On the Other Side of the Alphabet

]]

An enigmatic symbol recurs in “Without Which,” the long poem that synthesizes the major themes of Solmaz Sharif’s second collection, Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022). It’s a poem about exile and how people form themselves around what they lack—or lack language for. The poem begins with an unexpected void. Readers’ eyes fall almost halfway down the poem’s blank first page before encountering two closed brackets. Though such marks normally revise or discipline language in the service of clarity, here they open confusion. How should one read this first gesture? We’re being asked to experience white space as we would experience language, as a concrete presence that makes meaning, or we’re urged to contemplate the site where language was erased. We enter the poem too late to know, excluded, having lost something.

]]

Look (2016), Sharif’s acclaimed debut, inhabits a language world made slithery by the euphemisms of the US military-industrial complex. Rewriting entries from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, which she inserts into otherwise mundane contexts, Sharif creates a text structured by the forces it resists. Her formal techniques—majuscules, quotations, encroachments of prose—help stage energizing, unsettling contests between personal desires and the institutional discourses that define the terms of those desires. Sharif’s linguistic defamiliarizations illuminate the lies and violence inherent in such discourse while proposing that even this language can be reclaimed as the ground of a new, chastened intimacy. This is not to say that the poems lift into an anthemic mode but that as they do their careful, incriminating work, they register the ways in which a dark backdrop makes the foreground glow more intensely. One haunting poem, “Vulnerability Study,” comprises snapshots of events just about to happen, some possibly violent, some ambiguously tender. Uncertainty about how these tightly coiled events will play out extends the poem’s domain into the various futures it evokes. A circuit that begins with “your face turning from mine / to keep from cumming” ends, seven lines and four soft leaps later, with “a wall cleared of nails / for the ghosts to walk through.” Holding empty space open, the poem suggests, may let another presence wander in, with all the risk that entails. 

]]

Customs is, in part, a record of the ghosts that walk through the gap its predecessor made. Readers encounter elegies shivered and sliced into many forms, letters haunted by exile, deathlike landscapes, the tolling names of executed political prisoners. But distinguishing the dead from the living in a deeply alienated culture can prove impossible; lest readers forget where they are, the speaker of the first poem, “America,” declares “I / was dead. / I learned / it.” Sharif speaks as a new Persephone, whose continual death is required by the collective pressures and practices experienced as America and, even more dismally, as an American career. Speaking from the center of literary culture precisely because she looks so slant and darkly at it, Sharif writes “Our poets are used to padding … bookshelves on casters / moved aside / to make room for them.” Here is an insidious gentleness, an inability to touch reality that makes the poets into children, lunatics, or ghosts, but its pinch may lie in “used to,” which stresses, as Customs often does, how comfort quietly makes cowards of everyone.

]]

Making the anodyne tangible is difficult and painful. To do so, this collection applies formal techniques that, like the environments they reflect, sometimes demand readers’ attention and sometimes recede. Sharif’s syllabics, for instance, may slice poems aggressively, as in the two-syllable lines of “America”:

One more
thing. Eat
it said.
It felt
good. I
was dead.

Other poems enact a subtler repeated crushing, as in “Now What?” Similarly, in “Learning Persian,” defamiliarizing phonetics forces readers to work to make meaning until they discover that words that look very foreign are in fact domestic: “vee-roos,” “oh-toh-ree-te.” Such poems inculcate and reward an aesthetic vigilance that mirrors the poet’s ethical trajectory.

But that trajectory is wandering and recursive. These poems are not records of purification, not themselves Molotov cocktails, not only acts of social diagnosis. Sharif’s speaker is less a revolutionary than a lyric historian, and her alertness also registers the ways the world resists her renunciations: the play of fog on the hills; the small, bodily pleasures that attend money (e.g., “loneliness / delimited by colonnade and cold-pressed juices”); the powerful draw of family. These are poems caught in the space between recognition of hidden violence and power and the impossibility of extrication. “Visa,” in which the speaker waits for a loved one outside an airport’s international arrivals terminal, recognizes how arbitrary an immigration outcome is and how much of the speaker’s life is built on equal arbitrariness; it ends “All my waiting at this railing. / All my writing is this squint.” The testimony is powerful, rising toward ars poetica, and is emblematic of the book. It may be that because one loves other people, one stands not on the front lines but in an in-between space of relative powerlessness and intense but approximate vision. Still, the book asks what possibilities are recoverable in such a place. What, as Sharif wrote in a 2013 Volta article, can “social quests for freedom … learn from freedom enacted on the page?” If this means a kind of life-in-death, as it seems to in Customs, to which of the dead should the poem open?

