Sing Me A Circle: A Review

with Liz Vaughan

“Najmi is not only exploring her own life in these essays, her own family’s story, but also their placement in a larger political context.”

Samina Najmi’s essay collection Sing Me A Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time traces the curve of her life and ruminates upon history—personal, familial, and political. With methodical, elegant prose, Najmi explores themes of migration, grief, and our engagement with the past. From the city of Karachi, Pakistan, where she was raised, to the New England landscape where she received her doctorate degree, to the California suburbs where she settled to raise her own now-adult children, these essays intertwine with a deep sense of place, anchoring their narratives in these settings. Najmi carries a literary legacy—she is the latest in a familial line of memoirists, and even her surname originated from her poet grandfather’s pen name ‘Najam’, meaning ‘star’ in Arabic.

Najmi has been writing personal essays since 2011. “Skydying”, a reflection on her beloved uncle’s death while traveling by plane, appeared in Chautauqua in 2013 and now returns in the overarching narrative of Sing Me A Circle. Najmi is a professor of multiethnic literature at California State University, and her background in academic writing shines through her prose. For example, the essay “Greenford’s Gift” interweaves her childhood as an immigrant in a London borough with anecdotes about the town's industrial history in food production (which ties into her own familial history, as her mother worked in a tea packaging factory while living there), as well as Greenford’s claim as the location of the first breakthroughs in color chemistry that led to the modern range of dyes. The level of intricate detail in this essay, both about her life and about the historical topics she’s researched, is vivid and fully renders the scenes and their meaning.

“Did the danger fail to register because we failed to imagine it?”

This complexity elevates her creative nonfiction’s thematic intensity, as well. Najmi is not only exploring her own life in these essays, her own family’s story, but also their placement in a larger political context. Her opening essay “Triptych” features scenes of children encountering startling violence, and wonders, “did the danger fail to register because we failed to imagine it?” Sing Me A Circle continues to challenge this proposed lack of consideration for the oppressive or violent circumstances that other people face. From a recounting of Pakistan’s turbulent formation, to a memory of a summer spent living in occupied Gaza, to a reconciliation of her choice to live in the United States despite its colonial history, Najmi’s prose refuses to gloss over the violent political context of the world in which she’s writing.

On a craft level, Najmi does not limit herself to only creative nonfiction. The essays are accompanied by poems, stitched through the narrative to seemingly explore a topic that is much harder for prose to reach. The I remember you in fragments series tracks the life of her cousin Rubina, who died by suicide as a teenager and whose loss reshaped their family. The collection’s final essay, “Between Cave and Canyon”, shares that in Rubina’s absence, “[r]ecast in the kiln of memory, our glass lives, molten, have flowed into the void to assume unintended forms”. Najmi refuses to let Rubina become forgotten in the narrative of her life. These fragment poems linger in her cousin’s childhood, carrying her life into the present through love and memory.

I recommend this book to anybody looking for poignant creative nonfiction—anybody who wants to immerse themself in another person’s history, discover their intellectual pursuits, and emerge with a greater understanding of the world and their place within it. Sing Me A Circle accomplishes every point. Early in the collection, Najmi writes, “I've been thinking that all linearity is circularity in disguise. You have to zoom out to see the shape, and you do it through the lens of time”. She evokes circular, symmetrical legacies across time and space, and likewise, this is the kind of collection that will stay with readers long after they finish the final essay.

More information about Samina Najmi's writing and books can be found on her website https://www.saminanajmi.com/.

More of Samina Najmi's books: