Rachel Richardson on Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
The poems of Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas draw a map of human migration, suffering, and exile. The collection manages to hold some of our biggest subjects — war, ethnic conflict, immigration, environmental degradation, and the history of human civilization in one volume, while also going deeply within to access the intimate, individual level. Across the landscapes of Libya, Turkey, Afghanistan, Syria, and the United States, Mattawa listens for the music of displaced people: the hymns they sing, the prayers they offer up, and the stories they tell to their children.
“They” is all of us: we are woven through this book, we humans, we Americans, we parents and children, soldiers and teachers, politicians and believers, pillaging our earth and finding ourselves forsaken. The poems visit the Arab Spring, the Libyan civil war, the Flint, Michigan water crisis, our war in Afghanistan, and the Charlottesville white supremacist rally. Through poems in the form of haibuns, psalms, and ’alams, as well as invented forms that echo other traditions, Mattawa’s expansive ethnographic understanding and empathic imagination ask the question of what humans have wrought on each other and on our earth. What does being alive mean?, Mattawa wonders. What is our obligation as humans to make it bearable?
In the poem “Shikwah,” a response to the poet Muhammad Iqbal and an entreaty to Allah, Mattawa’s speaker argues, “Who else will hear birdsong / as prayer, who will cleanse himself with the stroke/ of sand? Who keeps the earth rotating with praise / of your name?” What loss would there be in a world without us, we humans ask, unceasingly. At the same time, we see the harms we do. In his startling poem, “Face,” Mattawa looks directly at the costs of living with war, addressing the poem to “the One Million Plus,” meaning all those who died in the Iraq war. The poem begins with the disfigurement of an American Marine:
Some of the mouth had been recovered
after dozens of surgeries to repair him.
His eyes peer at her through two slits.
She must have looked at him this way numerous times
and turned away, but she can’t do that now:
the picture must be taken for the world to see.
His momentary fame and later abandonment by his country leads him to suicide. In another section, Mattawa shows us an intimate ordinary conversation between a father and child. The father ends the poem by saying she …
held my hand asking
if we can go
to the park
this afternoon,
as if time can still guide me,
as if I can still face
the world I’m leaving her.
Mattawa’s decades-long engagement with poetry as a translator imbues this collection, not only in the Arabic influences and nods to influential poets in his own poems, but in the entire stance of the book. It is tempting to consider translation as the primary metaphor of Fugitive Atlas: migration is a form of translation from one geography and culture into another. The feelings and experiences of the poems must be translated through language to the reading audience. We move from occupied Afghanistan to Flint, Michigan, in the space of a page, and suddenly these two stories have to be reckoned with as related human actions perpetrated by those in power upon the community around them.
In the haibun “My City,” Mattawa describes his native Tripoli in clear prose: “And now my disheveled city, which lit up in rebellion, then turned on itself with assassinations and riots leading to outright war. Downtown, with its date-palm-frond-covered souqs and its charming worn-out piazzas, where I spent much of my childhood, became the battleground … As I watch the footage now, I notice reeds several feet high, young date palms and eager eucalyptus trees rising among the rubble of bombed-out modern towers and squat mud-walled homes.” Then, several pages later, he titles another haibun “Our Cities” and argues: “But I have news for you. In your city of exile, they’re building an elevated park meant to protect it from the new fierce storms and rising seas … This project too will shortchange nearby neighborhoods. It’s meant only to protect the financial district and the high-income high-risers living near.” Each rendering of these places where we might have lived, might live now, is a mirroring of another story, closer than we had imagined.
And to see the collection as an objective correlative for the act of translation is not inaccurate. Translation, after all, is from the Latin, to carry across. What is migration but the physical act of translating bodies from one home to another? What is exile but the loss of the original text?
Fugitive Atlas is most satisfying when taken as a collection of layered poems that shift under repeated readings, the sentences taking on further meanings when cast in different lights, when considered against different geographies, as if simultaneously multilingual. Even Mattawa’s forms — a modified haibun (Japanese), a blues (Southern American English) which sounds like a cross between a villanelle (French) and a ghazal (Arabic), and more — feel worked across the poet’s tongue to be experienced as migrated languages, influenced and musically recast in the crossing.
Fugitive Atlas leaves us awed at the intensity of Mattawa’s scrutiny of our human workings upon our earth, both in praise of it and in sacrilege. The experience of reading this deeply musical and moral lament is to find oneself among the other searching migrants — at once a fugitive and very much at home.
[Published by Graywolf Press on October 20, 2020, 112 pages, $18.00 paperback]
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Celeste Doaks on My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long
Black women have made plenty of headlines during this past year. We have become extremely valuable both culturally and politically in America. Cue Stacey Abrams and Amanda Gorman. If you don’t know those names, you should; and furthermore, don’t forget our first ever female Black and South Asian Vice President, Kamala Harris. That said, these women came into our awareness as grown individuals. But what is it that shaped, molded, and sometimes bruised them? Luckily, My Darling from the Lions, U.K. poet Rachel Long’s debut poetry volume, has arrived to explore all of these themes.