]]

The task of balancing two inheritances, the intellectual and the matrilineal, functions as one through line of Customs. Though one becomes accustomed to a dominant culture and language (American, English) through the many subtle blows that this book enacts, the noun form customs can also mark out those practices that will not be absorbed and travel through time alongside the family. As such, the names of the ancestors that Sharif invokes in this small place of freedom toll loudly. There are figures of resistance: Forough Farrokhzad, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ethel Rosenberg, Ovid, Julia Kristeva. Or, studying history, she returns to inevitable figures of power: Grandmother, the Shah. Others leave their trace in allusion or formal markers: Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Marianne Moore, Hafez. Alongside them, in the spirit of the ghazal, at endings, the name Solmaz. These people hover adjacent to life, both here and not, as their politics find new force in the poems as models for how to speak truth to power. Sharif writes at the end of “The Master’s House”:

To stand outside your grandmother’s house
To know, for example, that in Farsi the present perfect is called the
           relational past, and is used at times to describe a historic event
           whose effect is still relevant today, transcending the past
To say, for example, Shah dictator bude-ast translates to The Shah
           was a dictator, but more literally to The Shah is-was a dictator
To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of
           your eyes
To walk cemetery after cemetery in these States and nary a grave-
           stone reading Solmaz
To know no nation will be home until one does
To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing, though
           you’ve forgotten what it was

]]

Critiquing the United States can feel, in 2022, like punching a blanket, but in Customs, each observation (about, for instance, the ways hard and soft power hem in what might wishfully be called imagination or the freedom of the page) compels the speaker to feel anew the degree to which her words and life are woven into that same cloth. In her essay “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” June Jordan, a touchstone for Sharif’s work, writes, “By itself, our language cannot refuse to reflect the agonizing process of alienation from ourselves. If we collaborate with the powerful, then our language will lose its currency as a means to tell the truth in order to change the truth.” Half sociology, half farce, Sharif’s “Patronage” takes the recognition of such complicity as its problem and impetus. Poets are figured as nursemaids called in to soothe, not wake, the “milk-drunk // and burped babe” of collective conscience. In a twist on an old theme, they’re circus animals, then dung sweepers, deluded into thinking they’re “ringmaster[s].” Only after a thorough deflation of what poetry is allowed to be in the United States does a first-person speaker emerge to say, simply, “There was an inlet.” This “inlet,” a negative space, seems to produce an individual voice almost mechanically as well as pathos derived from the voice’s powerlessness: “I should’ve stayed. I should’ve stayed,” it murmurs. Occurring after the ironic third-person context that precedes it, the pleasant relief the vulnerability of this voice offers is itself suspect, a distraction from the poem’s theme: how high culture palliates and reproduces structural inequity. Only at the end of the poem does the speaker, with the help of a ghostly, intimate interlocutor, learn to see herself as power sees her, and thereby imagine—albeit in a kind of rehearsal or therapy session—how she might use her linguistic power to turn the tables, in this case, by flipping the metaphor:

Remember what you are to them.
 
Poodle, I said.
 
And remember what they are to you.

•  

Meat.

 

As with the closed brackets, Sharif’s bullet point works as both a stage direction and an active intervention. It marks a lapse of time while thought happens in the gap, but it also signals the transition from speech, in italics, to written language that the poem endorses beyond the conversational frame. The smaller first-person voice and the third-person analysis of poetry culture become one in the moment of hardening political resolve.

]]

Reflections on the gap between speech and writing pervade Customs, which, recognizing how profoundly Western literary history sanctions certain kinds of violence, goes back to the poisoned root of writing itself. The book begins with the first of several letters to a mysterious aleph (the Semitic letter, which also gives its name to alphabet). Sharif links the earliest Greco-Roman and Hebrew literature to exclusions of the Persian other, whose speech sounded to the Greeks like the nonsense syllable bar, hence, barbarians. (This return to origins is completed in “An Otherwise,” the book’s last poem, which travels through Iran: “What awaits us on the other side / of alphabet …”) Though the poet must dwell in this tradition so genealogically inimical to her presence, she does so warily. Reading as Goliath, not David, is one way she peeks behind the received narrative, with all its ideological freight, to the stories occluded behind it and shows how literature—in the broadest sense, of anything written—deforms and replaces what was there before it.     

She does this by making the violence of that deformation material—in the nonlanguage of an asterisk, brackets, white space—and incorporating it into the poem. At one point, a speaker “touch[es] the satin scar / where you had been cut,” and readers can feel all the ways a present artifact holds open the site and the multiple timeframes of a loss. The self-perpetuating systems people live between—global capitalism, the bureaucratic state—become embodied and tangible as people internalize them, whether as knowledge or as disciplinary violence. As Sharif said at a 2019 Seattle Arts & Lectures event,

[…] for me the formal shape of a poem is the diagnostic movement of a poem. It is power being enacted against speech and upon speech. So I’m constantly trying to find the shapes that will interrupt my speech, will prevent me from saying what I need to say, exist only in infinitives so there is no subject, ways that I can’t quite get to the thing that I need to say, or that I’m watching what I’m saying.

