I’ve long admired Solmaz Sharif’s debut book of poetry, Look (2016), for its intensity and moral clarity. I’m not alone. The collection — about lives upended or destroyed by warfare, especially the US “war on terror” — met with widespread praise and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In a 2020 essay on the state of political literature in the United States, Viet Thanh Nguyen cited Sharif as one of a small handful of writers willing and able to “fully confront [the US] war machine.”
Given Sharif’s reputation for bold, candid poetry, you can imagine my surprise on reading the following lines from her highly anticipated follow-up collection, Customs: “I said what I meant / but I said it // in velvet.” In the poem titled “Patronage,” Sharif writes of a “life beholden / but bestowed,” a bourgeois literary community that pulls punches, or never thinks to throw them. “Our poets coo. // And beg to be placed in a large room.”
I’d never once thought that Sharif might have cushioned her critiques in Look. That collection still seems razor-sharp to me. But the new book renews Sharif’s resolution to see clearly, to look—and not only at other lives, but also at her own. What she sees is an outrage that is still insufficient to the violence she catalogs.
The most immediate difference between Sharif’s early and recent work is stylistic. In Look, Sharif uses visual cues — small capitals, redactions, blank space — to emphasize the double-consciousness of her subjects. An unusual conceit unifies the collection: Sharif lifts titles, structure, and diction from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. She uses small caps to distinguish these words, which sometimes warp the familiar (“Let me LOOK at you”), and sometimes cast intimate scenes in a foreboding light:
Whereas this lover would pronounce my name and call me Exquisite and lay the floor lamp across the floor, softening even the light;
Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through the wardrobe …
Sharif’s use of military language splits her speaker’s self-image. In one instant, she is “Exquisite,” adored by her lover, seen in her full humanity. In the next, she is a “THERMAL SHADOW,” targeted for destruction, indistinguishable from a dog. The small caps, and the second sight they simulate, recur in poem after poem. In an elegant echo of W.E.B. Du Bois, Sharif calls this pervasive phenomenon “our sanctioned twoness.”
Now, in Customs, Sharif sets the military dictionary aside and clears space for a thrilling taboo rage. Sharif’s concerns persist: autobiography, US empire, those lives that are “without the kingdom […] and thus of it.” But her toolkit has been pared down, resulting in a more direct, cutting voice for her anti-imperialism. Consider, for example, the formal and affective distance between Sharif’s epistolary poems in Look and Customs. First, an excerpt of “Reaching Guantánamo,” from Look:
Dear Salim,
Love, are you well? Do they you?
I worry so much. Lately, my hair , even
my skin . The doctors tell me it’s
I believe them. It shouldn’t
. Please don’t worry.
Sharif’s lineation creates a ghostly visual rhyme of the censor’s destruction. We wonder at the erasures, and feel the denial of intimacy. The letter-writer (even her name is redacted) had written to assuage her love’s worry, but the censor’s cruel deletions can only worsen it. Now consider the formal and tonal shift in a poem (in full) from the epistolary sequence in Customs:
Dear Aleph,
I’ve arrived
frilled. Laced.
Softly etched.
Tomato juice on Carrara marble,
the ruin of it.
The training of the eye
only wealth can —
only wealth can
ruin one’s sight like this.
Only gout, plucked
pheasant, &c.
I tried to quell or quiet
my bile, but it grew
horns instead.
In the basement, it fed
from the steel bowl,
the congealed and cold
cartilage left,
and now I can confess,
there is nothing to them:
the Americans.
Not élan, quiddity.
A hateful people,
as all, and easy
to offend.
Send word, you said.
The line frays.
It is of love
I say this. It is of love,
I must say,
but not of thee.
The censor is gone, and the freedom this affords is like oxygen. Vivid and precise, this letter-writer sends word of the “ruin” she sees upon arrival in the US. She even begins to check the impulse to moderate her thoughts, abandoning convoluted syntax (“The training of the eye // only wealth can —”) in favor of a simpler declaration (“only wealth can / ruin one’s sight like this”). Once loosed, her anger builds to a confession — a diagnosis of the unexceptional, hateful nature of Americans. As in Look, the driving metaphor here is sight. But Sharif is no longer writing about the second sight of double-consciousness. She now lets her speakers look back, and describe — even if only in a letter, or in their minds — what they see.
Sharif’s rage in these poems is incandescent. It illuminates, shows us how to see. As I read Customs, I thought often of Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger.” (Sharif has Lorde in mind, too: she borrows the metaphor of the “Master’s House” for a central poem.) “Every woman,” writes Lorde, “has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being.” When you face oppression, Lorde explains, anger is the “appropriate response.” It can serve as a means of survival and a tool for change. Yet women of color are told to suppress their anger even though — and exactly because — their oppressions persist.
Sharif gives voice to such anger in Customs. She writes about the circumscribed lives of people who are trained, by violence or its threat, to bow to power. In a repeating scenario, Sharif’s vulnerable speakers encounter agents of the state, “The officer deciding by blood sugar, last blow job received, and relative level of disdain for vermin.” These moments are imbalanced and pressurized. What should the speakers say at a traffic stop, TSA screening, or customs desk? “Anything he asks, I must answer. / This, too, he likes.” A complex calculus follows but produces no good solution:
Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none.
Sharif sets up a sharp contrast between her speakers’ social training and the textured backdrop of their inner lives. These subjects know and resent that they must perform piety: “studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?” Of course, they must hold their tongues or risk all, as in these lines about passing a customs interview:
[…] Saving the argument
I am let in
I am let in until
The speaker’s admission depends on her silence. But even this is provisional. The clipped final line reveals the lingering contingency of the speaker’s belonging — what the novelist Laila Lalami has called the “conditional citizenship” of so many in the United States.
In a 2016 interview in The Paris Review, Sharif explains her political identity this way: “Whatever struggle is deemed optional or needs to be postponed, that’s my community.” At times, this can mean seeing the struggles of those within our own ambit. But in some of Sharif’s most compelling poems, she trains her vision further afield. In a recurring sequence, she regards an object — a tub of garlic soy butter, a leather bucket, a poem — and then puzzles out its provenance:
My materialist mind, I can’t
shake it. Within a perfect
little tub of garlic
butter
a relief of workers, of sickles,
fields of soy […]
Again, Sharif resists yet another kind of social training — the commodity fetish, which has us disregard invisible social relations so that we might happily have our things. But she can’t — or won’t — look away. She describes this as a habit of mind, somehow involuntary: “I can’t shake it.” But through her writing, Sharif demonstrates that seeing clearly is a habit that must be practiced — and guarded against ruin.
[Published by Graywolf Press on March 1, 2022, 72 pages, $16.00 paperback]