A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Dunya Mikhail Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

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Dunya Mikhail Diary of a Wave Outside the SeaOn the tenth anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, I listened on NPR as Renee Montagne interviewed an Iraqi poet who fled her homeland and I knew immediately it was Dunya Mikhail and that I had read her book, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and I needed to read it again.

Plausible Deniability

In many ways, I’ve been avoiding reading about the Middle East since we invaded that sovereign nation under false pretenses. I protested the war then, weakly, and as I realized how little power I had to change our policies, I turned away and pretended that I couldn’t see that my taxes weren’t paying for the destruction of someone else’s infrastructure and the murder of other people’s children. I’m opposed to both dictatorship and terrorism, but what we did in Iraq was uncomfortably close to a Crusade.

Somehow now, 10 years later, I’m ready to begin to really look at the Middle East again—to let my political scientist side again start to question—and to confront what makes me so uncomfortable about Iraq just as I have started to question my reading tastes. Truthfully, I stumbled into Iraq a few weeks ago when we finally started watching Homeland. I didn’t actually know the show started in Iraq, but watching Claire Danes piecing together international intrigue and speaking in foreign tongues reminded me of who I used to want to be. So here I sit, holding a book filled with Arabic script, trying to reconcile these pieces of myself.

Facing the Truth

The hardest thing to see in an “enemy” is his or her humanity. Mikhail’s book starts just there, with the simple observations of a child:

In my childhood, I envied myself for being a child.
I thought everyone was created the way they were:
created as a child or an old man or a mother.

She goes on to write:

I used to count dreams on my fingers
and cry, because my fingers were insufficient!
I also cried when I saw myself in photos
and I would shout:
“Take me out of the picture!”

The book slips quickly into scenes during the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm, but Mikhail doesn’t show the images I’m used to seeing—Humvees lumbering across a desert or oil wells on fire. Instead she writes about how life continued:

I was not waiting by myself;
the river was there, too,
and the smoke that rose from the explosions
and from the cigarette of a lover
who contemplated his loneliness
like a pawn in the corner of a chessboard.

And I remember what it was like then for me, my friends and I—not yet teenagers—gathered around a table in a kitchen discussing whether our brothers would be drafted. Our language wasn’t as beautiful as Mikhail’s. Our bodies were so much farther from danger. But we, too, existed with this war as it shaped our lives in ways we couldn’t understand or control. Still, Mikhail’s experience was much more immediate and soon the words devoted to war outweigh those devoted to other aspects of life:

Sometimes I imagine the war has ended
and life creeps into the foreheads of the corpses
for an instant.
One instant is enough,
a moment
the size of a bullet.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Has the war stopped?
What will we do now
without enemies?

“Pens and Rifles Have One End”

The second part of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was written after Mikhail fled Iraq. No longer subjected to Iraqi censors, the poetry begins to use real names rather than references to Zeus. Instead of oblique references to chess and electrons that split and reunite only to destruct, she tells stories of her “war generation.” I remember that the Gulf War was not the first to touch her lifetime and her city.

The way I fled the country was like everything in Iraq:
too hard, too easy, and exactly as they liked.

The way the book is laid out feels like a metaphor. Because Arabic is read right to left, the English translation of Mikhail’s words and the Arabic original meet in the middle with only to separate them. Somewhere between these two languages, amidst the family photos and images of other important papers, is a poet and her story.

It’s time to begin digging into my own story—to stop turning away when I encounter resistance—to delve deeper when life and writing are the most difficult. It’s time to find who this person who is part political scientist, part writer, part woman, part wife, and so much more—who this person is.

Read Mikhail’s poetry for the beauty of her language, but as you are reading, listen to the conversation that happens with all great books—the one where an artist provides you the keys to help you learn about yourself.

If this review made you want to have your own conversation with Mikhail’s work, pick up a copy of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Chinua Achebe and Why I Don’t Read Enough About Africa

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Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the SavannahWhen novelist Chinua Achebe died late last week, I remembered that I had several of his books sitting at home and had still not read any of them. I thought for a few minutes about why I hadn’t. Faithful readers of this blog will know that I often read geographically. Last spring I have to have gone through 10 or more Balkan Books in anticipation of a trip to Croatia. And the blog wasn’t extant when I went through my summer of Africana a few years back. But even that summer was mostly filled with non-Africans writing about Africa including Beryl Markham, Isak Dineson, Alexander McCall Smith and V.S. Naipaul.

