destroyed during the World War only to be
rebuilt on top of the ruins left in the war’s
wake—just as she is trying to rebuild her
own life on the ruins of her family’s grief.
Her first task upon arriving is to repaint the
apartment door, leaving it crisp and white to
focus her attention on the white she plans to
study while alone in her new environs—all
blanketed in snow, as the reader is to assume
that the clime is an element of her choice.
She never admits to running away from her
home, but the book pulsates with her need
for distance as she tries to understand that
which cannot be understood.
The book’s structure mimics her mind-
set. The fragments feel more like little white
islands that come together into an archipel-
ago that can only coalesce into oneness after
each island has been visited. She is simulta-
neously whole and fragmented, split apart
by the deaths of her siblings before her birth
and the ones she has physical reminders of,
such as the bones of her mother burned into
ash. The mother’s grief and Kang’s grief for
her mother intertwine as Kang attempts to
place herself in the hours of her onni’s brief
life. Kang imagines opening eyes that can-
not see and hearing their mother’s litany to
keep the baby alive, one that the sister would
not have the capacity to understand as lan-
guage would have been inaccessible to her:
“Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.”
The White Book is memoir but also
memorial for all the women Kang did and
did not know—and for herself and what shelost even though she never even knew what
could have been.
Colleen Lutz Clemens
Kutztown UniversityNgũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Minutes of Glory
and Other StoriesNew York. New Press. 2019. 224 pages.While few writers hold their fingers against
the pulse of postcolonialism, Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o has charted its very heartbeat.
Quickly ascending to the forefront of Afri-
can literature throughout the late twen-
tieth century, novels such as A Grain of
Wheat and Petals of Blood solidified Ngũgĩ’sBooks in Review
Mahtem Shiferraw
Your Body Is War
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press.
- 90 pages.
Embattled Representative Ilhan Omar
recently said of herself and her fellow fresh-
man congresswomen of color, “We are not
there to be quiet. We are not there to be
invisible.” The same may be said of Ethio-
pian/Eritrean American poet Mahtem Shi-
ferraw’s sophomore collection, Your Body Is
Wa r. The award-winning poet’s new volume
is a radical act of storytelling, of community,
and, most crucially, of survival. With dis-
tilled clarity and surprising ease, Shiferraw
turns her considerable poetic gifts to the
forbidden topics of gendered violence and
the trauma of war.
An early poem, “The Art of Invisibility,”
opens a powerful conversation about the
toll of sexual violence that Shiferraw will
continue throughout the collection. “So I
have mastered / the art of being invisible,
/ so breathless, if I opened my mouth /
only clouds would come out, // and if you
touched my flesh / it is not there, it is some-
where further / safe behind the heads of
eucalyptus trees, behind mothers, behind
women // who have eyes even in the back of
/ their heads.” Violence was meant to erase
the poet, but in unforgettable lines Shifer-
raw redraws not just herself but a commu-
nity of women standing sentinel beside her,
bound together by their common wounds.“The Yellow Woman” uses restrained
language as arresting as its sister poem,
“The Art of Invisibility,” to give a final
answer to the world that would unmake the
poet: “I am yellow, / I have yellow in me //
and it does not / let me die.” Short, sharp
stanzas lay bare the will to survive, but the
structure also builds corridors of space and
light for readers to catch their breath while
remaining immersed in the power and pain
in this poem.
Sexual violence is concentric to war—the
two cannot be parsed—but in this collec-
tion, Shiferraw gives war its own vocabulary.
War is inheritance passed on unwillingly.
War is a haunting of “papier-mâché” ghosts
that come in the night, in the daylight hours.
War is Asmara and also America, for gen-
der-based violence pervades both there and
here. But above all, war is a force that shat-
ters the self. In “Death by Trains,” Shiferraw
grapples with the contrary impulses of a
fragmented personhood: “I want to say, / I
need accomplices / to hold her down; // she
is unafraid // of things moving, things stag-
nant, things poised, / things sharp, things
enveloping, things tall, / things suffocating,
things undead, things numb. // I am afraid
/ of everything.”MAHTEM SHIFERRAW80 W LT SUMMER 2019