Sahar Muradi opens OCTOBERS, recipient of the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, by attending to the divisions within immigrants who feel bereft of meaningful context and community. A diversity of forms, often invented, begin to encapsulate both the experiences of alienation and underlying possibilities for deepening understanding and connection. Without glossing political and cultural differences, this poet’s compelling grasp of the human psyche grounds and facilitates openings to understanding. Careful readers will find themselves deepened with empathic and experiential common ground.
“The Picture Tin” introduces the speaker’s childhood, distant from extended family in Afghanistan:
I sat quietly with a tin
Full of pictures. Night drew.
My hands grew warm touching their faces.
In youth.
Separated in space and time from community, the speaker’s younger self experiences the tension of the post-911 invasion in ways that are also expressed in image, unable yet to be put into words:
In my picture tin
The war raged on: black and white
A fugitive zebra on the street
With my heart pulsing red in its mouth.
“Salaam Alaikum” adds linguistic and political contexts to this inner division, beginning each stanza with transliterated greetings in Dari (Farsi), Muradi’s mother tongue, and Bambara, native to West Africa. The poem – which according to the endnotes is based on a conversation between Muradi and a former colleague on the shared edges of Afghan and Malian histories, cultures, and languages – moves from childhood scenes to splices of narrative indicating rape and massacre. Opening in the first person, the poem shifts to a witnessing plural as these crimes are revealed: “We would exchange brothers / who were not our brothers.” Even as language and geography separate some members of the audience from others, the speaker actively seeks out all readers’ attention to correct one contributing factor in these crimes: “History was the first to leave / and without a trace.” Although some of its parts may not translate to everyone, the stark juxtaposition between everyday greetings and the terror of war implores us to listen to the human potentials for both resilient community and wild cruelty – and to work to understand, despite our various gaps, attempts to express experiences that are ultimately beyond rendering. Such dialogues, after all, inspire the form of the poem. What may seem to the unfamiliar as walls to understanding, also hold doors gently opened.
The poem “words by which to tell time” moves from transliteration to presenting original Farsi and English words on opposite sides of the page, further apart, yet also perhaps a gesture toward introducing themselves in true form. Their physical presence offers disparate audiences a common descriptive way to interact with the Arabic script: “a word that ends silently / a word whose feet never touch the ground.” Describing the letters like a beginner allows a more intuitive way to begin interacting with the language. It almost feels playful.
The dialogic organization on the margins breaks down as more deadly words are introduced, both by unfolding substitution of near homographs and the poetic attributions to the words’ images, gradually leading to “bomb,” eerily also: “a word that ends silently / a word whose feet never touch the ground / here.” The final word, “here,” differentiates and introduces two different audiences, those who are touched by bombs exploding abroad, “a word with a tail / in another country” – and those who are not. The mortal consequences, regardless, hauntingly recall the opening play with what to some were unfamiliar letters: “a tail that lands clearly, firmly // a sounds that splits / their mouths.”
The divide here cannot be more painful, certainly to express, but also to take in fully as a citizen of the bombing country. Beyond bridging division with things like sharing languages, opening, learning – human sufferings are hidden behind the perspectives cultivated for us in presentations of the invasion of Afghanistan that center on the 9-11 part of the story, the horror of which does not obviate the violence that followed. The scars of the invasion are carried, among others, by Americans connected to those who still live among our “enemies.” The poem evokes these traumas in voice and form that display their own divisions, asking readers to perceive them, and, in doing so, consider their own.
The meditative poem, “Grasping,” gives a sense of the inner awareness necessary to take in such layers of pathos, differentiate them with feeling and comprehension, and transform them into poetic offerings. The opening addresses a central cause of human anxiety, our relationship to Time:
Time, I am leaning into you
pushing all my chips to your corners.
Here in the grief of my hands,
in the elegies of grasping,
remind me how useful it was,
the arrow.
The familiar address of Time and need for its forward flow implied by “the arrow,” reveal the paradox of the “elegies of grasping,” their opening to ongoing movement by transformative revisiting of the past. The “grief of my hands” points to a similar enmeshment between the felt cognition of the elegies and the living body.
The second section moves to a scene in which separation itself is discovered – through care:
Lessons of infancy:
When he leaves the room,
he does not exist.
If I am hungry,
I am permitted to wail.
And above my head, the mobile.
What finer constellations outside myself.
The scene echoes awareness of the parent’s separateness through the perspective of infant need – and the miracle of those needs being met. However, in imagining primal hunger, we can travel back to our most basic shared perspective, feeling our need for care for in our vulnerability – though probably through painful awareness of the discord between this and our scattered adult perspectives. Perhaps, in this felt loss, we also reclaim a bit of our permission to express our needs for the world of “constellations outside myself,” in an ongoing way.
Indeed, the differentiation between grasping and love can be worked out only in and through the world, only through Time – only through, and here we meet the clever pun in the title, apprehension. The third section consciously attends to the anxieties that accompany these understandings:
Echoes are inevitable.
The long space behind my body,
the tall stem of day hissing through the clock,
avoiding the gaps.
What does it mean to live in the gaps,
in the places where it is groundless,
to be so open
to this one morning with its distinct wink?
The section connects the “gaps” in the perceived flow time, where “[e]choes” in memory present, to the gaps between the speaker and the “long space behind my body.” One’s seldom perceived shadow associates with encroaching mortality, who we don’t recognize we are entwined with what we dread becoming. Crucially, the speaker responds to these ruminations with a question about how to live with such gaps. This asking itself may be the wisest answer, given that it concludes by opening to the greeting of morning, itself perhaps an echo of the parent in the previous section. This openness, this attention to the outside world, allows the speaker to move forward, “[t]urning over what I cannot hold” and “grasping nothing.”