What Defines an African Writer?

Why, of all the African writers I’ve ever read, is only one Black? Okay, two, if you count Dinaw Mengestu, but The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears was set in the US and was more about the immigrant experience here than it was about Africa. The only Black African writer I’ve read, until this weekend when I finally opened The Anthills of the Savannah, is Chris Abani.

Is it About Race?

It should tell me something about my own relationship with race that I’m unable to decide whether to capitalize “Black.” I’d love to fall back on the PC comfort word of “African American” but although that fits both Dinaw Mengestu and Chris Abani to certain extents, it really doesn’t fit Chinua Achebe.

Maybe it’s Cultural Differences

I want to excuse myself and say that cultural differences make everyone uncomfortable. But that’s not good enough. I preach community and togetherness and world peace, and yet there are wide swaths of the world I have failed to adequately explore, even through literature. Instead, I read books about places I have a relationship with. I’ve lived in both Latin America and Europe and I’ve traveled to Asia. Reading books about those places helps me uncover new layers of the experiences I had abroad. And books, even in the quantity that I read them, are cheaper than a plane ticket. But if I only read what I know, I am only reinforcing my own stereotypes.

Reading Like a Colonizer

My dad always loved Africana while I was growing up, but his books are mostly (because of his interests) the Great White Hunter type. And when I was a kid and my dad and brother went on safari in Africa, I wasn’t interested to go. I could blame it on the weather (I love dreary, damp Seattle). But I have this sneaking suspicion that the place was so utterly foreign to me that I got scared. It was truly the dark continent because I don’t have a relationship with Africa. I think by reading mostly African books written by white Europeans, I was looking for a way I could relate to this place that is completely foreign to me.

All of that is to say I don’t know what makes a writer African. There are numerous experiences of Africa that are all valid, but I have failed to really explore them until now. My failure might be about race. It might be about culture. But it doesn’t matter why I haven’t been reading widely enough about Africa. What matters is that if I want to be the person I think I am, I have to start.

Back to Chinua Achebe and Anthills of the Savannah

Anthills of the Savannah follows school chums Ikem and Chris as they navigate their country’s first post-colonial government, a military dictatorship headed by another friend of theirs. The book starts with this obsequious tone as Chris, the Commissioner for Information, tries to appease the dictator. The language is also florid and bureaucratic as Chris talks around whatever offense His Excellency perceives at the moment. This portrait from the inside is an elegant way of showing the fear and instability of a new government.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was how Achebe portrayed the power of women. In many, many literary traditions, women are soft spoken or working the only power they have—their sexuality. In Anthills of the Savannah, the women, even the uneducated Elewa, are equally savvy as the men and it’s Chris’s girlfriend Beatrice who first sees the danger brewing. Throughout the book, men and women complement each other and learn from the way the other sees the world.

The tension builds quickly in the book and soon Ikem, the editor of the paper of record, is in trouble and Chris has to figure out whether to help him and how. In the US, a political circle this tight would feel like a contrivance (although it’s more true than I’d like to admit), but in the fictional country of Kangan, it’s a genius way of illustrating how much power changes people. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but I particularly liked the way Achebe worked in comments on dictatorship throughout the book:

“Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass… The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, just what is up and what is down.”

He also writes about some of the subtler effects of colonization:

“Beatrice smiled wryly. So, two whole generations before the likes of me could take a first-class degree in English, there were already barely literate carpenters and artisans of British rule hacking away in the archetypal jungle and subverting the very sounds and legends of daybreak to make straight my way.”

I lived under a dictator in Chile, but I was one of the privileged classes and I was a child. By finally opening up a book by Chinua Achebe and reading outside my comfort zone, I gained an entirely new understanding of this form of government. I also learned that gender relations are also a product of culture. I have much to understand about Africa and the rest of the world. I hope all the writers I encounter on my journey are as gifted as Achebe.

Do you challenge yourself with your reading better than I do? What have you learned about the world that’s surprised you?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Anthills of the Savannah from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

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Arlene Kim - What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoesPoet Arlene Kim rocked my literary heart at Richard Hugo House’s Lit Series earlier this year with an erasure poem displayed entirely in slides. This haunting response to the abuse of girls changed my conception of poetry. I bought her book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, immediately and have carried it with me every day since.

