Not too long ago, I attended a reading and panel discussion about poetry and violence with Cynthia Dewi Oka, Sevé Torres, Vanessa Mártir & Rajiv Mohabir at Bluestockings–a bookstore about which, if you live in New York and you don’t know it, you should make it your business to find out. Cynthia–whose book, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water you should also definitely know about (I reviewed it here)–introduced the panel by talking in part about the bravery of her co-panelists’ work, each of which takes on in very powerful ways intimate and political violence. During the Q&A, I pushed back at that characterization, not because I think it is untrue, but because I think that courage(ous) and brave(ry) are words that get tossed around very easily, sometimes way too easily, when we talk about the qualities we see in writing and writers whom we admire. How, I wanted to know, did each panelist think her or his work earned the label courageous?

I wish I’d been able to record their answers, because they were moving and persuasive. The one element they all had in common was to claim the courage it takes to write against one’s own invisibility–racial, ethnic, national, gendered, sexual, religious, personal–especially in situations where that visibility is actively sought by others. Dewi Oka gave this thought its most extreme expression when she talked about how, after surviving a particularly brutal and violent attempted murder, she had come to love poetry–as a way of never being silent in the face of violence–more than her life. I think that’s more or less a direct quote, and while it is a statement worth unpacking quite a bit further, for my purposes here, I want to leave it unexamined as a simple assertion of what it means to write against one’s own invisibility.

As a survivor of sexual violence whose art is largely animated by that experience, I understand that when people call me courageous for having written, they mean some version of the answer those panelists gave, and I do not fundamentally disagree with them. Why, then, does it make me cringe? Because I am very aware of how little danger I am actually in. Even when I write about antisemitism–the violence and depredations of which I have also experienced–and I am far more likely now to be a target of antisemitic than of sexual violence, the fact is that I write and publish and give readings in an environment where my safety is if not 100% guaranteed, then certainly secure enough that I can almost entirely take it for granted.

This is not to deny the possibility of violence against me, or that there are places in my own country, my own state, even my own city where that violence is more likely to happen. It is simply to acknowledge that, right now, no one is systematically employing violence, implicit or explicit, literal or figurative, to silence me, to render me invisible; and that makes me suspicious when people use the word courage as praise for my work and of the agenda that motivates its use. In Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Louise Gluck articulates this suspicion for me:

Poets [in the United States] have something to gain by giving currency to the idea of courage.… That courage animates a body of work seems, as an idea, immensely attractive. It dignifies the materials, infusing them with qualities of urgency and danger. In the ensuing confrontation, the poet becomes Perseus slaying Medusa. Equally appealing is unconscious, helpless courage: Cassandra who cannot help but see. This alternative carries the additional benefit of suggesting that truth and vision are costly, their purchase secured by sacrifice or loss. The glamor of these, and related, images stimulates the aspiring visionary, who need simply reproduce the outward sign to invoke the spiritual condition: in this instance, need simply arrange to have paid. (23–4)

Earlier in the essay, Gluck points out that the term “courage” is, in her experience, “much more likely to be used…by poets themselves than by critics,” and she suggests here that there is a certain amount of self-interest, if not self-aggrandizement, in one poet calling a fellow poet’s work courageous. After all, if having a vision and speaking the truth of it is enough, then all poets everywhere are to some degree either Perseus or Cassandra, and if everyone’s work exhibits that kind of courage, then courage as a descriptor, as praise, becomes relatively meaningless. Gluck goes on:

In its local use, the term “courage” responds to poetic materials felt to be personal: in so doing, it concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech. Its obligation as analysis is to suggest analogues for exile and death: to name what is at risk. (24)

I am thinking in particular of the most recent time when someone called my work courageous. I read “Working the Dotted Line” a poem from my book, The Silence of Men. The poem is about the first time I used a condom, which also happened  to be the first time I had sex with a woman who was a virgin, and how awkward it was, how difficult it was for me to deal with the fact that the sex would bring her, at least at first, some pain, and how ashamed I was that I’d had no idea if there was a way for us to have sex so that she wouldn’t feel pain. (The poem is too long to quote in the post, but you can read it here.) After the reading, a woman came up to thank me for that poem, saying it was very brave and that it had made her think of her own first time. She laughed knowingly with the friend who was with her and walked away.

Where, I asked myself, was the risk for me in reading that poem? Maybe you could argue that because the poem implicitly disavows a certain kind of male stereotype about having sex with a virgin that I risked being seen, by some people, as less than a man, but so what? Compared–and now I’ve gotten to what started me thinking about this topic in the first place–compared to the risk that some women in Afghanistan take to write their poems, to read them before an audience, to share them with the world, whatever courage it might have taken for me to read what I read is as nothing. The article, called “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry,” was written by Eliza Griswold, and it tells the story of some of those women.

