On Language as Balm

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Aria Aber’s “Mother of All Balms” appears in the September 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

It’s true that poetry finds us when we least expect it, and perhaps when we need its lyric shrine the most. Poetry is everywhere; ideally, you are perceptive enough to be able to be charmed by its omnipresence. It embalms with song the crevices of mundane existence. English is not my first language, and many of those who write in English today share this fate: we are to English a foreigner; it is the colonizer’s garden through which we wade and where we meet. A lingua franca ... “the oppressor’s language,” as Adrienne Rich puts it. There is no language in this world in which I am not a stranger, entering in from the outside. Much of my first book of poems, Hard Damage, is centered around the spaces between linguistic and geographic displacement: what gets lost in translation between languages and continents, what is miscommunicated and is replaced during the journey between two lifetimes.

This liminal space between languages can be bountiful. I might mishear leave for love and understand something trivial about my optimism; I might mispronounce a word while speaking to a lover and immediately we have a shared word—one that becomes the secret language of lovers. I might recall the confusing boundlessness of childhood, when song lyrics became what we wanted them to be: hymns to raspberry ice cream, odes to our pets; all language blooming within the nonsensical poetics of the mind. This, however, is rare.

Mostly, my life is surrounded by inflammatory rhetoric, demagogic speech, well-meaning yet micro-aggressive commentary; news reports upon news reports of child detention centers, life-threatening ecocide, global persecution of Muslims and other minorities. People who look like me are referred to as rats, vermin, pests. At times, reading the news feels like spiritual self-immolation; language can become the opposite of a balm, it can become the bomb that wrecks me open and torches me. It’s the poet’s responsibility, I believe, to work against the demagogues. When I teach a class on the political lyric, I tell my students that politicians operate within the same medium as poets: they use language. While demagogues use poetic devices to misconstrue populations, devalue unity, and further their agendas, we use poetic devices to make art. At our purest, I believe we sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. How do we want to utilize our responsibility? Maybe it starts with attempting to identify and scrutinize the words the demagogues employ to silence and injure us.

My home country of Afghanistan, for instance, is disgraced with many monikers, among them “quagmire,” “the second Vietnam,” “rocky dustbowl.” Afghanistan is thought of as a has-been, a trap, a failed experiment. In Sahar Muradi’s astute documentary poem “[a word is legged],” she offers a picture of Afghanistan by reproducing the nicknames Westerners have given it over the centuries:

the longest war
              the definition
of a quagmire
              (Washington, 170 years later)

late books, headlines
              “The Graveyard of Empires”

These destructive names are how many children of the Afghan diaspora know their home. The war-mongering orientalism of the twentieth century is still well and alive, perhaps even blossoming in the twenty-first century; once beautiful, exotified countries are reduced to phrases like crisis zone, killing field. Apart from dehumanizing entire geographies, these monikers lack nuance and often fail to present the power dynamics of political struggle, never considering who kills whom.

Except to bestialize countries and peoples, the military uses language to debase single victims and soft targets. Solmaz Sharif writes about the deceptive uses of military language in her brilliant poem “Personal Effects”:

Daily I sit
with the language
they’ve made

 

of our language

 

to neutralize
the capability of low dollar value items
like you.

The addressee of this tender, piercing poem is her uncle who fell in the Iran-Iraq war. “You are,” Sharif continues, “what is/referred to as a ‘casualty.’” The way military jargon, right-wing populists, and fascist demagogues utilize language to paint the weakest among us as worthless objects, as “collateral damage,” lays the groundwork for hate speech. It is exclusive, painful, oppressive. It is the opposite of what I want of poetry.

On the other hand, we use nicknames to euphemize and glorify. Weapons like missiles and bombs are named after heroic and poetic gods and mythical figures, glorious devices, and birds. This tradition is aided by the military industrial complex and perpetuated by advertisement companies paid by corporations that profit from arm sales: it is necessary to market weaponry not just as attractive, but as mythical and thus as part of our origin story. Our identity as a Western society is construed around the Eros of death; killing in combat is badass and sexy. We only need to look at movies to find this to be true. The world is covered by a net of manmade bombs in the names of Hermes, Hera, Sparrow, Daisy Cutter ... and somewhere, among them, there’s the Mother of All Bombs.

—

My poem “Mother of All Balms” emerged out of a moment of layered humiliation when a friend of mine referred to the “Mother of All Bombs” and I misheard the word bomb as balm. But even mistakes like these can be a source of creativity and inspiration. How beautiful the world would be if indeed they had launched a balm instead of a bomb.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as Mother of All Bombs, was, per GlobalSecurity.org at the time of its development, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal. It’s called a “large-yield bomb” because it yields large results. What exactly are we speaking of when we speak of a large-yielding result for a bomb? We speak of death. Hence, the military does not call the MOAB what I call it, which is what I think it is: a mass-destruction weapon.

On April 13th, 2017, the MOAB was launched in combat against ISIS in Nangarhar, Afghanistan. Although it killed some IS members, to many Afghan locals it felt like a test launch since the blast radius incurred many casualties and collateral damage; some Afghan journalists claim it killed more soft than hard targets. The poem I wrote starts with blaming the news reporter who said the word “wrong”—in a way, this is an attempt to rewrite the harsh reality portrayed within the news. I wanted this poem to function as song, as balm. While a bomb destroys, a balm does not create; its function is more limited: it restores, repairs, and heals what was already there but has been broken.

—

When I cannot bear to read the news, I read poetry instead. I listen to recordings, recite my favorite poems, mutter them to myself in supermarket aisles, and quote them on social media or in letters or emails to my friends. I relish in lyricism that is meant to incise, cut open, heal, embalm us. I read Rich’s “On the Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” I repeat to myself one of Sharif’s lines: “Let it matter what we call a thing.” Or I read Muradi’s poems, underlining the verse “here is the great green field where at last I can remove the high heel of language let the body supple in its meaning” to understand again and again how the language of mass media affects our psyches and destructs our bodies.

Apart from these American luminaries, one of the poets I return to the most is the German lyric master Rainer Maria Rilke, because he is one of the great poets writing about the innocence and borderless imagination of childhood. Like the memories of childhood, language, too, fails us: always imprecise, an arrow shooting into the ether, hoping for something to define us, for someone to hear us and thus hold us. When I feel defeated by the inherited trauma of displacement, of growing up paperless among refugees in asylum, I remember this line from Letters of a Young Poet:

And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sound—wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

No matter how hard our childhoods were, they are the first site of art. They are always as creative, bonding, fierce, fertile as language. By writing “Mother of All Balms,” I attempted to honor the childhood of my mother, whose adult life was stolen from her because of war, political prison, refuge. I wanted the poem to serve as a balm—to heal what has been ruptured, even if only superficially. Does language have the power to restore? To heal what’s broken? To fill the crevices? “Mother of All Balms” is an attempt to ask these questions through the unstable imagination of a poem, which is as fleeting and strange as childhood.