Although the video of that evening’s performance is locked somewhere in a vault and I cannot share it with you, I can share this book and what it taught me about poetry. If you’re a returning reader to this blog, you know that I’m fascinated with poetry, but I am only recently learning to write it. So when I read a book like Kim’s, I am reading as much for what I can learn from it as I am for the beauty of language.

What Poetry Sounds Like

I’ve been reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry lately. In fact, it was his discussion of the way tension carries across a line that taught me to better hear poetry. Kim utilizes that tension incredibly well. In “Hollow Tongue” she writes, “The dead can speak / any language, I’d imagine,” and I became enraptured with the way the line breaks. I’ve run it over and over my tongue just to capture the way, as Pinsky has taught me, the line slows the sentence down and the sentence speeds the line up.

Another favorite selection I’ve been studying for line breaks is “Paper Suns,” where Kim writes, “My love. I tended him / after he fell. His charred wing stumps, / his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then”. The line breaks give an extra charge to a poem already full of rich language and evocative imagery.

The Many Shapes of a Poem

My knowledge of forms of poetry is limited. What I can tell you is that Kim considers the entire page when she writes her poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Rot,” is a series of conventional paragraphs spread across multiple pages whereas “Wind,” also a poem set in paragraph form, gusts across the pages it covers with shifting margins and alignments. “Spool, Book, Coin” is written in very short lines that, according to the endnotes, mimic the wavering walk of a child. The way each of the poems in this book is laid out is so carefully considered and unique to each instance, that I wanted to (and will in the coming days) study them over and over to learn precisely how the layout and syllable counts affect my read of each poem.

Recurring Imagery

There are many images that Kim returns to again and again throughout the book including the woods, hair, and birds. It was the Biblical apple, though, that caught my attention. This was in part because it’s a relatively accessible image and occurs very early in the book, but it was also so lusciously invoked that I wanted to think about it over and over. “Rot” starts, “Begin / An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.” The language was so simple and yet I was so firmly entrenched in Eden. I wondered how she did that and if I had somehow too firmly committed to one interpretation. The poem goes on in the next section:

A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of the apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color.” – Arlene Kim, “Rot”

And so the poem isn’t just about sex and temptation but it’s about surfaces and the way we become beguiled and misled by them. There are many, many things happening beneath the surfaces of Kim’s poems and I look forward to discovering more as I read them. I was grateful for the notes she provides at the end of the book, but the poems are strong enough to do without them if you choose.

Now that I’m getting over my obsession with getting poetry “right” (damn you undergrad English courses), I’m really starting to enjoy reading poems. My favorite prose is usually about the language of a piece and concision anyway, and who spends more time crafting language than poets?

I recommend Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? for poetry newbies like me and also for my more educated poet friends. I learn from you, so please share your thoughts about the craft of this book with me in the comments below. And if I ever find that video of the erasure poem on the web, I’ll post it here.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Gabriela and the Widow: Jack Remick Teaches Writing through Writing

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The old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” does not at all apply to Jack Remick. Before I read Gabriela and the Widow, Jack taught me about writing with the insightful questions he’d ask after we read our work aloud during the long-standing writing group at Louisa’s Café in Seattle. Reading Gabriela was even more of an education in the subtleties of craft.

Significant Detail

Driven from her village in Mexico by a civil war that kills her family, young Gabriela faces many hardships. Remick uses details like a “cotton blouse embroidered by hand in the faint light of the evening fire” to convey tender allusions to what Gabriela’s life must have been like before the war. When La Patrona, a woman who has “rescued” Gabriela, then takes this blouse and says she will burn it, the reader has a deeper understanding of how fully the woman is stripping away the essence of Gabriela.

When Gabriela craves a pair of white Nikes, it is easy to see that what she is really craving is a life like the Norteñas who wear these shoes. Later, Gabriela will be coaxed into other shoes, but even then the Nikes serve as a grounding point to indicate how much Gabriela is changing.

Objective Correlative

Terrible things happened to Gabriela when the war came to her village. Remick could have detailed them and we’d be struck by the horror without ever really getting inside Gabriela’s experience. Instead, Remick creates a correlation in Gabriela’s mind between toads and the horrible events—events that she refuses to quite remember. The reader sees her visceral reaction over and over anytime toads cross her path and in this way learns to empathize with her.