“I can’t say any poems in front of my brothers,” [Meena, one of the women the article is about] said. Love poems would be seen by them as proof of an illicit relationship, for which [she] could be beaten or even killed.

And then a little later, about another woman:

Rahila was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set herself on fire.

Some years ago, the poet Nadia Anjuman was killed because she wrote poetry.

Every time I hear stories like these, I ask myself whether I would have that kind of courage. Would I, given a similarly oppressive circumstance, risk death to say what I had to say? And every time I am confronted with the same answer: I’d like to think so, but I just don’t know. It’s an honest answer, one I am not embarrassed to give, but it does make me wary when people call me or my work, or any American writer’s work, courageous. I want to know what their agenda is and whether it does justice to the courage and bravery of writers like these women poets of Afghanistan.

Do The Latter

When Abolqasem Hamadani
left Hamadan on a sudden journey,
he came upon a crowd of people
gathered outside an idol’s temple.
On a fire, an oil-filled cauldron
bubbled like a windswept ocean.
Some minutes passed and then a Christian
entered and bowed before the idol.
When he stood, they asked him this: “Humble
servant, what are you to God?”
“A slave,” he answered. They responded,
“Then quickly make your offering.”
He did and left, like smoke rising.
Another person did the same,
then another, and ten more came,
and each was similarly dismissed.
At last, a man who could’ve passed
for dead, shriveled and weak, pale,
emaciated, lean, feeble—
he was a walking shadow. They asked,
“And what are you? A man, a corpse,
or both?” He said, “I am a piece
of skin. I love my God.” At this
they told him, “Sit down.” He did, at ease
on the golden throne they showed him. Then,
they carried over the boiling cauldron
and poured the oil onto his head.
The man’s skin melted from the heat;
his skull landed at his feet.
When it had been removed, they set
the rest of him ablaze. “These ashes,”
they said, “cure every pain there is.”

The shaikh observed this from a distance,
and when they finished ran at once
to ponder what he’d seen. “You fool,”
he said to himself, “that Christian, full
with false love, gave his life to it.
If you’re truly an initiate,
for love of your God do the same.
Otherwise, go make your home
with catamites. If you are sure
of your love for God, then choose: abjure
your life or forsake your faith. The former
you have not done; so do the latter.”

I’ve heard that one day Izrail,
consumer of souls, entered the hall
where Solomon reigned. Seated there
was a young man. God’s soul collector
glanced quickly at the young man’s face,
turned around and left the palace.
Terrified, the young man ran
to Solomon for help. “You can,
I know, command the clouds. Choose one
to carry me away from here.
Death has sickened me with fear.”
Solomon did as the man asked.
A cloud carried him from Fars
to India. Three days passed
before Izrail came again.
“Swordless shedder of blood,” Solomon
addressed him, “why such a keen glance
when you saw that young man?” “I’d planned,”
the angel answered, “at God’s command,
to seize his soul in India
three days from when you saw me last;
but when I saw him in this room,
I did not understand how three days’ time
would be enough for him to get there.
When the cloud bore him off, I followed,
and took his soul to meet with God.”

Miguel Falquez-Certain (Barranquilla, Colombia) has been living in New York City for more than three decades, where he works as a multilingual translator and writer. He is the author of six volumes of poetry:Reflejos de una máscara, Habitación en la palabra, Proemas en cámara ardiente, Doble corona, Usurpaciones y deicidios, and Palimpsestos; of a short novel, Bajo el adoquín, la playa; of six plays: La pasión, Moves Meet Metes Move: A Tragic Farce, “Castillos de arena,” “Allá en el club hay un runrún,” “Una angustia se abre paso entre los huesos,” and Quemar las naves, as well as of short stories and essays. Book Press–New York published Triacas (short fiction) and Mañanayer (poetry) in 2010. Mañanayer received the only honorable mention in The 2011 International Latino Book Awards in the category of Best Poetry Book – Spanish or Bilingual.

When:  May 7, 2013
Where: Terraza 7 Cafe, 40–19 Gleane Street, Elmhurst, NY 11373
Time: 7:00 — 9:00 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:45)
Other: $5 suggested donation. For more information contact Richard Jeffrey Newman.

Here’s one of Miguel’s poems:

Hypothesis of a Dream

 And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking onto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

―First Samuel, 18:1

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth ― for thy love is better than wine.

