English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Fragments of Light

Ed. Rick London & Leslie Scalapino.  enough.  O Books, 2003.  159pp.  $16.

By Grace A. Epstein, University of Cincinnati

            One doesn’t expect an anthology of multicultural responses to the events of September 11, 2001, the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan, and, more recently, of Iraq, to be harmonious or painless to read.  The language of the event as well as the aftermath is forever bound to traumatic memory in shards of impressions, imagery and sound bites.  This is not to say that such a collection need be formless.  From the uncompromising graphic of the cover by Abigail Child that positions Brueghal’s painting, "Tower of Babel," and the photograph of the remaining structural shell of Tower 2 onto the frame of a Spanish newspaper headlines, enough chronicles the passionate reactions of a formidable group of international poets and essayists, including Mahmoud Darwish and Murilo Mendes.  With postmodern pastiche and linguistic fusion the text bursts with insight, compelling readers to re-envision our planet transformed since that day in early September more than two years ago.  

             As the first entry by Michael McClure called “Black Dahlia” spreads across the page in the shape of the dahlia of its title, the anthology announces, “THE CUPS WE DRINK FROM ARE THE SKULLS OF ARABS”(5). The political promise of the material is never in doubt.  As Rick London asserts on the back cover, “A radical purpose of poetry in critical times is to disrupt the language of consensus.” Clearly, enough is not intended for leisurely reading.  Nothing short of a call to “arms,” its political punch constitutes a tour de force that makes no apologies for a critique of the policies of destruction posed by the bin Ladens and Bushes of the world.  Punctuating this message from the onset, McClure ends two of his contributions with what can only be called a literal roar, “grahhr” (6).

             The patchwork of entries is absent transitions or introductory paragraphs—the author bios are neatly catalogued at the end.  And while it nods to the individual voice of a selection, each voice seems to call forth the next one.  The only demarcations between works are the names of the authors who have contributed them. The material, like cyclones of meaning, touches down at critical moments or sweep readers along at other points.  These tempestuous words produce an evocative rhythm.  Some entries are contemplative, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s short “Extasis,” and at least two larger essays, “The Violence of Oneness” by Norman Fischer, which considers religious sacrifice through the lens of George Bataille’s The Theory of Religion, and “White Lines” by Fanny Howe, which examines the nature of memory according to Ilona Karmel’s An Estate of Memory, strike with piercing effect.    

             The agenda to deconstruct a simplistic model of good and evil through the use of fractured language elements can be observed in almost all the pieces. Alice Notley’s prose poem, “Back” graphs impressions of war to corporate jargon, “their names my name a forest of investments” (10) and in “Destroy,” she again ponders “if the money’s between your legs can you be a dead woman?” (11). Mahmoud Darwish’s contributions are, as always, specific and penetrating.  An award winning writer, he fervently articulates the suffering of his Palestinian people. In “Ramallah – January 2002” he is at his best, enjoining personal with political and mythical significance. Of the devastating incursion by the Israeli military into the Palestinian headquarters of Yasser Arafat, Darwish writes poignantly,

Here, Adam remembers the clay of which he was born

He says, on the verge of death, he says,

“I have no more earth to lose”

Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own hands

In a few moments, I will begin my life

born free of father and mother

I will choose letters of sky blue for my name

Under siege, life is the moment between remembrances

of the first moment, and forgetfulness of the last [. . . ]. (14)

            Another particularly stunning item comes from Larry Kearney, “The Man with His Kids on the Table,” presents a incisive perspective with “I’ve come to understand evil as the willingness to increase the misery of children for money or power—no compulsions, no dark forces, no fault to God” (58).  Here the author conjures a child to be killed in order to finally “bring down bin Laden” (58-59).  The impact of the amoral posture, reminiscent of Ursula K. La Guin’s much anthologized, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,“ sears the mind. Shocking to read, Kearney’s offering is too candid to dismiss.

             My favorite pieces are from Pat Reed whose prose poems mix startling personal danger with that of the national disaster. Unexpectedly awakened on “September 11” by a neighbor who announces, “Sorry to wake you, but the house behind us is engulfed in flames” (88), the poem’s narrator calls the police, waters down her house, and waits for the fire department. Later, with the kitchen still smoking, she watches TV in time to see that “something smoking far away shivers in the sun and crumples to the ground” (89).   In the follow-up piece, “September 18” she exchanges greetings with a Yemenite store owner over a bottle of ginger ale and a chocolate bar.  As they stand looking out his store window, he muses, “a little fog this morning but now it’s nice” and the narrator’s unspoken answer: “I want to say are people treating you ok. we stand for a minute looking out the door at the bright wind dragging leaves up the sidewalk, but I sense he’s already told me” (89).  This blend of the commonplace, of the personal threat played out against the backdrop of the larger menace of the WTC tragedy, intersect, until thoughtfully, the author nudges us to the personal once more and the dormant dangers possible for the Yemenite store owner.  Forced to my own recollections of my daughter’s Iranian friend, beaten up in her own home in Boston less than two weeks after September 11, 2001, I sense the cycle of peril that Reed poses here, made all the more potent for what her characters do not say. 

             In this way, the entire anthology gains momentum. The variable images of suffering and death fastened to snippets of the mundane, the contemplative to the convincing, alternate between climax and denouement.  Certainly, several contributions are less accessible than others, firing off random associations that readers may or may not know or remember.  One of Rick London’s poems, “Folk Form” identifies passages taken from Henry Kissinger, Eihei Dogen and Dick Cheney with a footnote below the poem, but most works depend on the reader’s own recognition to carry the heft of the message.  Since much of 9-11’s discourse is already incorporated into our daily lexicon, albeit invisibly, this verbal synthesis is fitting. In Leslie Scalapino’s set of three prose poems, a Pal Mal Comic series, with accompanying enhanced photographs, the narrator’s “argument” critiques her (our) privileged voyeurism of the Afghan war and its string of destructive images. The language references postcolonial, feminist, and humanist politics. Watching the “daisy-cutter” weapons, she writes, “Realistic. ‘Picture this’ is the same as acceptance of it—passivity—in that here they are flowers that are duplications of themselves as physical appearance but without their original. Without any original. Of any being” (26).

             Such over-determined lines drop like firecrackers, bristling with surprise and significance throughout, which is perhaps its single drawback. Few Americans will accept the challenge to dominant consensus in addition to confronting an intellectually demanding text. Despite that flaw, or because of it, the anthology grounds itself firmly upon the finest tradition of political poetry and prose. Reflecting the myriad angles of vision for our times like a stain glass window, its elements meld together by the ponderous lead of responsibility; in this way, the legacy of September 11, 2001 is aptly colored. Whether it is enough, is impossible to say. These fragments of light can’t help but generate an even greater appreciation the further we travel from our own historical moment.