Secular and Divine: On Brooke Sahni's "Before I Had the Word"
Brooke Sahni | Before I Had the Word | Texas Review Press | 2021 | 92 Pages
Brooke Sahni’s debut poetry collection, Before I Had the Word, chosen by Maggie Smith as the Winner of the 2020 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, explores generational ties to grief, sex, family, and religion. Fearlessly mixing the divine and spiritual with the secular and mundane, Sahni challenges the very definitions of holiness and devotion. Her book concerns itself with the grey area that separates childhood and adulthood, studying the myths that ferry between to ask the question: What rites of passage truly mark one’s transition from adolescent to adult?
Sahni answers in imagery and language that is fantastic, humorous, and breathtakingly violent—exemplifying the misunderstandings and strange passages that characterize coming of age. In one of the book’s central poems, “Lore,” one of the speaker’s male classmates ejaculates into a plastic bag and throws it at a group of young women. The female characters lament “how easy it is to get pregnant” before the reality of the situation is explained to them. The concept is hyperbolic and chuckle-worthy, but betrays the unsettling reality that young women are often at the mercy of men; that young women often have to be told how their bodies work. “Lore” is a standout for its bold depiction of the truthful ridiculousness of what it’s like to be young and female.
Miriam, a traditional Jewish figure who appears throughout the Torah, appears throughout the collection, seemingly intended as a symbol for young womanhood. In Exodus 2:4, an unnamed sister of Moses is observed placing him in the Nile, and that unnamed woman is usually identified as Miriam. As Sahni writes in the poem “Reform,” “Miram was only mentioned in the Torah a few times”—elaborating on a theme of Before I Had the Word: women are meant to be seen but not named. Sahni challenges this notion directly, consistently naming Miriam while questioning her own naming in the process, as in the poem “If you took out the e, you could be like the stream.”
the woman behind the counter says.
And for a moment, a new way
of being: I could be the Grand Stream and every bright
nutrient would bloat my cells so when people drank
they too would grow golden.
Sahni questions what the act of naming means for what a person can become. The distance between Miriam’s un-naming in holy texts and her naming in these poems creates a space of new possibility for meaning and becoming.
Another focal point of Before I Had the Word is the serial poem, “Notes on Midrash.” Midrash, for those unfamiliar, is an interpretative act that seeks to investigate religious questions—both theological and practical—by plumbing the depths of the Torah. Midrash responds to contemporary problems and crafts new stories, making connections between contemporary Jewish realities and the unchanging holy text. Sahni’s series of Midrash poems serve as a connective through-line, becoming an in-depth investigation of femininity, sex, and selfhood vis-a-vis religion.
By now I know the hand is holy, it can perform so many tricks. But there is a law that
says my skin and the scripture skin is a sacrilegious contact—why would god make an
object that can’t be touched when, already, I’ve touched so many beautiful things?
One of the most striking stylistic elements of this collection is its recurring use of the collective “we.” In most cases, Sahni is referencing a speaker and a group of her female friends, and this “we” becomes a collective that feels the same from the beginning of the book to the end. But by the middle of the book, the reader feels compelled to accompany this “we” rather than stand idly by and miss out on what they might be discovering. Young women are often depicted as learning and discovering together:
Last week our kind-of friend, the prophetess, (fire) told us if a girl doesn’t shave her pussy, a boy will never touch her there. Between her legs, the glossed pages of a magazine, her voice cool as amethyst: How to give the perfect flavored blowjob; how to remove period stains; how to eat and not get full;
In the poem “The Sensous Woman by J,” this same group of women reads the diary of the speaker’s mother. In this moment, the women are put in communication with the women of their past—a reflection of the practice of Midrash.
Moments of sentiment just like this echo throughout the book. However, such tender moments are often belied by violence:
A woman gets eaten
out by a tiger and the unnamed author assures
the readers that this fantasy is perfectly natural—
Desolation and loss place emphasis on faith amid the intangible, the way a believer trusts in the existence of a benevolent god—blind yet trusting faith that grief is a mere passage that must be journeyed. Sahni’s title poem explores this phenomenon most explicitly:
O, holy body,
what you no longer need
refuses to exit,
burrow,
shrunken and dormant.
In many of these poems, the speaker sings from a space between two worlds and two faiths—Judaism and Sikhism. For Sahni, the tension between the two religions and the larger tension between faith and doubt drives the poetic psyche from first page to last. “The Golden Reserve”—the collection’s final poem—delves fully into this tension and aches as a clarifying moment in the book. Here the speaker both fears finality and embraces the closure that it brings:
Upstairs, a fridge stands full of insulin, liters of Coke line the walls, hoards of coriander,
wadi, garam masala for next time.
We will get into the car and not speak until we reach the river
These poems offer a fresh approach to topics that many writers might consider too sentimental. But their author treads a careful and deliberate line between sentimentality and sentiment and never stumbles. Her debut offers the reader a place to process nostalgia, coming of age, and faith thoughtfully and clear-minded. Brooke Sahni has achieved a rare feat with Before I Had the Word, in poems that sing for both the ancient and the modern, the secular and the divine.