CBR9 #4: Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

This is my first book of poetry, ever. Or rather, pamphlet, because it is so thin. I bought it because of the Beyonce hype behind Warsan's words, because I'd heard her name over and over, because her name is now tangibly linked to words like "refugee" and "woman", because a Pajiba friend posted an excerpt from her poem on Facebook, because they actually (actually!) had it in a Bangkok bookstore, a thin sleeve of paperback tucked amidst hundred-page hardcovers.

I read it at home, and I read it while waiting for the train. I read it while seated during my commute, and also when standing packed among others. I soon felt a particular hotness reading it in public, so I did the bulk of my reading in bed, when I was about to fall asleep. Sometimes, I read it outloud to my empty room, just to see if the words would taste different in my mouth.

Poetry is a funny medium for me. It has always felt slightly out of my reach. I hoped for Shire's words to bring me closer, but sometimes it came too close for comfort. I never related wholly to a single poem, only to the sentiment conveyed – Shire ensconces the people in actions and images that are really feelings – but sometimes that sentiment hinged so accurately (and vulgarly) to my own that it felt almost intrusive.

This is not a book you should read on the train. At one point, I was trapped in my mind, with images of men and women kissing, and then the train jolted to a stop and I looked up, and caught the eye of a young woman heading home from work. What a strange experience.

In Love and In WarTo my daughter I will say,
'when the men come, set yourself on fire'.

There is also sadness and yearning and so much brutality running through her words. I know nothing about Shire's background, only that she is a black female, but a quick google search tells me she is a London-based Somali poet and only 28. Perhaps it was because I just got done with Drown, but the feeling I get from her writing is similar to what I got from Junot Diaz' – the quiet violence comes through in moments of tranquility.

I can hear you in our spare room with her.
What is she hungry for?
What can you fill her up with?
What can you do, that you would not do for me?
I count my ribs before I go to sleep.
(excerpt from "Bone")

You grandparents often found themselves
in dark rooms, mapping out
each other's bodies,
claiming whole countries
with their mouths
(excerpt from "Grandfather's Hands")

Perhaps her most well-known poem is "Home," which seeped into my consciousness some time last year or two years ago during the refugee crisis. I read Shire's words before I knew her name, before I knew she was a "serious" poet and not some activist getting her feelings out. (But really, how is one different from the other if the impact is the same?) I'm not sure when she finished "Home" but the beginnings of it were revealed in this pamphlet, called "Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)". In this piece, written in short paragraphs spanning four pages, you see that familiar phrase – "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." – over and over again, like a resounding punch that doesn't quite land, not until you see refugees crowded on dingy lifeboats off the coast of Greece.

CBR9 #3: Drown by Junot Diaz

Getting through Drown, a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, took me close to a month. This delay was due to my very bad, no-good month of January, which included some emotional fall-out after the inauguration and the first two weeks of this administration.

I can thus say that the stories in the book can be divided like so: Read pre-Trump vs. read post-Trump. Obviously this wasn't Diaz's intent – after all, it was published in 1996 – but personally, for me, the short stories in the beginning of the collection were more tied to heartbreak and youthful malice, while the stories at the end resonated deeply with me as a tale of code-switching in an America that is fixated with race and of the immigrant's heartache of never belonging. His epigraph, a passage by Gustavo Perez Firmat, is incredibly fitting:

The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else

Similar to two other books that I've read before by him – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and another short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her  – the sense of being an immigrant's child, or an immigrant, is prevalent in every single piece. From the way Yunior and his brother Rafa feel out of place when they are visiting the Dominican Republic to a chance encounter with a fellow immigrant while working a job putting together pool tables for rich families, there is always longing in Diaz's words. As always, Yunior, his alter-ego, appears frequently in the stories, tied up in various forms of heartbreak or childhood mischief, and the posturing masculinity – whatever that means for a growing adult male in America, or for an immigrant with a displaced sense of self and an absent father – seems to anchor much of his interactions.

The final third of the book really hit me hard. How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie made me so sad. It's written as a dating guide of how a young, brown boy should act around a girl and his mother when she drops her off at his house. The things he has to hide around the apartment, the places he chooses to bring her for dinner and how to act during dinner ("If the girl's from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if she's Latina and amaze her if she's black. If she's not from around the way, Wendy's will do."), even how far they might go when they are sitting on the couch at the end of the night. At the end of the night, the "halfie" girl will likely not want him to touch her. "You're the only kind of guy who asks me out, she will say.... You and the blackboys." That paragraph shot like an arrow straight through my heart, and I can only imagine how it must feel to have that said to someone like Diaz, like being counted as second best because you are an immigrant, a non-white; never the gleaming white knight in white armor.

The last story, Negocios, felt almost like a relief as most of the stories in the book deals with Yunior and Rafa's absent father peripherally. While it is narrated by Yunior, it is mostly written from the point of view of his father, Ramon, about his journey as a new immigrant to America, and all the hardship he had to endure. The roommates who stole his money, the difficulty getting a well-paying job without a solid grasp of English, having to always worry about getting busted for not having a green card – it really drives home how grueling this experience is and how little knowledge and sympathy we, as US citizens, have for that. Ramon isn't even particularly a good person – he cheated on Yunior's mom and stopped sending her money, he hits his second wife, he never reaches out to his children when he went back to Dominican Republic for a visit – and even as I say this, I really did feel for him a bit. That's always been the genius of Diaz's writing. This Is How You Lose Her was full of stories of cheating cads and asshole men, but he is able make the reader understand, a little bit, how a human being being a massive dick could be due to all the hurt inside. Or sometimes, people are just dicks. And Diaz did the same with Ramon's dad. Perhaps I was also feeling a bit vulnerable to empathizing with him, after the month that I've had.