In our “For Your Consideration” column, MTC editors, writers, and readers point your attention to works of art and cultural texts that may have dropped out of the 36-hour discourse cycle, but we consider worthy of your attention and consideration. Here, Thomas Higgins reviews three recent poetry collections that meditate on loss, homeland, and the shape of memory.
A few months ago, I heard an award-winning poet explain that poetry is essentially good for making sense of two things: death and other people. At the time I was reading a few dynamic collections by young, diasporic poets displaced from their homelands for various reasons—genocide, economic stagnation, political instability—and who had turned to poetry to make sense of it all. In Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise (Knopf, 2024), Weijia Pan’s Motherlands (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), the poet reckons with personal and collective loss. What I am most struck by is their way of crafting a poetry of people and of place that positions itself as a kind of nostalgic elegy for what is already gone as well as what is in the process of being lost. This suspended state of loss, I believe, is what sets these collections apart. What should we make of poetry that attempts to speak for those who live with death each day? How can poetry mourn for the living as well as for the dead, or inhabit a home that no longer exists? Faced with loss, each of these poets articulate how poetry today can respond to a world in crisis, with language that is equally interested in self-expression and survival. Whereas Abu Toha conflates subjecthood and objecthood to craft a hybrid poetry that blends autobiography with reportage, Pan metaphorizes translation to refract collective history through the lens of a fragmented life, and Tolase’s droll tone captures the pervasiveness of history and political corruption in everyday life. Their art, though often beautiful, is not the byproduct of leisure and privileged contemplation. It gives to the reader as much as it asks in return.
Abu Toha’s sophomore collection, Forest of Noise, was published in the second year of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, following his Palestinian family’s forced evacuation and Toha’s own detention by Israeli forces, where he was beaten and hospitalized before being released. The collection moves across time and perspective in clear, undeniable language charged by the poet’s lifelong proximity to violence and death. His poems are forged in the fires of loss. In a sequence titled “Gaza Notebook (2021—2023)”, for example, Abu Toha personifies places and objects in a cityscape empty of human life:
In the absence of those who once gave them function, and therefore meaning, the objects of everyday life retain an aspect of that missing humanity; they become memorials. What’s missing is amplified—hands making meals, hanging laundry, language in brackets, a silence that wants to be spoken. But then even this longing is destroyed: “stones of house after explosion / get amnesia.” In the earlier scene, the abandoned house retains something of its past, whereas the remains of a destroyed house lose their memory of the structure they once supported. As in all of Abu Toha’s poetry, the loss of home is inextricable from the ongoing loss of homeland experienced by the Palestinian people.
This concept of homeland as dream or distant memory is constant in Abu Toha’s poetic oeuvre. In “My Grandfather’s Well,” he envisions the ghost of his grandfather still standing by a well near his home, refusing to abandon it after his forced removal during the Nakba or even after his own death. Elsewhere, in a poem titled “Palestinian Village,” Abu Toha offers a vision of homeland as a place that carries history, a village where “you can chock / the wheels of your vegetable cart / with a stone your grandfather once used / to crush thyme.” Like the disappeared village, communal acts, such as making “tea with sage or mint” to share with neighbors, are obsolete in a world where existence is reduced to bare survival. These poems are an incomplete record of an ongoing genocide, a testament to life under annihilation.
This too, however, comes at a cost: in “Two Watches,” he writes about feelings of guilt as a refugee living in the United States. Wearing two wristwatches, “one set to the local time in New York, / the other to Gaza’s,” he finds himself uneasy with his relative safety, the contemporaneity of happiness and suffering. Art is no replacement for life. The poem concludes, “He is happy to have time, a watch that works. / He is happy to have time.” For Abu Toha, a survivor of genocide who has witnessed countless loved ones die, the sense of living on borrowed time subtends the poetry. How, then, could a different poet tell us something about the experience of loss, one whose ability to return home, though fraught in its own way, is not a question of survival but of something else entirely?
Weijia Pan is another diasporic poet whose fragmented, minimalist narratives offer us another way to understand how poetry can reckon with loss. In a recent interview with the Houston Asian American Archive, Pan reflected on the experience of returning to his native city of Shanghai. He explains that though he still sees the city as home, he can only spend at most two months there at a time before he begins to feel like he doesn’t belong anymore. Pan explores this conception of a homeland as a container of childhood memory in his prize-winning debut collection, Motherlands. In “February: A Dictionary of History, Drinks, War, Culture, and Coronavirus,” a poem in tercets that mimics a Chinese-to-English dictionary and a sequence of diary entries, Pan begins with a Chinese character. “家乡 : two tombstones on the same mound; hometown; home is where the heart is / after death; the way memory emerges in horror at night when phosphorus / fire flickers; tombstones are flintstones; those who refused to talk talk silently.” Pan compares the silence of the dead to the silence of those living through the Chinese media crackdowns of early 2020, emphasizing the speaker’s sense of helplessness as he watches from a distance. This in-between space, between speaker and home, the living and the dead, is itself amplified by the slipperiness of translation. The concluding stanza reads: “记忆 : every spring; cutting red paper, calligraphing the door; visiting relatives / to compare dumplings, jobs, children; much a-flourish; life moves on; the thing is, / I couldn’t make it back to China; I built a shrine for my hometown; I live in that light.” Unable to visit his family, his home, the poet writes a poem that disguises itself not only as a translation, but as a shrine. Here and elsewhere in Motherlands, the process of translation – Chinese into English; memory and experience into poetry – offers a fascinating metaphor for what is lost in moving from one language or place to another. Where Pan succeeds most is in the story half-told, the fragmented poem that says as much in silence as it ever could in words.
