The noted Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoon’s latest collection, Postcards from the Underworld, traces the nuanced intertwining of two oppositional but interrelated realities of worldly violence. Cycles of politically and religiously authored destruction are invoked in the opening poem, “Prayer,” a rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer addressed to “our Iraq.” This piece introduces the external, worldly context of this strand of poems by evoking wartime horrors such as “thy hellfire come” and “give us this day our daily death / and forgive us not our betrayals / as we forgive not those who betray us.” Such poems are partnered with and opposed by other sequences that offer subtle, intuitive glimpses into the psyche, where the interior dramas caused by human experiences of these traumas and coercions take on lives of their own. This book’s most compelling aspects, however, involve the recurrent integration of these disparate realities through the meditative and genuinely insightful possibilities of poetry, in gentle ways that model the healing presented by aesthetic witnessing even when complete healing is impossible.
“Psalm” transitions from the voice of the body politic presented in “Prayer” to a mythic etiology of its collective suffering: “In the beginning was the stab / The dagger made the wound / in its own image.” The personified wound lives on: “It became a heart.” Importantly, both dagger and heart journey on through the same refrain, “searching / for another body,” indicating their cyclic and transmissible aspects. This dual imaginal movement expresses open ended psychological truth. The dagger as wounding factor creates an impression of itself that is carried on, even creating a new “heart.” The heart as an undifferentiated image could represent anything from incommunicable emotion or terror to the potential for deepened sensitivity and capacity for compassion.
Both dagger and heart appearing as independent actors also speaks to their similar existence as psychic contents that wish to express themselves through the material world. Thus, they are “searching for a body” in two ways: vessel and object. This points back to the omission of the stabbed body at the beginning of the poem, evoking the disembodiment inflicted by “original,” originating trauma – and also, importantly, structuring the cyclic nature of the drama into the subtle body of the poem. Although much of the book weaves together such shared threads of interior being, they continually lead back to the political and religious conflicts of the external world, which both frustrate and rededicate the speaker to the weaving itself.
The inner world and its wartime context are brought together, to a degree, in “The Day,” which unfolds this subtle conception of trauma as creative drive until it reaches the outcome of a war in which “the earth was spent / and overbled / and lost its gravity.” Counterintuitively, the overflow of violence creates the psychological space from which the poems are written, according to the book’s title:
dead birds too
their corpses kept flying
up into the grey sky
which had become
a colossal screen
of the underworld
The even tone in many of these poems agrees with their point of origin; the speaker addresses us from a perspective that has already accepted mortality. “The Day,” by contrast, depicts the relative loss of the consciousness that holds together human life when the reality of death is denied, creating an inverted underworld on earth where daylight should be. This sky may, more literally, indicate the underworld as the source of deadly “hellfire;” however, the reversal of gravity also corresponds with a logical incomprehensibility of the worldview that orders it.
The consciousness required for any attempt at understanding this endless chaos begins to emerge in “From Eve’s Confessions”:
I was the voice of the wind
and when it grew tired
I descended from its ribs
and left it
weeping everywhere
for me
Eve’s leaving the “wind” for a limited version of “voice” may correlate, on one level, with a soul inhabiting a body with limited consciousness. This evocation corresponds with the shift to first person and individualized biblical retelling:
then created myself
on the earth’s skin
and when I was bored
I made Adam
God was a mere game we played
The poem counters the earlier creation story with one of self-creation. Again, however, to play at God is a double-edged sword in this collection, invoked in the mass destruction of war and resulting suffering, yet, in small ways, also offering Eve’s freedom to explore consciousness. This openness involves allowing psyche to express the truth of its fracturing in ways that are illogical to the cause-effect thinking of ego consciousness.
Several poems about dismemberment speak poignantly and arrestingly from such perspectives about the fragmentation of psyche under duress – but also psyche’s ability to perceive itself through the dismemberment imagery. “Dismemberment” narrates the fragmenting perspectives that emerge as if from a trauma: “The body, or a voice impersonating it, said: / Go! As of now, you are all free.” The “body” speaks for the part of us that tries to maintain a feeling of unifying control, even in the absurd gesture of freeing its components after this has already taken place: “The tired tongue sought a mute man’s mouth to rest in. / The hands clapped and waved to each other as they fled.” Meanwhile, another detached heart, “kept beating alone / until a stray foot crushed it.” On one level, the poem describes dissociative experiences that correspond with trauma, the splintered responses attributed to different parts and difficult to reintegrate. However, the speaker’s own perspective arises from a heart still partnered with a body and head, thus capable of forming witnessing poetry.
“An Ordinary Day,” however, shows the aftermath of a family whose father’s head is severed:
He gave his pillow to my little brother
told us to listen to mother
and do our homework
Then he knelt in prayer
thanking God for what was left
My little sister cried a lot
then beheaded her doll
and buried its head
in our back yard
The head, consciousness, seems to have been sacrificed, willingly or by coercion – or perhaps an aftermath of the catastrophic brutality previously discussed. The sacrificed consciousness results in further disconnection of human relationships. However, crucially, the daughter dramatizes her own loss with the doll. The sacrifice of a beloved transitional object may, in the developmental fostering of consciousness through separation, parallel Eve’s leaving the wind behind in assuming her own voice. Thus, the daughter’s own head and heart remain connected in her body – but she also leaves behind the imagined safety of childhood.