Additionally, Long has brought biracial identity (Black and White) forward into literary consciousness. She is in dialogue with other poets doing the same: Natasha Trethewey, Toi Derricotte, UK’s Hannah Lowe or Scotland’s Jackie Kay among others. However, a hyper-contemporary poet constructing and deconstructing her Black womanhood is necessary, especially considering we have a Kamala Harris in the White House and a Meghan Markle in the British royal family. Therefore, this book will interest women (Black and biracial women even more so), but I believe Long’s poems also speak to what is human in everyone. They illuminate vulnerability, racism, sexuality, love and all the feelings in-between. While each section of poems may not provide a direct response to the book’s title, they are her offering. Think of this book as Long’s cosmic penny on the complex altar of life.
These offerings happen right from the start. My Darling begins with “Open,” which is one of a series of five interspersed poems with the same title. This poem may be tiny (five lines), but it opens the book with a ritual poem that ties/holds the first section together. The fact that “Open” feels like a prayer-like initiation isn’t strange, considering the book’s title uses the King James version of Psalms 35:17 as its foundation. That is, “Lord, how long wilt thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions.” The basic translation being: how long will God observe these persecutions and ignore them? The Psalm continues by asking if God will save the soul (My Darling) from the enemies (the Lions). However, do not get mired in this religious idea or some of the others that ebb and flow throughout; this notion is far from the total expanse of this book.
The first section of My Darling primarily contains childhood memory poems. Because childhood is challenging for many, few poets can inject humor into those moments. Long is adept at this. In “Sandwiches” we meet a recurring character, Tiff, whom the narrator asks to “make up” her eyes in a beautiful way (that young girls so often do) with mascara. In addition to her mastery of cosmetics, Tiff also stuffs her bra with sandwiches to attract boys. “See, Tiff’s clocked the boys have clocked the difference between / a tissue and a tit, a sock and a tit, but not quite yet / a tit and a slice of bread.” Moments like this are comical, but also illuminate the attention to detail, image, and female construction that dominates My Darling’s pages. Of course, there are other poems where the stakes are much higher, such as “Helena” — a chilling poem where sexual consent between the narrator and Ali is blurry at best. The long lines here (and in a few other poems) might be the only thing I would critique, since some of Long’s imagery gets weighed down.
Continuing to examine women’s struggles, Long next tackles hair. This topic becomes even more complicated for women of color. “Communion” is another stand-out in the section “A Lineage of Wigs.” This poem carries the same title as Cornelius Eady’s, but with a totally different focus. The black hair salon for some women can be the site of transformation but also sometimes presents identity struggles. Long’s images make this experience visceral. “Scalp sliced so many times / you can’t recall if you are girl or railroad?” Additionally, the internal challenges of the narrator’s mixed-race identity do not escape examination. “Girl, you’re the blackest you might ever be in here.” In “Wire,” a fourteen line almost-sonnet, an outsider asks why the narrator’s sister’s hair is so “long and soft and black.” Then says, “I bet I can guess which one/your mum likes styling in the morning.” This tongue-in-cheek response stings, but Long never lingers long in sentimentality. The only place where readers feel a softness, is when the narrator discusses the mother, which I’ll return to.
And finally, we arrive at the third section, titled “Dolls.” These three sections may nod to the original Holy Trinity, though here it comprises Mother, Daughter, Holy Ghost. The final section is a deconstruction of the things girls (if we stick to the gender binary) use in everyday play. There are fights between dolls Steven, the brown man, and Ken, the blond. “Ken would beat Steve up / for fun.” It may sound silly, but readers wonder: what is Ken’s real beef with Steve? Is it only his skin that angers Ken? Also, this section includes a timely examination of the UK’s new royal family member, Meghan Markle, in “Black Princess! Black Princess!” This poem explicates a vetting process, which seems never-ending. It’s highlighted by the use of the first-person plural narrator. The poem may cause readers to ponder if our new Madame Vice President was “inspected” like this. “Now we must comb through your hair. / Just joking! … But we will have to comb through every partner you’ve had.“ It seems no matter how far up the political ladder you’ve ascended, race and gender are landmines that never disappear.
Long ends My Darling with a tribute to the speaker’s mother in a poem called “The Sunflower.” While there are many other poems in My Darling which include the mother, this one feels particularly important. Sunflowers need what all other flowers do — water, good soil, a chance to “stand in the sun” as Olivia Pope might say. As a Black American woman who also published a first book collection discussing many similar themes, I am extremely moved by this collection. Poets will love how Long oscillates between narrative and experimentation, almost-sonnets and haiku-like prayer poems. But readers everywhere will appreciate this offering filled with candor and an unapologetic approach to the Black woman’s narrative.
[Published by Picador on August 6, 2020, 96 pages. To be published in the U.S. by Tin House on September 9, 2021]
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Nicole Cooley on Foreign Bodies by Kimiko Hahn
A nautilus shell. A safety deposit box. A beloved mother’s ashes in a box.
