Ante Body

Ante body, Egyptian-born poet Marwa Helal’s second collection, examines race, gender, migration, and language with intelligence and crackling originality. At once opaque and inviting, the book beckons readers into its disjointed columns of text with bold pronouncements, such as the line “NOT A PASSPORT PHOTO” stamped on one page, and “this is use of white space” stranded at the bottom of another. Splayed across facing pages in the book’s center are the words “People the We,” an inversion of the United States’ founding document, which introduces “The Arabic,” a poetic form of Helal’s invention, whose lines are read right-to-left. The form is intentionally jarring for anyone unfamiliar with reading right-to-left, but Helal ups the ante by layering on references and faux errors, as in an amended version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Who Will Survive In America?”:

ask i now

 ⸮america in surveillve will who
 ⸮america in surveillve will who
 ⸮america in surveillve will who

An indictment of the US surveillance state, Helal’s use of typos or “typos” (since, as she clarifies in one poem, “the typo is the correction”) frustrates the “hegemonic demonic white supremacist capitalist patriarchy™” by insisting on multiple ways of reading and writing in English. In “Bring Back Our Girls,” a five-part poem addressing cultural theft and sexism, which opens with a call to bring the bust of Nefertiti back to Egypt, “typos” increasingly interfere with legibility (“objectxfactxon xn the mxrror xs closer than xt appears”), before culminating in an obfuscated code:

5. Me tooa B Me toob Me tooc R Me tood Me tooe I Me toof
     N Me toog G

Me tooh            them

Me tooi B Me tooj A Me took C Me tool K Mem too Men
     too Me tooo 

Helal buries the urgent plea “BRING THEM BACK” in the refrain of a fraught movement (#MeToo), while underscoring the difficulty of dismantling oppressive systems with the tools of the dominant culture. Such complicated, fascinating play with language makes this a collection worthy of revisiting, of frequent returns to puzzle through its many meanings.