Behind the Tree Backs

Iman Mohammed’s first full-length poetry book, Behind the Tree Backs, is composed of a series of intricately constructed fragments—observations, thoughts, and memories—often dizzying in their play with scale and scope. Seemingly simple phrases, like the title, “behind the tree backs,” require considered attention. Do trees have “backs”? Unless a tree was near a fence or building, being “behind” it would be a matter of perception. This emphasis on individual perception is apt for the collection, which seems to speak from deep within a single (embodied) consciousness. 

Mohammed was born in Iraq in 1987 and raised in Sweden. The trauma of war and displacement is evident in this collection, sometimes subtly and sometimes more explicitly. A page ending “behind dawn / drones stain themselves the sea / sacred sea and sun” is followed by a description of the scene on the ground: 

The child’s blackblue sapphires hover above the adult’s face, beneath it veins. Fingers pass cookies, wet wipes, M1 Abrams, milk. Firmly a child is held by the right hand while the left opens the door to a house. After forty days the little one stopped screaming. Hand in hand with the conclusion of the air offensive. 

In the translator’s note, Jennifer Hayashida writes: “I have interrogated any impulse I may have felt to domesticate, stabilize, explain […].” And indeed, Hayashida’s musical translation employs a sparse and subtly “nonstandard” syntax that allows for surprising resonances among Mohammed’s cascade of lucid images. Here, for example, two sentences without grammatical subjects, surrounded by blank space on the page, create the effect of an inner monologue overheard by the reader: 

Slice bread at night, star particles arrayed. My feet
unsteady on the floor. Exist on an orb adrift in black ocean. 

What begins with mundane activity swerves into wonder and disorientation, as “exist” chimes with “adrift,” in a line of near-pentameter. Here, as elsewhere, Mohammed’s poetry binds the perceptual to the imaginative, offering us glimpses of a vivid inner world in motion.