Fire Is not a Country

In Fire Is not a Country, Cynthia Dewi Oka captures the exhausting toll of resistance work, of what is “spent” when one is expected to continually push back on the world. At a moment in contemporary poetry when there is so much rousing energy for strength and calls to action, there is something exceptionally brilliant about this collection’s attention to fatigue, to the body overwhelmed, to the idea that one should not have to be or perform super humanness in order to survive. In the poem “Protégé: Part II,” we learn about the speaker’s experience going to “meeting after meeting with words like / ‘defense’ and ‘community,’ stack assurances in red lettering on the table.” The poem continues:

[…] You are not alone, I tell terrified factory workers, 
terrified parents, terror itself, you are this other condition speech 
has no right to enter without a warrant—the seafaring instinct 

The phrase “You are not alone” rings out here, as if to say, don’t be gaslit. In other words, Oka corroborates the unheard. She also translates the bureaucracy of oppression as in the breathtaking poem, “Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda” in which a little moth acts as a poet-prophet who offers this warning:

That tonight, the night after, the night after that, for as the distance 
between God and a pothole, a moth’s flight will spell, 

They are coming for you. 

Oka’s resistance is unruly and wild, messy and tired. In “Driving to York Prison in a Thunderbird,” the speaker recalls “a night, a long time ago,” when they drove a stolen car, “in another country, with the top / down” while beating their chest. “[E]scape,” says the speaker, “is the story we tell so we can live with the echoes of choices / we made in greed, hunger, pain.” 

These poems revel in a wilderness of other-worldly imagery produced by the poet’s interest in contradictions. The reader will gleefully suspend their disbelief to dwell in these lines. As Oka says of misunderstanding, it is “our common feast,” meaning, maybe, that one can be nourished by the incomprehensible.