These are some of the objects that spin through Kimiko Hahn’s stunning tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. Hahn investigates what we collect and the spell that objects cast. She weaves past and present, the personal and the historical, through a range of poetic forms drawn from multiple traditions, including Japanese poetics, erasure, cento, and quotation and citation from myriad sources that spark gorgeous juxtapositions.
Hahn is a master of form, especially of forms in combination and collision. Her previous books – most recently Brain Fever (Norton, 2014), Toxic Flora (Norton, 2010) and The Narrow Road to the Interior (Norton, 2008) – showcase her extraordinary formal range and play with Japanese forms such as the zuihitsu, senryu and tanka. Hahn is deeply influenced by Japanese poetry and poetics, as she writes about in a recent essay for American Poetry Review. While Foreign Bodies extends Hahn’s prior investigations of form, both western and non-western, here she turns her attention to the relationship between home, intimacy and objects.
A fossil. A coffin. A chrysalis.
I confess that I am a deep lover of things, someone who frequents flea markets to imagine the lives of the people who used to own mason jars and depression glass, who stares into trash cans, wondering who threw away a child’s sparkly tiara or a tiny vodka bottle, who arranges miniature chairs on my desk for solace and inspiration. And so reading Foreign Bodies is a special pleasure, as Hahn’s poems return again and again to objects, those we think of as ephemera and those we claim as valuable, and the meanings that arise from them.
A margarine container. “[C]oil of welk cases from the local beach.”
A crucial question Hahn asks in Foreign Bodies is: what is a “foreign body”? One of the book’s beautiful sequences, “Object Lessons,” focuses on Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson. In the 19th century, Dr. Jackson extracted objects children swallowed — “nails and bolts, radiator key, / a child’s perfect attendance pin, // a Carry-Me-For-Luck medallion —.” His collection of objects is preserved at Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum of Medical History. The sequence, in both poetry and lyrical prose, looks at Jackson’s life and work but also interweaves fairy tale and personal experience, including a heartbreaking attempt by two daughters to save possessions from their ruined family home.
“Object Lessons,” like so many poems in the collection, explicitly links objects and the body through ideas of preservation and safekeeping. Hahn writes, “To answer a wish to possess: / tuck a chess piece into a cheek. / To meet a hunger not to share: swallow a kewpie doll whole.” To swallow is to possess. And to keep secret. And to save.
A cigar box full of treasures. A “coffee can of chewed up chewing gum.”
Hahn’s exploration of objects and home is deeply elegiac. Mourning is central to this book. Recalling her mother’s sudden violent death, the speaker retraces and reimagines her mother’s most intimate possessions. In “Constant Objection,” she observes, “if only I’d saved your brush // with a few strands of silver hair // Mother, dear object of my despondence, / What more can a daughter bear?”
Elsewhere, the speaker witnesses her father, a visual artist, lose his memory as she sorts through her childhood home. He has spent his life creating and making his own collections, which she must now dismantle, as in “Unearthly Delights,” the poem that opens the book: “After you rip through the screen / and wedge yourself into Father’s bedroom / you find a pile of art supply catalogs, / brown scraps of a bedspread.” Breaking into her childhood home, the speaker sorts her father’s possessions and the objects that defined her childhood, deciding what to save and what to discard. What more can a daughter bear?
Home is at the center of this book. Over and over, the poems in Foreign Bodies return to the house where the speaker grew up, piled with hoarded possessions, including the speaker’s mother’s ashes she seeks to find. And then in a brilliant and surprising turn, in “The Old House Speaks,” the childhood home is given voice: “What will become of my kitchen? The room where the now-middle-aged woman, when a toddler, sat in the bright porcelain sink for a sponge bath.”
A school locker. A cold case file. “A doll’s guide to Kiyoto lodged inside a walnut.”
What is a foreign body? The answers are multiple and various. A swallowed object. A migrant child at the border. An Asian American woman. A mother. A daughter. A daughter of a daughter. The poem “Foreign Body” interrogates this directly in its opening: “This is a poem on my other’s body. / I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one // who saved her braid of blue-black hair / in a drawer.” The mother’s body is “[t]he one body I write on.”
While much of the book is composed of longer sequences, poems called “charms,” short, delicate lyrics, interlace the collection and direct the reader to think about the notion of a keepsake. Here the speaker offers sharp directives:
Charms iii
Trustfulness
Never take from a father’s shelf
Impressions of ancient reptile
Or you’ll fossilize your heart
And forever bleed out bile
What is the difference between hoarding, collecting, and saving? How can a daughter preserve her childhood in a family home that is destroyed?
A commonplace book. “A palm sized clock, / green with a cartoon face.”
In an essay near the end of Foreign Bodies, “Nitro, More on Japanese Poetics,” Hahn writes, “I want to place the craft of poetry back where it belongs, that is, not just party to the mind, but a thing coursing throughout the body. Riotous and iambic. Other times, faint.” In her rich, lush language, Hahn does exactly this in her new book, as she explores the power and intimacy of the objects that shape us.
[Published by W.W. Norton on March 3, 2020, 128 pages, $256.95 hardcover]
Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Foreign Body” at the Poetry Foundation may be accessed by clicking here.