A New Silent Grammar: On Solmaz Sharif's "Customs"

Solmaz Sharif | Customs | Graywolf Press | 2022 | 72 Pages

Solmaz Sharif’s spectacular sophomore collection, Customs, is filled with crushing poems that carry weariness, rebuilt and disrupted again and again. Continuing the work of her debut, Look, Customs, too, deals in doubles. But whereas Look played off of the double-meanings of terms in the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Customs builds a collection from the tensions that exist in the word “customs” itself: tradition, ritual, longevity; but also: a border, a declaration, a sterile proceeding. It is through these tensions that the poems of Customs arrive, some sharp and heavy-hitting, others long and drawn out with ample space on the page. Whether in the collapse of logical reason in “Social Skills Training”—a prose poem that ends with the gutting line, “Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?”—or the enormity of “An Otherwise,” Customs’ strength comes from its ability to be vulnerable and determined all at once.

The tensions of Customs are perhaps most apparent in expressions of return and exile (as highlighted by the repetition of the phrase “I want to go home” in the poem “The Master’s House,” the entire poem “End of Exile,” and the central “return” in “An Otherwise”). These meet with devastating disruption in the intricate, wandering “Without Which,” a long poem fragmented by space and brackets.

No crueler word than return.

No greater lie.

The gates may open but to return.

More gates were built inside.

This moment is elucidating; thinking of my own context, return is so weighted in the Palestinian imagination. Our poets write of our martyrs and resist alongside them; sometimes, I wonder, what life will be like after we are free, and what a truly free Palestine looks like. Last spring, the hashtag “#غرد_كأنها_حرة” circulated on Twitter, a collection of Palestinians imagining life as if our land was free; people imagined themselves moving from Akka to Ramallah with ease, returning to their homes their grandparents left in 1948, and traveling across the Levant without the obstacle of borders. This stanza acknowledges there is more work to be done than just ridding ourselves of the obvious systems that oppress us; decolonization and anti-imperial work are more holistic than we know. Sharif’s work is about attunement to the ways imperialism is ingrained into our lives, our speech, our poetry; this moment is direct in that acknowledgement. Despite the abstracted, disjointed nature of “Without Which,” Sharif rejects misinterpretation. 

Customs works in these realizations, writing into the unbearable weight of everything that oppresses us, creating intimacies among despair. Where Look was attention-grabbing, energized in its attempts, as if to say, look at how deeply ingrained this violence is in our daily lives, look at how sinister; it hides in our language without a second thought, Customs carries exhaustion in that knowledge. It is not a defeatist text, not in the slightest. Instead, Customs asks us to approach poetry’s role in this despair differently than Look theorized.

At an event hosted by the Washington University in St Louis, Sharif said of her approach to poetry: “Poetry is not an exercise in aesthetic pleasure. It is an opportunity to name, diagnose, and draw attention to actual violences that are occurring.”

This is captured thoroughly in the book’s third poem, “Beauty.”

You asked for beauty, and one morning, a small blue eggshell on the

stoop, shattered open, its contents gone

Likely eaten

Early, Sharif shows the consequences of beauty without context. “Beauty,” too, presents the toll that the normalization of unlivable conditions has on us all. Is the blue shell still beautiful if its inhabitant has met a cruel death? Is the poem still beautiful if the poet violently conquered the land he writes about? 

Sharif poignantly writes this alongside explicit references to depression; I felt “A life is a thing you have to start,” too painfully in my body. The timing of this collection feels serendipitous as well; surely much of it was conceived before the pandemic was even a budding reality, but it is illuminating in our current context. When I myself am too high-risk to let life go on as “normal,” too worried about those more vulnerable than me who I could put in danger, life feels on hold; mine will not continue until I let it, while others live on around me. But what is a life at the cost of others’? The next line, too, “Mornings I feel most possible,” resonates clearly; I write this review from my bed, a cup of coffee cooling next to me. I think if I don’t finish before the world wakes up, I might never be able to. There is a horror in the mundanity, in the belief that this repetition will never end—that we will never feel more than this. What is the source of this violent, mundane repetition? A pandemic only exacerbating the symptoms. 

But mental illness is a structural issue as much as it is a hereditary one. Sharif acknowledges this in the poem “Self-Care.” Where “Beauty” was heart-wrenching, “Self-Care” is sardonic. “Has your copay increased?” couples with “Has the shore risen / as you closed up the shop? / And have you put your weight / behind its glass door to keep / the ocean out? All of it?” to zero in on the absolute absurdity of putting bandaids on systemic, globally harrowing issues under the guise of “self-care.” The cost of care as it exists now is ever-increasing, and the traumas we collectively hold are too massive to shoulder on our own. Sharif names and diagnoses succinctly, in cascading lines that run into each other, a momentum that echoes the bombardment of self-care “cures” to which we are exposed daily. 

Look began: “It matters what you call a thing. Exquisite: a lover called me. / Exquisite.” The iconic titular poem is built from moments of intimacy with a lover amid varying levels of state violence; eventually, the intimacy and the violence blur, growing closer and closer until they finally merge: “Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds. / Let me LOOK at you. / Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here,” the 16 seconds here reference the timing of a trigger. In Customs, the poems begin with this merge already realized: the awareness of the slippage of “real life” into “state violence” (there is no difference) is immediately apparent. After the preface poem, “America,” Customs Section I is marked by a return to the epistolary, the first in a series of poems titled “Dear Aleph.” These poems are characterized by an ongoing conversation in which the “you” is revealed through small admissions; “you’re correct. Every nation hates / its children.” // “Send word, you said.” Similar to the Gauntanomo suite of Look, an evasive intimacy pervades these letters that, while perhaps inherent to the form, is emphasized by the lack of grounding details in a clear sender or receiver. “Without Which,” the long book’s poem, then takes much of what Section I has set up, fulfilling the weariness that tinged so many of the prior poems as it stretches across the pages. Its brackets almost echo Sappho’s fragments, taking the place of formal resolves. Like in “Dear Aleph,” a feeling of eerie intimacy pervades. 