This knack for fragmentation is on full display in “Faces,” the collection’s virtuosic concluding sequence in which Pan imagines his grandfather as “an ex-guerrilla of the Malayan Communist Party.” In a collection teeming with nostalgia, it is fitting that he should end with a dramatization of return, a sort of fragmented, twentieth-century retelling of the story of Odysseus. Even the grandfather’s long-delayed homecoming is fraught, echoing Pan’s sense of homeland as a place imbued with the passage of time and memory. “How,” he asks, “does a nation face its compatriots?” What does it owe, if anything, to those who return from exile to face a home that has changed, a people that no longer recognize the returnee’s “scarred face.” Is the outsider – the exile, the prisoner of war, the immigrant – a part of the nation from which he is absent, to which he at long last returns? Its brokenness not only speaks to a breakdown in relations between members of a family, but leaves the poem itself incomplete, its narrative unresolved. For this complex, many-layered poem to conclude with an equally fraught, inconclusive image is a testament to the Pan’s restraint. Does the returnee symbolize the missing fragment, or is it a gap that can never be filled? Like Louise Glück, who selected Motherlands for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Pan thrives on silences and fragments, preferring a poetry of the unresolved.
Although he is similarly devoted to the unresolved, Ajibola Tolase presents a more outwardly autobiographical speaker whose conversational tone both masks and reveals the pain of someone reckoning with the burden and gift of survival. In 2000 Blacks, his Cave Canem Prize-winning debut, Tolase, like Abu Toha and Pan, explores themes of longing and distance and pays particular attention to the plight of the refugee. Early on in 2000 Blacks, the title of which comes from a Fela Kuti and Roy Ayers song whose lyrics express a millenarian dream of Pan-African freedom, Tolase confronts the continued struggle toward this utopian vision. In “Refuge Sonnets,” a powerful, plainspoken sequence in which Tolase’s sense of irony shines without straining, he writes “They want / to ask how I arrived here, and if it’s true I brought desert sand / with me, but they are afraid I don’t speak clearly or they are afraid / I’ll ask the same of them. ‘Who is your father? What did he do?’” Tolase turns language against the interrogator, saying what too often remains unspoken in cross-cultural exchange between those from within the imperial center and those from without. Home for Tolase is not only a place, but a history of conquest and dispersal, of those who have power and those who have it wielded against them. However, as a poet with a complicated relationship with Nigeria, Tolase is averse to celebrate home in a nationalistic sense: “There is a Gambian I ran into / who was celebrating the Independence Day of a nation he was exiled / from—until I ruined it when I mentioned our countries are mapped / by colonial instincts.” History infects this poem as it does the whole sonnet crown, a form that traditionally consists in a sequence of sonnets wherein the last line of the preceding poem is repeated as the first in the next. Ending on the first line of the sequence, the final sonnet is meant to bring us back to where we started. Tolase begins each sonnet in his crown with a line that echoes what came before without repeating it word for word, so that what is retained from one sonnet to the next gives a sense of how history repeats itself, changing its face but refusing to disappear completely.
For Tolase, like Abu Toha and Pan, history is more than an archive of outdated maps and colonial decrees. It is also something personal, as intimate as memory or a recipe passed down from one generation to the next. In “Midwest in the Spring,” the poet explores the slippages in time and space which keep him connected to the people and place that he came from. In the world of the poem, the serendipitous act of making a grandmother’s recipe for bean soup, one “she swore is best in the / wet season,” on the day of her death during a rainy season far away from home enacts the impossible, a homecoming which reunites the dead with the living. Like Abu Toha’s sage or mint tea that can’t be shared, like Pan’s broken bowl, Tolase’s lonely bowl of soup is a touchstone in the collection, a simple image that stays with the reader as a symbol of loss and the desire to bring something back. For Tolase, however, the desire to return home is complicated by the knowledge of why he left. Memories of violence and the experience of life under oppressive systems of power permeate 2000 Blacks—men raid a house with guns that bear the insignia of the Nigerian police force; executives escape traffic on their boats; a father whips his son and leaves his family, but the son still loves him and seeks not to forgive but to “[u]nderstand what he left behind.” This searching is at the heart of Tolase’s brilliant debut, which journeys through hope and despair to discover a less perfect, more essential truth. Alluding to Kuti’s song, he recalls the year 2000 in “New Year Problem,” in which he reflects on the hopes and fears surrounding the new millenium as well as the recent horrors of the twentieth century: “I am uninterested in armies, / bombings, and medals but the soldier who will die before / he fires his rifle; and the athlete rendered invalid before / the Olympic games.” Rather than the events which nations depend on for power, Tolase is fascinated with individuals, the solitary losses which accumulate as they shape or destroy peoples’ lives.
While death is a constant presence in many of these poems, what they are ultimately concerned with is life – what it is and how to sustain it. Theirs is a poetry of survival and perseverance that refuses to accept things as they are, a poetry that confronts and challenges its readers to look at their own lives. How will we live after poems like this? How, if we write, will we write in a way that responds to the offerings they have made?
Thomas Higgins is a writer whose poetry and reviews have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Queens with his partner and two large cats.
Article photo: An illustration from Journey from Venice to Palestine, Mount Sinai and Egypt (ca. 1467) via Public Domain Review