The daughter’s dramatic expression is not entirely dissimilar from that of the poems themselves, as shown in “A Head” when the decapitated soul tells hungry dogs:
‘Please,
leave my head
right here
at the bottom
of this poem’
The head-corpse of the poem places the human poet within his dangerous political circumstances, opening a different drama of dismemberment, that in which the body is sacrificed so that the consciousness in the text may continue to communicate. This stands in connection and contrast to the poetic creation narrated in “Garment”:
With words
and the eye’s needle
I sew this garment
for silence
The weaving together of language and silence notably includes the eye, representing the particular aspect of consciousness associated with the perspective and directed thinking necessary for poetic creation. The paradox and pathos of the poem enter with the angel who causes the “Garment” to be continually rewoven:
When I finish
The angel of nihilism
standing before me
slips it on
but unsatisfied
casts it off again
and yawns
I take up another thread
This angel is a complicated presence in the psyche, inspiring new work in a negating way that, among other things, expresses the poet’s own eventual dissatisfaction with completed poems. The poem’s manifestation of its appearance of the angel is an interesting connection to the imperfections of the earlier creation stories: Both are flawed; creations are imperfect. The poet’s paradoxical access to both spiritual and psychological self-transcendence actually arises through this identification between macrocosmic and microcosmic creations. Likewise, the angel’s nihilism, perhaps in part related to the poems’ inability to fundamentally change the pragmatic world, prevents feelings of ultimate creative closure and therefore demands ongoing creative activity, as echoes in the abiding pathos of “Wars”:
When I was torn by war
I took a brush
and soaked it with death
and drew a window
on the wall of this war
I opened it
searching
for something
But all I saw
was another war
The angel’s demands also indirectly foster ongoing connection with other poets who “take up another thread.” Murmur” extends this ongoing creative activity to a subtle form of community:
Just before dying
the man who inhabited me
for many years
murmured:
I want to stay here
with you
The immanent “dying” could be attributed to either the speaker or introjected predecessor. This form of bond between speaker and ancestor is contextualized by the previous poem’s image of recursive war: “I carry his remains / and every morning /we put on a new shroud.” Here, the angel’s discontent with human creations serves as a paradoxical impetus for cultural continuity both in the form of honoring past creations and creators and in care for the legacy one leaves, which is even more explicitly evoked in “Slow Mail”:
By the time my light
reaches your eyes
I will have been
extinguished
and your eyes
will be
ashes
wandering
in the wind
The final lines return to the presence of “wind” as a sort of transcendent spirit from which we incarnate, similar to Eve, when we begin to live individual voices. The larger contexts perceived by the poet, as they move beyond death, also encompass the political world’s violence, as we read in “Wrinkles on the Wind’s Forehead”:
This is not the first time
the myths have washed their face
with our blood
(t)here they are
looking into the mirror of the horizon
as they don our bones
These cyclic wars recall the underworld in the sky, a vision of the world perpetually, unconsciously obliterating itself. The continual response of poetic creation forms an interwoven opposition to this endless destruction. This again recalls the creativity attributed to Eve, the soul in consciousness that perceives through being in its lostness, a form of reintegration in response to the various forms of dismemberment.
An exquisite embodiment of such creation is offered in the long poem, “Strings,” which presents music as a wordless mirror of poetry, connecting in its wanderings the material and spiritual, eros and pathos, inner and outer:
the player’s fingers ascend
the musical scales
and carry me
to the clouds
and then descend
followed by God
who weeps
and apologizes for everything
Like poetry, music also works to “pull my soul /from the well of silence” to reconnect the listener’s interiority to its own visions of creative dissolution in which ego is subject to soul:
scatter me off
to an island far away
outside time
inside my heart
It’s “thread / that rains from the needle’s eye” interweaves previous themes, sometimes inverting the political and spiritual sides of the garment, as when the it becomes …
a thread used by a mother
to mend a shirt
that still remembers the scent
of the prisoner
whose return
she’s been waiting
for eleven autumns
a shirt
no one will ever wear
The thread returns through the inner landscape, becoming
the borderline
across the provinces
of nostalgia
between a country
that never was
and a country
that will never be —
And, like the lyric poem, it derives its paradoxical life, in part, from the struggle between consciousness and time:
the sobbing of a man
as he clings to the thread
that runs from his fingers
towards a white kite
that still soars
in the skies of his childhood
outside the cell
on the night
of his execution
The imperfect world recapitulates such suffering – and the wish to ignore this reality too often serves religious and political ideologies that exponentiate the same suffering. In holding together such conflicting truths, this book shows us ways that poetry and violence, while they may have some common roots in the recursive nature of human consciousness and culture, are nonetheless oppositional responses to our fears. If we listen to this collection, in the hearts of songs that birthed themselves from songs, we will remember again to listen for such music in the world that holds all of life, briefly, together.
[Published by Seagull Books on October 4, 2023, 96 pages, $19.00 US paperback]