Solmaz Sharif's "He, Too"

Thoughts on possibility and poetry.

He, Too

Returning to the US, he asks
my occupation. Teacher.

What do you teach?
Poetry.

I hate poetry, the officer says,
I only like writing
where you can make an argument.

Anything he asks, I must answer.
This he likes, too.

I don’t tell him
he will be in a poem
where the argument will be

anti-American.

I place him here, puffy,
pink, ringed in plexi, pleased

with his own wit
and spittle. Saving the argument
I am let in

I am let in until


from Customs (Graywolf, 2022)

---

I have been thinking about this poem all week. I remember when I first read it, years ago, as immigration bans swept across the global landscape. And I’ve been sitting with it open in its own tab on my laptop this week, looking at it from time to time, reading it, reading it again, wondering about that final line: I am let in until, and how it ends without ending.

The word until is made up of two syllables that, taken literally, mean the same thing. I like Google’s little aside when you search up the etymology. Almost cheekily, it says: the sense thus duplicated, which is a gorgeous turn of phrase. Another online etymology dictionary simply says: the two syllables have the same meaning.

And what does until mean? It has a kind of dependency. It acknowledges dependency. In the poem, the speaker is or is not let in (into the country, into someone’s vision, into someone’s recognition or out of it) until what? Until, I imagine, something happens that refuses that acknowledgment or admission again. Or until, perhaps, that other possible world emerges, where people don’t have to be let in, where the door is open — where something is shared, and where people are seen and acknowledged and empowered as they are.

It’s that world that I am thinking of this week. It has been a brutal week. I tested positive for Covid a few days ago, and have mostly been sitting at home, trying to lesson plan for future weeks as I follow the news in the wake of the horrible attack on Israel and during the retaliatory campaign (which is, in essence, an escalation of an ongoing, sixteen-years-long siege) in which Israel has dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

For what it’s worth, I have found a great deal of worthwhile perspective this week from the progressive magazine Jewish Currents, a magazine I’ve admired not just for its criticism, but also for its poetry (the brilliant Claire Schwartz edits the section there). This piece provides an extensive primer on all that has happened. This piece details why what is happening in Gaza is an example of genocide. This piece offers perspectives from Palestinians in the West Bank. And this searing and sorrow-yet-hope-filled piece, by editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, articulates the profound grief that has arisen in these weeks, a grief rooted in a desire for imaginative possibilities. In it, Angel writes:

I am reminding myself that it was from Palestinians, many of them writing and speaking in these pages, that I learned to think of Palestine as a site of possibility—a place where the very idea of the nation-state, which has so harmed both peoples, could be remade or destroyed entirely. And it was Palestinians who opened my thinking to multiple visions of sharing the land. On the left, I hope we do not mistake the inevitability of the violence for an inescapable limit on our work or the quality of our thought. Even if our dreams for better have failed, they must accompany us through this moment to the other side.

Dreams and possibility — they seem on the other side of the specific moment that today’s poem depicts:

What do you teach?
Poetry.

I hate poetry, the officer says,
I only like writing
where you can make an argument.

Anything he asks, I must answer.
This he likes, too.

One stunning aspect of Sharif’s work is the way in which she somehow manages to make today’s poem at once its own thing — the opposite, perhaps of argument — and also an argument. The poem — by the sheer specificity of its description — makes the “anti-American” argument that its speaker claims, with the customs officer at the heart of it. And then, notice too that Sharif makes such an argument using the poetry of language:

I place him here, puffy,
pink, ringed in plexi, pleased

with his own wit
and spittle.

The four p’s pop against each other; the sharp terseness of wit echoes in spittle (and then again in until). It’s an argument of sounds and details and repetitions and echoes — the stuff of poetry. And maybe that’s part of the beauty of this poem (if one could say that there is beauty in it) — it demonstrates that poetry can do so much, that it can make an argument if it chooses to, and that, even in making an argument, it can resist the very simplistic idea of argument that is often propagated in Western culture, and the egotistical and individualistic desires that a life rooted in the premise that someone must be wrong can bring about in a person.