―The Song of Songs, 1:2

Nevertheless, I never offered a thorough report of your absolute surrender. After all, I was the one who had gone searching for your scent of moss, until I found you distracted at the bar in the opal-tinged lights of the afternoon. Sycophants, preventing me from coming closer, were surrounding you; our eyes met patiently. While leaning over, I noticed the dark-blond down that made furrows on the back of your neck; I felt the swell of your breath and foresaw a capitulation. Our lips showed us the path.

A recent break-up had made me vulnerable. I lusted after your kisses; I longed for your young body sweet as sugar cane; I breathed in the fascinating insolence of your unsophisticated loquacity. I relinquished everything for your lips. While the summer’s scorching sun was hitting the walls, I nibbled on your buttons, until I pulled them out and found you, strong and flawless, in the intoxicating sweat of your thighs, in the inner perspiration of your navel: We sat up in the midst of the bed sheets impelled by the obstinate onslaught of a deferred lust, rising up in the umbra tree of that irreparable afternoon.

Habits make us despicable. Ordinary and fainthearted, preferring security instead of the chance of reaching for the sublime, I went back to the winding, although familiar, path, to the compliant arthritis of forgetfulness.

Even though you offered me everything, I chose the comforts of an insipid bonding. Long ago, I lusted after the kisses of your mouth. You are no more. You exist in the hypothesis of a dream.

To Magdalena Araque

I decided to write this book because listening, telling, and writing the stories of those who can’t write them will create awareness.… I can only pray that the book urges readers to empathize, and help.… If the book can provide even a handful of women, in unfortunate situations, strength and courage to say NO, I would be humbled.

That is a tall order for any book, much less a book of poetry, given how few people generally read poetry, but it is impossible not to applaud Vikram’s commitment to the stories she has gathered, the women who have told them to her, and the language of poetry with which she has struggled to bring them to life. Nonetheless, once you have acknowledged the value in Vikram’s motivation and recognized that the stories she sets out to tell do still need to be told (because it would be dishonest to pretend that these narratives of women’s oppression have not been told before), you still need to ask what her poems actually accomplish, not merely whether they succeed as art–though since they are art, that is the first and most important question–but whether they bear witness in a way that makes a difference.

Overall, I wish Vikram would learn to trust her language more. There are moments of real, and sometimes painful beauty in these poems, metaphors and snippets of narrative that illuminate the lives of the women Vikram writes about and that do, I think, have the power to change people’s perspectives in the way that only art can. Too often, however, those moments are undercut by writing that is prosaic, self-consciously didactic and sometimes mired in unfortunate cliches, as in these lines from the concluding strophe of “Her Wounds Are Mysterious:”

Her wounds are mysterious
like the Congo; the depth unseen
to the world but home to insects
rarely heard.…

The reference to the Congo is both cliche and evocative of a racist imperialism that is all too similar to the heterosexual male prerogative that wounded the girl the poem is about in the first place. Still, you can see the potential in what this strophe might have been like if it had been revised a little more. “Her wounds are home to insects….” is a metaphor that far more powerfully captures, I think, the horror and the damage inflicted by the men in the poem. Indeed, reading No Ocean Here, I found myself thinking more than once that one more revision would have strengthened the volume considerably. Notice how much stronger the poem “Honor Killing” would have been without the final three lines:

Dead, she stares at the sea
as it carries her bones
thrown by guards,
smoking water pipes.

Her mother’s mouth fills with sand,
her father and brothers’ hands are covered
with gloves to cleanse the stains
left on the walls of their family
by a man who spread her legs,
tore her apart like a coyote.

Right before her murder, she didn’t see
the silhouette of her face
in her grandmother’s heart.

Apparently the family’s pride lies
underneath her skirt,
in the space between her legs.

That second-to-last strophe is beautiful and heartbreaking. It would have made a fine ending to the poem, and I am happy to say that there are many moments in No Ocean Here that live up to the potential in those lines. The first couplet of “Her Wounds Are Mysterious,” for example, gives us a girl who “wasn’t always a fallen leaf,/she danced;” and in “There Is Something Wrong with the World,” women “who are compelled to kill their own youth/become invisible like soot inside chimneys.” The poem “War” deals with rape as a weapon of war in images that are hard to forget:

All cavities of the women’s trust were emptied out
when each man selected a victim:

her mother’s body, stuffed inside soil,
was stomped by feet and questions,
her sister dragged by her dark breasts,
and she was turned to debris and dust.