The psychological understandings of “Grasping” make possible – and also likely arose from –differentiating reflections, such as those in “Facsimile,” an impressive longer piece of invented form. It alternates narrative or lyrical prose sections about the speaker’s childhood experiences with her father and his immigration to the United States with poems in various forms that respond in image, pieces of clipped dialogue or address, or other ways that recontextualize from within. As the title indicates, the poem deals with mental impressions of her father, incomplete copies – just as much of his own pathos was defined by feeling like a copy of himself placed in a strange context: “My father was an idea from Afghanistan.”
This apparently contrafactual opening actually speaks directly to the father’s lifetime of regrets and frustrations:
“Wouldn’t it have been different if I were not in these un-United States? If family were not marbles scattered. If I hadn’t grown up so far from the community. A community. So lacking of a net, that I mirrored my father in his interiority, in his unsettledness in his own being. Wouldn’t it have been entirely different had we remained in Afghanistan? In so many ways, of course. And yet, somehow, wouldn’t we have lost so much less? Wasn’t that what he was always saying, circling the wormhole of his regrets?
His regrets coupled with romance the way exile courts imagination. What could have been. What should have. And shadows the present. On if only’s he raised a family.”
Being a “facsimile” involves the twin sufferings of feeling that one’s life is not real compounded by the idea that one’s real life were somewhere else. Importantly, though the speaker locates these feelings in the historical and cultural contexts relevant to her father, many readers have felt some versions of them. The piece describes alienating experiences of cultural divisions while building experiential, empathic synapses across them.
The surrounding poems contextualize this section within a meditative process. It is preceded by what appear to be images from the father’s literal deathbed:
The oval of your mouth,
drying.
We took turns.
The yellow sponge. (italics original)
In its mourning release, this scene seems to create space within the meditation for the speaker’s own thoughts and feelings, permission to cease “mirror[ing] my father in his interiority.” The poem that follows moves deeper into this undiscovered psychological space, marked by confusion around the subject-addressee relationship in the absence of the previous mirroring:
You what?
You – my.
Irrelevant – all.
I keep coming back.
Faithfully.
To empty. (italics original)
Within this emptiness, the speaker increasingly differentiates herself from the father. She remembers sitting “[a]t his feet, making kites” and “[m]arveling at how he folded the sheet upon itself, cut an almond eye, and reveled a daisy.” Though she carries this creative fascination forward, it is employed in a mature exploration of her independent participation in the world, including her own past: “Today, I am wearing you. / Your peyran, waaskat” (italics original). This active shaping of her own psychological material opens to broader differentiation between inherited and intentional selfhood:
The stories.
Poetry. As if
every stream of news.
Every mud brick.
Of history (ours).
Is no longer (mine). (italics original)
The renunciation here is similar to declaring the father ”an idea.” It doesn’t negate the reality of “history” or even disavow it. As the parenthesis enact, the poem merely creates – or acknowledges – a separate psychological space within which the speaker is able to orient herself independently. Astutely, this individuating step leads to an existential confrontation:
But was it,
just like that?
Had you been
and then suddenly not?
Was that your boat untethered?
Was it you?
Or wasn’t it? (italics original)
This awareness of insubstantiality opens, perhaps out of an intuited need for reconnection, to recollections of the speaker’s deepest personal enmeshments in politics, culture, even history during her work in the Foreign Ministry:
“Or maybe I stayed out of surrogacy. To do what he was doing: to repent with my body. Two years into the American occupation, a wash of artillery and aid, excess and poverty, hard and soft violences. The borders blurred: I was the country men – native and foreign – kept trying to rescue, tame, conquer. Like a good mujahid, I played every role. And like a good shahid, I renounced myself.”
The paradoxical result of this impossible tangle of identifications is a dedicated attention to each moment itself:
Any moment.
Rises up.
A well.
A wave.
An unfathomable plunge. (italics original)
And this, in turn, opens to a freedom born of the isolation with which the meditation began, now on an existential plane in which the desired context itself can no longer even be conceived:
No one knows.
No one knows exactly.
You.
Cut out of. (italics original)
Counterintuitively, the shivering existential turn late in the poem is also the most broadly relatable on a psychological level, albeit an often unspoken one. From this axiomatic groundlessness, “A language entirely” offers an adorably expansive point of connection though the sort of parenting that delights in participating in the child’s creative discovery of the world:
She notices the shamal in the trees.
We call it dancing.
I wonder if I could teach her language –
entirely in metaphor.
This is a leaf yawning to the ground.
You have two starfish, right and left.
The clouds are playing piano again. (italics original)
This creative incorporation of language recalls the descriptive animation of words in “words by which to tell time.” Here their self-cultivation within parental attention is reflected in the atemporal literary space of the speaker’s infinitives: “To not correct. / To allow the pleasure of the construction. / Of the gesture.” The new tone of this poem owes both to the daughter’s clever, joyful inventiveness and the resolution of her mother to become, in part, a witnessing space for it:
To see one in another
is to see as one another.
We watch her eyes
as much as her mouth.
Mucher, she corrects me.
I like ice cream mucher.
The robot lost its eye.
No, the robot is winking.
Because to say is to see. (italics original)
In this new practice of constructive witnessing, the speaker may be cultivating a new myth that strengthens and revitalizes those she inherited, a bridge from the home separate from home – to a home made in the images of her own considered perspectives and values. Such aspirations, as well, each seer who opens this book will be invited to listen and speak into being.
[Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on October 15, 2023, 72 pages, $18.00US paperback]