Natalie Eilbert Explores Charif Shanahan's Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Natalie Eilbert suggests readers dive into Charif Shanahan's debut collection of poetry, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017). In Shanahan's book, readers are guided through the North African landscape, its beauty and devastation, by pages dotted with reference to the blackstart, a bird that hails from North Africa and is present in the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula. "The blackstart’s natural origins are a source of tension as much as intrigue for Shanahan," Eilbert writes. Let's start there: 

When I first Googled it (I had never heard of the species), “blackstart” showed another meaning: a blackstart restores electric power without relying on an external transmission network. In other words, it must find another source of energy to regenerate the city. Shanahan’s spectacular poetry does this — perhaps unwittingly, it seeks to illuminate his cast of cities through unconventional means of conduction. Like the bird, the speaker’s many voices probe the desert, navigating distances. Like regeneration, the mind behind this collection is a spark that can relocate us in the rooms we’ve been wandering through in the dark all along.

Even from the beginning, Shanahan promises this will be a book preoccupied by makers. From the first line of the first poem, “Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968,” such divine encounter proves fatal: “The maker has marked another boy to die.” The initial meter, near-perfect iambic pentameter, does not last; rather, Shanahan establishes formalities only to see how they might wrinkle and bruise under his spell: neat and knitted couplets conclude with a single line (“the Alps close behind her,” a memorable example); lacunas break up uniform line lengths in the title poem, “Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing” and elsewhere; the longer poem “Your Foot, Your Root” marries prose sections with single lines and indented couplets with strikethrough text, conveying a difficult passage. That initial poem sets an unshackling precedent, even as it maintains a unifying shape. Death and life vacillate, the lines of body blur in such a way that life under the skin is as improbable as death under the skin:

His thin body between two sheets,
Black legs jutting out onto the stone floor,
The tips of his toenails translucent as an eye.
Gray clumps of skin, powder-light,
Like dust on the curve of his unwashed heel
And the face, swollen, expanding like a lung.
At its center, the sheet lifts and curves:
His body’s strangeness, even there.
One palm faces down to show the black
Surface of hand, the other facing up
White as his desert’s sky.

It is as if the speaker sees the body not as dead but simply incapable of further life. This body, has it become alien, or was it always so? To describe the toe, here is an eye. To describe the skin, here is the dust that collects on the heel. The face, a lung. The pale palm, the white of an altogether different associative order. In espousing the parts anew, the body becomes less body. The black boy, in death, becomes recognizable only in how he is shaped by parts that do not align with his forced otherness.

The light-skinned women in this poem further complicate this. They have “gathered in waiting: / No song of final parting, no wailing / Ripped holy from their throats.” The contrast here is stunning. They are a group who refuse the body rites. They do not sing; they burn in the sun. They do not mourn the loss of the boy. The tone of the book is clear. Even there — in that room, in that country, in that death, the black hand and the white palm together and separately facing up — his body’s strangeness.

Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books.