As the immigration policies of our country’s embattled administration continue to complicate the lives of migrants, foreign visitors, asylum seekers, and refugees, there’s a need for their personal narratives to be heard in order to avoid the erasure of individual experiences most affected by said policies. A timely and surprising testimonial comes through in the pages of Marwa Helal’s striking poetry debut Invasive species, a book that contends with the ways identity and nationality are shaped by, among other factors, international conflicts and the caprices of those with the power to control movement.
From the outset, Helal signals that this collection has been written with a political consciousness about language. Opening with “poem to be read from right to left,” she forces us to reposition the act of reading away from our default Western convention (left to right) to the appropriate direction when reading Arabic, the poet’s native tongue. This challenge affirms the sentiment in the Chinua Achebe epigraph that precedes the poem: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”
Achebe and Helal underscore their solidarity with other writers whose formal education has led them to express themselves in English because of migration to — or by the colonial imposition of — an English-speaking empire. Additionally, one can argue that, for Helal, this is also a clever tracing on the map of the family’s immigrant path: heading west from Egypt and the Middle East. Later in the book, “generation of feeling” (pun intended) reminds us that despite that initial poem meant to unsettle the Western reader, the purpose of the project as a whole is to place the speaker’s sense of dislocation (linguistic, cultural, spatial) at the center of the narrative:
these growing pains though
the good will hunting
we
fallen twigs
look like bones
waiting to be lit
i am trying to tell you something about how
rearranging the words
rearranges the universe
That narrative is set in motion with the father’s journey on a student visa to complete his doctoral studies at Ohio State University. At the tender age of “2.5,” the speaker quickly acculturates to an American upbringing. It begins with the speaker’s first word, “Geoffrey,” as in the Toys “R” Us giraffe, and progresses smoothly into summer vacations to the Great Lakes and Disneyland. But then, this “leaf-raking, waving-hello-suburban-next-door neighbor” encounters a rude awakening: the threat of deportation once the speaker reaches adulthood without having navigated the proper channels to attain legal residency. Helal narrates the bureaucratic quagmire that is the American immigration system, which sends the speaker back to Egypt whose embassies are just as cold and cruel: “i have spent all of my life leaving, i have made art of it. now, to study returning. these places don’t go anywhere, but we do.”
Caught between America’s Islamophobic sentiment that became amplified after 9/11 and the Egyptian authorities’ mistrust of a citizen whose American dreams are nothing short of a betrayal of Egyptian values, the speaker begins to question where home is and to what country they truly belong: “i was made invasive species beast of no nation.” And even after all the heartache and eventual attainment of that hard-won green card leading to naturalization, the speaker continues to second-guess the critical decision to return to “a country that ensures we are harassed for being whoever we are presumed to be and never who we actually are.”
Helal’s use of prose is an effective choice, supporting a narrative that unfolds as part autobiography and part ethnography of the “immigration industrial complex.” The result is a stylized documentation (simultaneously an abecedarian and an alphabetized catalogue of events) of a sociopolitical situation steeped in paperwork with dehumanizing terminology and discriminatory requirements designed to create obstacles and not, despite the claims of these institutions, to expedite access or citizenship.
What then is the next step for a person who has survived such an ordeal? “Now that I’ve told you my story,” the speaker declares, “I can truly begin returning now. There will still be mornings when I wake up and think I am in Egypt, but that’s okay. Because the America I return to is not the America I left. / The America I return to is the one we are making together.” An optimistic note from one whose descent into helplessness and hopelessness is a story told in one language while existing in another.
The labor of mining the poetry from a tedious governmental process mirrors the search for individuality among the inflexible procedures that reject emotion and personal story. Indeed, Helal finds the self in the most unexpected corridors of bureaucracy, where many people become lost or vanish altogether. This telling of the tale after a triumph over an adversarial institution delivers a distinct justice — and Helal strikes one final blow with the assertion, “ive seen the future, the future needs women’s archives more than anything else, when they cull us, they will see it was never a man’s world at all.”
Invasive species inventively protests the ways American culture, proclaiming the foreign and alien undesirable, demands that its immigrant communities assimilate. This is a harsh lesson that plays out daily in our immigration debates. But Invasive species also reimagines the conventions we have come to expect from poetry. It’s as if Helal proposes that, in this instance too, we should re-examine the confines of definition and the rules that restrict belonging.
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[Published by Nightboat Books, January 8, 2019. 144 pages, $16.95 paperback]