In an interview with the Guardian to promote her newest album Laurel Hell, the songwriter Mitski calls “the human romantic relationship the best metaphor, the best narrative vehicle; this album is about a feeling of ending, a feeling of resignation, and often using the narrative of the ending relationship is the easiest way to convey that emotion.” It’s natural to muse as to the nature of the “you” when it appears in a poem; sometimes, that “you” is actually an “I,” or the reader, or an apostrophe—whether that referenced party is real or imagined, too, is another line of inquiry. Sharif’s work echoes Mitski’s theory of romance; in Customs, the “you” is often built out by wonderful moments of intimacy contrasted with begrudging sadness. “You” asks for beauty but what appears is only the suggestion of a dead and eaten baby bird; “to watch you / get dressed while still in bed / ]] / is a little city where / I’m most grateful to be alive” There are many moments in which the conceit of the book collapses on its own vehicle, its metaphors not able to separate themselves from the impenetrable horror of the relationship between the state and our “normal” lives. In “Planetarium,” an outing to Joshua Tree becomes a simulated warzone. Sharif emphasizes the metaphor alongside that which it is meant to capture; nothing is obscured. Our relationships—romantic, familial, or otherwise—do not have to be a metaphor for the invasiveness of the state when the invasiveness of the state is already involved in our relationships. 

“Without Which” ends in an incredible display:

Some days,

just to think

of washing some dishes—

mismatched and in a rust-stained

sink—

touching things I have spent my whole life

The poem finds itself at the end of the second to last page, leading to brackets upon brackets on a page that is sparse except for “touching—”. That bare, tender isolation of “touching—” concludes the poem before the section shifts to the powerhouse anthem of “The Master’s House.” The preciousness with which the poet holds the commodity of touch runs as a motif throughout “Without Which,” reminiscent, perhaps, of Aracelis Girmay’s “Elegy,” which begins: “What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?” and ends:

This is the only kingdom.

The kingdom of touching;

the touches of the disappearing, things.

The tenderness with which Girmay holds subjects in her writing turns this elegy into something hopeful. Read again and again, it can even become a plea. The scarcity of other figures in Sharif’s ending conjures this somberness more profoundly, as if contending seriously with the same question of unguaranteed living. Again: “A life is a thing you have to start.” The mundanity of washing dishes is a call-back to the “frugal musicality” of the kitchen sink Sharif describes earlier in “Beauty,” and “Without Which” ends with an impressive denuement: a verbal close accompanied by the quiet, visual noise of brackets, a new silent grammar appearing on the page. This quiet sets a perfect stage for the contrasting energy and determination of “The Master’s House,” (with underlying allusion to Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”) perhaps a response to the question Girmay poses.

Customs feels like the most-awaited collection to the coterie of poets I call community and friends. Solmaz Sharif’s influence among high-contemporary SWANA and Muslim writers, of those writing from diasporas where their homes have been destroyed by American imperialism, whose conditions upon re-entry are dictacted by heightened surveillance, cannot be overstated. I find her formal flairs and intentionality in the works of so many others I love—Andrea Abi-Karam and Fargo Tbakhi to name some—and I welcome the continued wave of self-awareness and the limitations of the poet as presented in this new work. When “Patronage” first dropped in the Yale Review, it was all I could think for days: 

Remember what you are to them.

Poodle, I said.

And remember what they are to you.

•

Meat.

That haunting, closing moment generated the exact opposite feeling in me from what the poem describes a poetry audience to be; to scream, to cheer, to furiously agree. The idle life written about in “Patronage” is not the poetic lineage I started in, but it is where I feel myself on the outskirts of joining—although reluctantly. Works like this make participation in these spaces feel simultaneously hopeless and less bleak. Sharif once again is prescriptive in her poetry, an ars poetica that turns itself on the culture. Of course, this not a high-and-mighty condemnation. Another trait I admire of Sharif is her willingness to acknowledge and implicate herself in these phenomena, a truthfulness that turns into an active archive of navigation.

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken you there,

she said of our trip

to her childhood home.

For years I wrote of the bumps

left by the tanks

churning over her roads

as braille messages from the martyrs,

which meant I missed

it entirely,

the only

it:

my mother’s face

turned out

the passenger window,

just looking.

The poet can create an archive of harm, of phenomena that may be at risk of being erased; the poet, too, however, can participate in erasure. The Jordanian poet Zein Sa’dedin told me in an interview for Sumou magazine,“writing is a reductive act.” I bristled at that interpretation; I love to turn to the moony-eyed idea that poetry is where we can rebuild the world larger and better than we ever imagined, with no regard to the confines of grammars and expected language. However, it is this moment in Customs that illustrates Sa’dedin’s point so plainly: when poets task themselves with building metaphor out of violence, what voices and realities are left behind? The stereotypical diaspora poet in me resists the urge to say, “well the poet’s mother was the poem all along,” but it is here that the continued doubleness and tensions of Customs arise once again. It is here that the sparseness of “touching—” is relevant, all of the moments hidden by the close of the bracket. In a massive feat, Customs continues the work of Look, pushing its mission forward with a new slate of sharp, memorable pieces that are set to inspire yet another generation.