Remick builds on Gabriela’s reaction to toads throughout the story. What makes this relationship for me is when Gabriela begins remembering times of innocence that involved toads as well. The glimpse at what life was like before is heartbreaking and the tension between the dark and light memories makes both exponentially more touching.

Myths Retold

Gabriela finds safety in the North where she takes care of an ailing widow whose memory is failing. Gabriela helps her work on a list of objects and photographs and what they meant in the woman’s life. In return, La Viuda teaches Gabriela about what it means to be a woman. Though La Viuda has a somewhat colored view of the experience of womanhood, she doesn’t let her life turn her into a Miss Havisham. Instead, La Viuda intersperses myths and stories of great women with her own stories. Through tales about everyone from Helen of Troy to Xipe Totec, she helps Gabriela create an identity based on strength and womanhood as she transfers her life force to the young girl.

There are hundreds of things I could say about the reasons I loved this book—like the way Gabriela and La Viuda seamlessly slip from English to Spanish and back in their conversations, the magical realism (especially in relation to mirrors), or how in answer to La Viuda’s aging forgetfulness, Remick creates a shifting repetition that grounds the reader and also builds the narrative. What you need to know is the elegant craft reveals just the right amount of information to engage you, the reader, in telling the story.

Jack Remick can teach and he can sure as hell write. Read Gabriela and the Widow and find the things that speak to your writing. You’ll fall in love with the story and you’ll be a better writer for it. Although my work schedule doesn’t allow for weekday afternoons at Louisa’s anymore, I am grateful I can pick up Gabriela and learn from her and from Jack any old time.

Lisa Robertson Finds Poetry in Architecture

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Lisa Robertson Occasional WorkWhen I requested a review copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson, I was working as the managing editor of an architecture magazine while earning my MFA. The irony of my experience was how many architects used convoluted and turgid language to describe designs that were pared down to their purely minimal essences. The days I spent sorting through jargon like “fenestration” and “tectonics” were great training for nights spent finding the clearest way to communicate an idea in my own writing.

Essays on Art and Architecture

“We believe that the objective of architecture is to give happiness.”

A poet, Robertson uses her command of words to blend the architectural vernacular with everyday language. She writes in the persona of the Office for Soft Architecture which speaks in the first person plural about a wide range of issues that affect the urban environment from architectural style and color to invasive species.

One of the ways Robertson displays her skill with language is by pairing a simple sentence with a truly dense one:

“The Himalayan blackberry escaped. The plant’s swift rhetorical trajectory from aestheticized exotic, to naturalized species, to invasive alien, all the while concealing a spurious origin myth, displays a typically hackneyed horticultural anthropomorphism.”

At times, I found myself lost in the richness of her vocabulary, but the writing was so well crafted that I felt I still understood her meaning on some subliminal level. Just when I thought I might truly be done for, Robertson reeled me in by tying the lascivious undertones of strawberries in Jane Austen’s Emma to the Arts and Crafts Movement in British Columbia.

Some of my favorite essays in this book were commissioned to accompany art shows. I enjoyed leafing through the full-color illustrations of those shows and guessing what Robertson might have to say about them.

Seven Walks through a Changing City

“Imagine a very beautiful photograph whose emulsion is lifting and peeling from the paper. There is no longer a negative. To preserve it you must absorb this artifact through your skin, as if it were an antique cosmetic comprised of colloidal silver. You must absorb its insecurity.

The seven walks in this book are poetic journeys through a rapidly changing Vancouver. They are not meant as guidebooks. In fact, it would be impossible for an outsider to replicate the paths Robertson is describing. Instead, they impart the feeling of a city as it evolves around you. Sometimes she references architecture directly:

“Ruined factories rising into fog; their lapsed symmetries nearly gothic. The abandoned undulations of the vast mercantile storage facilities…”

Other times the walks become more emotional journeys.

“There was no window in the city that was not overtly moralistic – the roadways were illuminated and my decadence seemed to soak the asphalt so it shone.”

But the language is always evocative and it feels as though the setting is pregnant with potential stories even when Robertson is merely conveying a mood.

In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson finds poetry in the language of architecture and finds a new way to convey the experience of urban geography. It is a book architects will appreciate for the careful consideration of form and context and writers will appreciate for the plasticity of Robertson’s language.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.