I can’t stop thinking of this attitude that Sharif captures so well:

I hate poetry, the officer says,
I only like writing
where you can make an argument.

This week, I deleted Instagram from my phone for a little bit, not so much because of the news, but because of the discourse — though perhaps that’s too kind of a word — I witnessed in comments and elsewhere. There’s a tendency, exacerbated in moments of conflict, for people to immediately insist on other people’s wrongness, to resist the possibility (there’s that word again) that there might be something shared in a given moment, or something able to be offered. To resist, too, self-reflection — admitting one’s own wrongness, or whatever learning we each have left to do. But I have also, this week, been reminded of poetry’s possibility. I have witnessed poetry organizations take the lead in movements of solidarity with the people of Palestine, and I have witnessed writers demanding material change as forms of protest against colonialism, a demand I have also signed and joined. It is fascinating that this character in Sharif’s poem makes so bold a claim about poetry; it is fascinating because poetry has always, for me, been a place where language and play and politics and joy and sorrow have collided, a place where I have learned — more than I have from any one-dimensional argument — about the world, and those who live in it.

I think of someone like Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, whose work I wrote about not long ago, and how her poems capture a way of existing that is multi-dimensional, full of possibility at the same time as it is full of grief. All of that is here, in her short poem, “My Laugh,” translated by Fady Joudah:

I’m exhausted from smuggling my laugh out of my psychology,
smuggling my laugh out of the fates of those I love,
out of videos of slaughtered children
and children who will be kidnapped
from their magical smiles tomorrow,
exhausted from smuggling my laugh
out of sins, ugly secrets,
and in ripped stockings: my jarring laugh
that breaks my ribs
and gashes public decency.

Or I think of Wendell Berry, the poet-pacifist-naturalist who reminds me always of the underlying narratives of communality and sustainability and care that the world offers us, if only we care enough to look. The poet-pacifist-naturalist who, upon looking at two horses laying side by side, wrote:

They are beautiful in the light
and in the warmth happy. Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded 
within the world. It is 
the way the world is sometimes.

Or I think of Anna Swir, who worked as a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising, and her poem “White Wedding Slippers,” translated by Czeslaw Milosz. This poem, short and brutal as it is — how does it not, by virtue of the existence and experience that prompted it, and the existence and experience that wrote it, argue toward a different world?

At night
my mother opened a chest and took out
her white silk wedding slippers.
Then she daubed them
a long time with ink.

Early in the morning
she went in those slippers
to the street
to line up for bread.
It was ten degrees,
she stood
for three hours in the street.

They were handing out
one quarter of a loaf per person.

Poetry has often, for me, made the arguments I didn’t know were possible. It has also often pointed me toward the possibility that exists at the end of argument. It has reminded me of the pain and rage that occurs when what we argue about feels wildly wrong to argue about — like the worth of lives, or the shared humanness we collectively experience. Poetry redirects my gaze. It affirms my imagination. It often makes witness possible, and it certainly models the kind of attention that I strive to enact, the attention that refuses generalization, the attention that communicates, through language, a kind of care.

The kind of argument that, I imagine, the character in Sharif’s poem is talking about is a kind of argument borne from the language handed down to us from people in positions of power. Ceremony, process, bureaucracy — the language of such things obfuscates the humanness at the heart of any conflict, any moment of attention. A hospital is bombed, and we listen to powerful people argue about who did it, rather than think — with care — about the grief of those affected and the long history of subjugation and oppression that set up the conditions for such an atrocity to occur. When the care-filled thinking of that history is neglected in favor of something so process-oriented, it can make violence feel, in its aftermath, like something so casually bureaucratic, so simply a way for us to argue about blame.

Art offers a different approach to thinking. In a post detailing a reading and conversation with Min Jin Lee that had to be relocated after it was cancelled by the 92Y, Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote:

I spoke about my book, yes, but also about how art is silenced in times of war and division because some people only want to see the world as us vs. them. But art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time.