]]

After the silence of its enigmatic symbol, the first lines of the long poem “Without Which” emerge:

I have long loved what one can carry.
I have long left all that can be left
behind in the burning cities and lost
 
even loss—not cared much
or learned to. I turned and looked
and not even salt did I become.

This is a scarred voice whose first note is love, even if such love feels like a structural necessity, a way of making sense of loss by loving only what “one can carry.” Despite its eerie suddenness, its unexplained elisions, its sacramental music—the ghostly tetrameter, those ls and os—the first stanza is formally knowable and joins a long tradition of exilic laments. Across the stanza break, expectations begin to chip apart. At first read, what the speaker has “lost” appears to be a physical object, parallel, rationally enough, with what she has “left / behind.” But when the grammar is completed in the next stanza, the loss is revealed to be the linguistic abstraction loss and with it the ability to speak in any categorical way about such experience. The white space between stanzas is a place of activity that’s even more surprising than the speech it frames; it’s where language goes underground and is rearranged. This sentence preserves at its center a vibrating absence (“without which”) even as it narrates a journey outside of (“without”) an uncertain and obscured homeland known only by periphrasis (“what,” “that,” “which”). And this revision of the gendered Old Testament parable of witnessing has to be read as a reflection on the paradox of Look. (An erasure of erasure: Lot’s shadows “lost”). Though the writer of an ardent anti-imperial document might expect, and even hope for, condemnation—proof that the arrow landed—she is instead gladly received into, and rewarded by, that imperial literary establishment. Readers feel the speaker’s puzzled insulation: “I turned and looked / and not even salt did I become.”

]]

From that cryptic first note, which balances an appealing directness with a withholding of narrative information, the poem travels a series of voids, emerging from its white spaces in unpredictable new contexts but always with stunning control. Changing with its circumstances, that control reads sometimes as ingrained, sometimes as redacted, sometimes as the pinch of self-censorship. When the speaker writes

Eventually I pare down
 
                     ]]
 
what of me I can’t stand to look at,

readers experience “]]” as the blade (of writing?) sinking into the speaker. That cutting is not a narrated past event but an action that takes place during reading, in real time. Readers feel just how effective that “paring” has been. This poem’s commitment to keeping going despite its losses of losses results in a proliferation of relative clauses, absences treated as positives, of which “what of me I can’t stand to look at” is one. This is tortuous, tortured language, stripped of all positive content except aversion, not looking. As with the incision marks, which hold open the site of the wound even as they supersede it, what remains is language entirely hollowed out but still reactive, attaching unpredictably to whatever comes before or after it.

]]

Meanwhile, ]], at first a wound, slowly becomes a sign of potential, until it suggests to the speaker a “door,” then the half-moons of paint a door knocker has scraped away. Later, ]] is a strange “leather bucket” lowered into dark wells, returning to the surface bright with reflective water. At last, ]] is at once the walls of the room in which the speaker lies with her lover and the lover’s scars, which she touches.

]]

The progression of “Without Which” from a stately inability to make contact, “not car[ing] much,” to a relationship of touch and intimacy with what isn’t there, characterizes Customs as a whole. The notes it lands on—intimacy and lived-in-ness—are the book’s major discoveries. Interpersonal relationships, with both the living and the dead, are held up against alienated language and geopolitical realities. At the end of “An Otherwise,” the return to Iran that concludes the book, the speaker sets out “to follow / the music mine // and not, but matrilineal …” It is an arc that curves away from literariness—Ovid and the alphabet—and toward the family: the mother’s face looking out the passenger window at the country she’s left. There, a row of cypresses, a path of “of small and sharp stone.”

]]

This essay adopts one of Sharif’s forms to make tangible a deep theme of Customs: that structural forces beyond language always control the reception of language. Each act of reading is filtered through a moment in history, an economic structure, a system of political representation or through a cultural inheritance, a genetic tree. Poetic form—shapes that interrupt speech, to cite Sharif—can draw attention to this mediation by interrupting it, allowing the poet to adjust these nested relationships. This adoption of Sharif’s symbol and its interruptions is therefore a response to the ways Customs challenges readers to read beyond the safe cordons of literary culture, using poetry as a tool for ethical inquiry and political imagination.

]]

In the essay “We Are All Refugees,” June Jordan writes,

As I think about the stories of women—from my students all the way back to my maternal grandmother—again and again I am struck by qualities of hesitation and restraint. … Hesitation and restraint make tenderness and generosity and altruistic interaction possible and even likely. Hesitation and restraint quiver quietly alive someplace opposite to violence and domination.