The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-04-21)

20 The New York Review

she can write, which is to say poetry

in English— seems, at the end of this

poem, no more than a diversionary tac-

tic. And the danger inherent in such tac-

tics is that they become our lives.

How can a poet escape this bind? One

answer might be to go home. But the

poems in Sharif’s new book acknowledge

the impossibility of satisfying diasporic

nostalgia. There is a poem in Customs

called “Learning Persian” whose every

line is simply a phonetic transliteration

of a Farsi word that is borrowed from

a European language (“deek- tah- tor,”

“fahn- te- zi”): the point, I take it, is

that those who look to a mother tongue

or a nation of origin with a longing for

“home” are likely to find that empire has

gotten there first, has always preceded

one’s own fantasy.

“No crueler word than return,”

writes Sharif in “Without Which,” one

of the extraordinary long poems that

conclude the book. “No greater lie. //

The gates may open but to return./

More gates were built inside.” Here is

how that poem begins:

]]

I have long loved what one can

carry.

I have long left all that can be left

behind in the burning cities and

lost

even loss— not cared much

or learned to. I turned and looked

and not even salt did I become.

]]

Those right square brackets recur three

times per page throughout the poem’s

twenty pages, sometimes separating

one group of stanzas from another,

as though to indicate a section break,

sometimes marking an otherwise blank

page. The effect is striking and disori-

enting: the brackets suggest the kind of

editorial intervention that one sees in

modern editions of ancient texts, to in-

dicate gaps in the record, places where

something now irrecoverable once

stood. That they are only right brackets

suggests a cordoning off of the past, a

paring away of the historical self. They

show us, in other words, what it looks

like to have “lost//even loss.”

“Without Which” is a poem about liv-

ing a life organized around the aware-

ness of such loss. “Some days,” Sharif

writes, near poem’s end, “I am almost

happy having never/lived there.” Other

days bring other feelings:

Would you have knocked for me?

I ask the neighbor.

I have been, he said.

Then I felt his knocking

]]

inside my chest.

This is followed by a page and a half of

blank space, with four instances of the

doubled brackets, a replication of the

knocking pulse just described, the echo

of eros unfulfilled and retrospectively

imagined, the sound in your head after

you suddenly stop running. Desire re-

mains, in the poem, unmet; the life that

might otherwise have been recedes

from view.

The book’s final poem, “An Other-

wise,” weaves together lyric interiority

and political demystification in a way

that feels altogether new. The bones

of narrative— a story of return and

disappointment— are still here:

When I went

I found nothing.

It died there: desire.

All fantasy

of return.

Before arriving at that story, though, the

poem begins in prose with an older his-

tory and a different figure at its center:

Downwind from a British Petro-

leum refinery, my mother is remov-

ing the books she was ordered to

remove from the school library.

Russians, mostly. Gorky’s Mother

among them. The Shah is coming

to tour the school. It is winter.

Here is the “relational past,” at a scale

both global and familial: the Western

claims to Iranian oil, the royalist anx-

iety about anti- capitalist influence,

the persistence of the maternal figure,

even in the face of attempts to expunge

that figure from the record. The po-

et’s mother and her classmates await

the Shah’s arrival and do what their

teacher tells them to do: “Wave, girls,

the teacher says. // My mother, waving.”

How, though, to read the mother’s

wave, how to respond to its recurring

gesture? On the one hand, a wave is

a gesture of accommodation, not al-

together unlike the noxious accom-

modations cataloged in “The Master’s

House.” But, on the other hand, Sharif

sees behind her mother’s wave a revo-

lutionary future: in the minds of those

waving girls, she writes, the Shah might

have seen, had he cared to look, “rifles

pointed at him.”

Early in the poem, Sharif recounts

a memory of riding in her parents’ car

and hearing a tape recording of “an

ancient poem sung and filled/with cy-

presses, their upright/windscreen for

what must be grown.” In Persian po-

etry, the cypress frequently signifies the

height and grace of the beloved, but it is

also associated with death and mourn-

ing. Both senses are present here. The

mother and daughter who have lived

these last decades in the United States

share a set of memories and a longing

for their source:

What did you leave behind?

We answered:

A pool

lined

with evergreens,

needles falling

into water,

its floor

painted milky

jade....

We wanted

to be asked

of these things.

To tell of them

was to live

again.

Here is neither the articulation of a

naive desire to return home nor a self-

effacing attempt to shed one’s attach-

ment to the past. The old home is no

longer there, but in its place grief—

intimate knowledge of an irrecoverably

lost world— survives. The ancient poem

that was played during childhood car

rides intertwines with a shared memory

and marks, much later, a path to follow:

I began to write of cypresses.

And of small and sharp stone.

And I, on this path, a wooden

handle in my palm, and a blade

at the end of it.

And beyond, their windscreen,

the unseen.

I knew not the poem, only the

weather.

I knew not the listening, only this

landscape, its one clear chan-

nel.

The metal in my teeth caught its

frequency.

The iron shavings of my blood

pulled toward this otherwise.

This is a poet discovering a new

kind of power. Without knowing what

it means— or where or when or even

whether it exists— Sharif writes the

scene she has in mind. That faith in

lyric will not open the door to a lost

world, but neither does it condemn the

poet to Mill’s “solitary cell.” The poem

becomes a place where the teenage

girl whose school the Shah once vis-

ited and the daughter of that girl, the

poet we now read, can meet. A place

from which the world to come might be

found.

An untitled poem precedes “An Oth-

erwise.” It takes the form of a dialogue,

perhaps between mother and daughter,

though that isn’t specified:

Does yours have a landscape?

— Yes.

Because mine has a landscape.

— It is a path of small and sharp

stone and it is lined with cy-

presses.

And are there other paths that you

are aware of?

— One for each of us.

And are you waving?

— We will never see each other.

And are you aware of the waving?

I haven’t been able to stop thinking of

this page since I first read it. Are these

two voices each describing the life they

might otherwise have lived? Memory

puts us on solitary paths. We feel those

paths pull apart in the last three lines,

in which the voices don’t quite address

each other. But Sharif has shown that

memory isn’t merely personal, and that

imagination isn’t merely fantasy. To

read this book is to be made aware of

the waving. Q

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