When one writes a poem, they are imagining that poem into reality. When one reads a poem, they are entering into that act of melding imagination to the real world. In Crosslight for Youngbird, Asiya Wadud’s accomplished first collection of poems, the reader must undertake this crossing along with her, an exercise in radical empathy that demands we recognize poetry not just as an expression of truth, but of our common humanity and inhumanity. In this experimental book, everything exists in intersection: the public and private, lyric and prose, image and text, faith and doubt, borders and space, life and death. Even the book’s title contains mostly compound words, a concatenated fastening of meanings. Within this space of numerous intersecting ideas and forms, an innovative voice emerges. It is a voice of empathy and a voice of power. Or what power should sound like. A new model for an American readership who hear, every day, the abuses of power in language.
Crosslight may be defined as “the light that crosses the path of another light and illuminates what the other leaves dark.” Wadud uses language itself as crosslight to illuminate the dark and tragic realities of an inhumane world. Crossing, here, is both a physical and metaphysical occurrence: “A dinghy is a lifeboat, moored. 3,771 lives lost in the Mediterranean in 2015. A patera is a lifeboat, moored. At its narrowest, the Straight of Gibraltar is 14 kilometers across.” This measurement is the distance between danger and safety, freedom and oppression, life and death. In “Lida meet lorry,” Wadud tells the story of 71 people from the Middle East who entered a refrigerated truck in Hungary with the promise to be transported to Germany, only to be found dead the next morning: “Didn’t they know the world as it was named? Bit of clothes, 17 travel documents. 40 cell phones. In a meat truck. In which the cooling system has been shut off. In which air ducts were blocked.”
While lyric in construction, these poems comprise documentary work, telling and reiterating the truth of the cruelties people exact on other people, bringing to light that, like war, a border is a human construct. Wadud highlights the dehumanization of those who are desperately trying to escape war-torn countries and oppressive governments and wants to give them back their humanity: “They were all named at birth. They were named on the day they were born. They were anticipated. Along them were likely many eyes. Some who loved the sun. Some of the red earth. Some the green on which they cut their teeth. Some black forest. Each yearn their own yearn. Each mourn their own mourn.”
The current border crises around the world have devastated the speaker, provoking questions about a benevolent higher power. The speaker’s relationship to God is omnipresent, but doubt permeates the collection. In “testament, a litany for many voices,” we encounter a three-way conversation between GOD, described as “alternately rancor and love,” a SOLO voice, described as “shirked, embodies doubt, reluctant belief,” and a chorus of ALL, described as “reciprocated rancor, the greenest pastures, embodies doubt.” It’s clear that the dialogue is democratic — the collective voice matters just as much as the individual voice, just as much as God’s. However, God never seems to offer any definitive hope to the seekers:
SOLO
God is love
GOD
He is, he is not
One gets the sense that the speaker is the SOLO voice who must reconcile her belief in a God who is not all powerful but has power. Who is not all good, but is good. Who is not always there, but is aware. This dialogue powerfully melds the collective and individual voice, a comment on the various ways language cmay be used as power to speak for the otherwise powerless. The SOLO voice gives a realistic rather than idealistic vision of God, which is perhaps the first step to understanding our own human failures. If God isn’t perfect, how can we be?
SOLO
“God’s deepest belief is to be
Boundless, capacious
Yet he’s careless and capricious
And he is volatile and violent
And he is blasphemous and unkind
But God is trying”
The speaker’s public grief is inherently connected to her private grief. Identity and place serve as invisible tethers to the past: “Now I was born poor and black just below the Mason-Dixon line where a just God justified all my light inside. Now, I know I am free. I know the difference between a dinghy and a refugee. I know my family broke their backs table top whipped black lacerated Middle Passage Southern sun burn direct.” Can one feel wholly free while holding the simultaneous knowledge of her family’s, ancestor’s, or even a stranger’s unfree history? These poems hold that question within the crosslight so that it will always be seen, so that we will never stop asking it. So that humanity will not fall victim to a failure of imagination when it comes to the suffering of others.
Wadud is not just asking us to imagine this. We are being asked to listen, too. Much of this book unfolds in staccato lists that gain intensity through accumulation and signify the difficult journey of moving forward — incantations that exist somewhere between prayer and protest. “Doom and resolve each keep their own metronome,” she tells us. Wadud knows what James Baldwin knew, that, “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” Everything beats in this book — the hearts of the dead, of the merciless, the innocent; a measure of remembering and living and mourning and singing. The book teaches us that every intersection is not necessarily a crossing, but a graph of crossed lines that straddle the spaces between location and dislocation, whether geographically, psychologically, or culturally. A specific space illuminated that shows how many people have no choice but to live between two different worlds. Says Wadud, “The rain is beating now and a cool calm engulfs me. I hold the resolve and hold the doom too.” These powerful poems show us that we must also hold both.
[Published October 2, 2018 by Nightboat Books, 88 pages, $15.95 paperback]