The Threshold
The Threshold, Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s first book in English translation, includes poems from her four Arabic collections, arranged chronologically, opening with poems set in Cairo of the 1990s and then documenting the poet’s emigration to Canada, where she now lives and works as a professor of Arabic language and literature. Translator Robyn Cresswell aptly compares Mersal’s poetry to that of Wisława Szymborska (in its “mistrust of bombast”), and argues that Mersal’s inherently feminist poems serve as a counterpoint to the work of male “latter-day prophets” of Arabic verse, including Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis. For Mersal, as Cresswell explains, politics is located:
[…] not in the public square or at the checkpoint, but rather in the realm of sexual relations, commonplace idioms, and hierarchies of power that are more durable because mostly unacknowledged.
The “threshold” of the title refers to sites, passage through which results in irrevocable change. In “A Visit,” a woman visits her lover:
The one behind the door
should open it as quickly as possible
before the one outside
has time to ponder what rationalizations
brought her here.Time typically disappears
as one walks over the threshold.
Mersal’s humor is evident in the title poem’s description of a group of friends on the cusp of maturity, wandering around Cairo, discussing literature and politics:
When the oldest of us suggested
that we become more forward thinking
I conceived of a way to convert public toilets
into stalls for weeping
and public squares into urinals
and then all of a sudden
one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend
When I’m talking about democracy
You shut the hell up
so we ran for it
By the poem’s end, we learn that the speaker has crossed over: “when I decided to leave them all behind / and walk alone / I was already thirty.”
In the last lines of the final poem, “The Idea of Home,” Mersal offers a new kind of threshold: “Let home be the place where you never notice the bad lighting, let it be a wall whose cracks keep growing until one day you take them for doors.”