The language of politics does not do this kind of work of openness. The language of politics is often extremely simplified, and it sadly borrows a tool from poetry (in the form of metaphor, especially; think of all the military language that persists through politics and life) to make its simplified case. Issues are made to have only two sides. And nuance, too, is simplified. We hear things like more than one thing can be true, which doesn’t really mean anything; it’s a statement about nuance that offers no nuance. We hear things like well, it’s complex, without anyone naming the complexity, which is probably because whatever is being discussed has less to do with complexity than personal discomfort.

These kinds of arguments, and this kind of overly and overtly simplified language — they make it easier for oppressive structures of power to exist, structures that we live within and benefit from everyday. They make it easier for such structures to exist because they make it harder to doubt, to question, and to imagine; they reduce such possibilities. And the possibilities afforded to us by doubting and questioning and imagining (these, too: some arguments that poetry makes) are radical and poetic in scope.

I am reminded of how, over a decade ago, I worked for two summers at Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of so many veterans. At the time, I was in college, still forming a sense of my politics. There, the dead were buried to exact specifications, the grass trimmed to a certain height. All of it was for ceremony, yes, and reverence, yes, but also to blur whatever confusion or dissonance might arise upon walking through those grounds. I spent so much time there. And it worked. It was hard, while there, to ask myself why? To wonder about the purpose of the dead. Of what they died for, or if they had to. Those are questions I thought about later, when I wasn’t struck by the symmetry of the landscape, so meticulously designed. But now, thinking about such symmetry, those questions arise. They arise all the time.

I think of how that cemetery began as Mary and Robert E. Lee’s rose garden. Strange fact, isn’t it? While Lee was gone, fighting for the South, Union soldiers came and dug up the flowers and buried the dead in the place of roses. I think, too, of how, when American-led troops invaded Iraq, they rolled tanks over the graves of Wadi-Al-Salam, the largest cemetery in the world, known as the “Valley of Peace.” Other troops would use headstones as shields, catacombs as trenches. And now, because of near-constant war and conflict, burial plots are running out in a cemetery that stretches six miles across the land. The dead in the place of roses. Tanks rolling over graves. Beauty that hides atrocity under the veil of ceremony. This is the world underneath the simplified world, underneath the generalized language. But it is the world; it’s our world.

I wonder if the speaker in Sharif’s poem resists poetry not because it doesn’t make an argument, but because it does. I wonder if the speaker in Sharif’s poem resists poetry because of what it argues towards. Poetry, I think, often complicates us back into ourselves, into what we share together, rather than what we are capable of enjoying apart. And it complicates us, too, back into the mess those complications make of us, those places where we have to wrestle with doubt and questioning, and where we have to try to take stands amidst it all.

In reading Claire Schwartz’s review of Sharif’s book, I was pointed toward an interview with Alina Stefanescu where Sharif states:

I point to the intolerable, and I name it as intolerable. And the idea is to keep doing that until we can’t take it anymore and we all agree we must change it. The revolution is not in the poem itself, but it makes it inevitable. 

There’s that until again. I think again of the ending of today’s poem, how it might say: I am let in until I can’t take it anymore. And I think of that refusal, itself an argument, and how it might lead to change. The world the speaker is let into in today’s poem is a world of overt simplification, violence, bureaucracy, and so much more. And so I imagine the speaker refusing that world. I imagine all of us doing the same.

I’m thinking of that phrase — the sense thus duplicated, and how the word until is made up of two syllables that mean, essentially, the same thing. And I’m thinking of the word until, how it offers a conditional dependency that is at once hopeful and restrictive. You can’t come in until you show your ID: restrictive. We will keep building and naming and learning and holding until the radically possible imaginary emerges: hopeful. There’s something here of worth, isn’t there? I will keep thinking about it and paying attention to it and doing something about it until —

---

A Note:

If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.