One of the strongest poems in the book, “Caretaker of Graves” takes on the subject of female infanticide, but from a mother’s perspective, and ends with what, for me, is an absolutely devastating image:

The sun doesn’t sink until 8 p.m.
but she sees darkness of bats all day.

Tidal waves of melancholy mix
with seeds plowed in her every year.

Mouth filled with muffled cries,
hospitals and conspirators in doctors’ clothes
shadow her throughout married life.

Frogs get used to the air at night
but her murdered womb mourns scars.

No Ocean Here is an uneven volume, but the moments of power and beauty it contains make it worth having and Vikram a poet worth watching.

How practical versus idealistic should the approach to college be? I’m somewhat torn, and past columns have reflected that. I applaud proposals to give young people better information about how various fields of study match up with the job market and about projected returns on their investments in college. And for students who want college to be an instant pivot into a job with decent pay, a nudge toward certain disciplines makes excellent sense.

But college is about more than that, with less targeted, long-term benefits that aren’t easily captured by metrics. And some of the reforms being promoted right now lose sight of that and threaten to lessen the value of a degree.

It’s worth following the links in that quote; each piece raises some important questions. And I applaud the warning with which he closes:

I’d sound yet another alarm. Scratch the surface of some of the efforts to reform state universities and you find more than just legitimate qualms about efficiency and demands for accountability. You find the kind of indiscriminate anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular among more than a few right-wing conservatives.

Edited to add: For me, the book’s title, Because Men Only Understand Cliches, is so firmly rooted in the circumstances that inform the title poem, and also in the poem’s–and therefore the book’s–position (in my head) as a response to that assertion, that it did not occur to me that some people might read the title as an accusation that I was making against men. Well, I have been shown the error of my ways. Artos, whose comment appears below, wonders whether or not I “realize how offensive [Because Men Only Understand Cliches] is to men who are not mang­i­nas? Kind of like, “Blacks only know fried chicken and watermelon.” I have decided to let his comment through primarily because it made me smile; it’s the first time I’ve been called a mangina on the Internet, certainly on my own blog, and that feels like some kind milestone. When I told my son about Artos’ comment, he said, after he stopped snorting with laughter, “Really, what is he, in fifth grade?” This is from the first movement of “Because Men Only Understand Cliches,” which tells the story of where the title comes from:

Belly like a watermelon
stuffed up the front
of her white cotton summer dress,
the pregnant woman at the corner
turns her back to me to face
the direction she’ll cross the street in,
and what she’s wearing
flares from the waist down
in a twirl that settles
along the line of her hips
till only the hem that falls
to just above her ankles
is still rippling, a flag
waving surrender
to this late summer day.

My eyes lift to her shoulders,
follow the contour the fabric traces
down from the loops
through which her tanned arms emerge
to the curve of her butt cheeks
that bounce lightly as she steps back,
just avoiding the taxi pulling up fast
to the curb where she’s standing.

She’s as tall as me or taller,
black hair tied tight in a braid
pointing like a compass
to the small of her back,
and she isn’t wearing panties,
her dress not unlike the one
you wore the night we wandered the beach
till the boardwalk lights were stars
blinking at our backs,
and the campfires scattered across the sand
were the signal flames of a distant town.

The moon over the ocean
cast our shadows behind us.
You stood in front of me,
the blue cloth of what you were wearing
bunched in the hand I held to steady you
just beneath your breasts, my other hand
finding when I reached
that you’d been naked to the breeze
running up your legs, you’d said,
like the water’s warm breath
before it touched its tongue to you.

You gave a throaty laugh
as I pulled you tighter to me,
stroking and pulling and gently
parting the fur you let grow in
once the lover who’d kept you shaved was gone;
and you were wet,
though wet does not do justice
to the fruit bursting its skin
between your legs.

I kissed the lips you shape your words with,
and in your coming—we were surprised:
you never come at home
at just the urging of my hands—
you called your pleasure out to the open sea
for the wind and tide to carry who-knows-where,
and I heard again my teacher
telling the men in my first-year poetry workshop
that none of us would ever
“write a successful cunt poem,
because when it comes to cunts,
men only understand clichés.”

I thought how you have only ever called it
your vagina, then later, while you slept,
tried to list the rhyming words I’d need
to write a sonnet, but China, Carolina, trichina—
a parasite you don’t want to catch—and angina
were the best I could do. I listed off-rhymes,
Montana, banana, and then,
in the New Yawk accent you love to mimic,
I heard linah, finah, minah, and reclinah,
that last one bringing me
the woman from the conference
who worried that two kids had made her
“roomier down there”
than any man other than the husband
she’d been needing to leave for years
would want, and so she hadn’t left him.