The poet struggles to write. Her muse is hiding. Not forever, not if she can help it, but the words are gone for now, which is its own form of misery. Because the thoughts she can’t express still feel so beautiful in her mind.
“I try,” Felisa Hervey said midway through a Monday morning speech therapy session.
Books she could no longer read lined the walls of her Tucson home. A brand-new diploma from the doctorate she may never use sat underneath the dissertation that took her four years to complete. An unfinished draft of her memoir, “My Battle for Language,” stared out from her laptop. Felisa knew what she wanted to write, but the words were trapped inside. “Beautiful language,” she said. “Like — ugh.”
“I know what you’re supposed to do,” replied her rehab specialist, a soft-spoken young woman named Jacque Penunuri. She had tried to fill in the gaps. “But I’m not a creative writer. I don’t think I’ll ever learn.”
“I don’t know,” Felisa said. “We’ll see.”
“Because I know you’re supposed to use beautiful language and metaphors and descriptive words,” Jacque said. “But doing it is a whole different thing.”
“Yeah,” Felisa said. “Hard to do.”
It used to be so easy.
Felisa, 35, built her life on the beauty of language. She spoke six of them, picking up new tongues as her family moved around the world. In Chile she absorbed Spanish. In Kazakhstan she force-fed herself vocabulary lessons, because learning Kazakh seemed like the only way to make friends. Along the way she collected pieces of Arabic and Russian. When she moved to Afghanistan to volunteer and study, it was only natural that she picked up Dari, the country’s Persian dialect. It sounded so poetic.
All her life, Felisa used poetry to navigate a path through the world. She published her first poem before she was a teenager, and she never stopped writing. She loved the sharpness of short poems. The way so few words can hold such great meaning.
When the Air Force deployed her back to Afghanistan, in 2010, poetry helped her make sense of the place. She climbed onto rooftops whenever she could, retreating up high to write about war and love and the space between them. But she was most valuable on the ground, where she built a presence that renowned general H.R. McMaster called “extraordinary.”
Because she was an American, in uniform, who spoke fluent Dari, the military relied on her to connect with sympathetic locals. She became a stop-on-the-street figure, recognized for her willingness to sit in Afghan living rooms and bake bread on Afghan TV. She also published books of translated poetry, and one on how the military could reach the Afghan people.
She wrote under the pen name Farzana Marie, borrowing the Persian word for wise.
Afghanistan enraptured her. All of it. The poetry. The mountains and the hospitality and the people, so kind and strong. The place became a part of her. When her deployment ended, she left the Air Force and went back to Kabul, first to study Afghan female poets, then to work with NATO. Her dissertation at the University of Arizona inched toward completion.
Then, in August 2015, her world went black.
A massive, mysterious, out-of-nowhere stroke forced Felisa out of Afghanistan and into a Dubai hospital, unable to feel her fingers or speak her own name. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t write.
Her languages — all six of them — were gone.
“Shattered,” she said.
She was 31 years old, with an all-consuming case of aphasia.
The disorder darkens language, but not intelligence. The piece of Felisa’s brain that processes speech, reading and writing was destroyed. “Dead,” she said. But the rest is still intact. She understands most speech, as long as she can see the person’s lips. Movies make sense with subtitles.
“Loss of language, not intellect,” Felisa said. She pointed at her head. “Fine. Smart. But I can’t talk.
“Ironic, no?”
There is no cure for aphasia. Only the full-time work of recovery.
Felisa returned to Tucson with a rehab goal and a void in her soul. Her work, her education, her hobbies and her most deeply held beliefs — all of it was rooted in language. Without it, nothing felt the same.
“I always feel frustrated, angry and sad about the loss,” she said in a video filmed two years after the stroke. “I am livid. Since my stroke, I feel that God has disappeared. I hope that he is listening.”
Even now, after three and a half laborious years, five of her languages remain dark. Felisa figures that only 35 percent of her English has returned. Gaps cover entire parts of speech: Verb tenses are a problem. So are prepositions. She’s left to speak in loosely connected phrases, without the words to express where she is — or where she’s going.
The future is frazzled. She hasn’t applied for even simple jobs, because she can’t manage the paperwork. A disability check pays her rent, and for extra cash, she sells hand-decorated silicone mug covers. They’re all the rage in Asia.
She can’t translate. She can’t write. It took four years to finish the last 20 percent of her dissertation, because Felisa had to dictate her ideas in pieces. She successfully defended her work in August, and received a doctorate she can’t use.
“Later,” she said. “Not now. Later. I am healing.”
One day, she promised herself, she’ll speak in full sentences. She’ll read without having to follow an audiobook. And she’ll write. The muse will return. Poetry will again flow through her fingers and onto the page, where the world can see the thoughts that still fill her mind. One day.
Until then, she still needed some help.
As their Monday session wound down, Felisa searched her laptop for a poem she wrote years ago, about war and returning to a new version of normal. The poem references a play, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” in which a young woman saves her village from an invasion, even though she couldn’t speak.
“Read, please,” Felisa said, and Jacque began to read.
Felisa scooted closer. She nodded along to the words she’d written back then, before her life changed forever. The poem had its own rhythm. The words had life. Her soul rested between those lines.
When Mother Courage said, ‘She still suffers from pity,’ was she talking about you? Me? Or the girl who could not speak?
“Me,” Felisa said softly.
“You?” Jacque asked. “The girl who could not speak?”
A word formed on Felisa’s lips. It hung there. She sounded out each syllable with a roll of her left shoulder, as if she were pumping out the words.
“Predicted,” she managed to say. “Foreshadowed.”
Jacque nodded.
The room was silent.
“Before,” Felisa continued. “What? Weird.”
“Yeah,” Jacque said. “That is weird.”
They turned back to the poem. Jacque kept reading, and Felisa’s shining eyes followed her to the final line:
Did you ever notice that the girl who could not speak shouted loudest at the end?
