Pimsleur Punjabi Conversational Course Level 1 Lessons 1-5

    Sat Sri Akaal, friends.

    I’ve been doing book reviews for years, but this book is the first of its kind. The Pimsleur Punjabi Conversational Course is a language-learning tool that, as you have likely guessed, is intended to help me learn Punjabi.

    I got the book as an audiobook, which is really its only functional format. In fact, the book’s introduction explicitly states that you should not look up words or consider spelling when engaging with the Pimsleur method. The method then relies on a lot of repetition; the narrators introduce phrases, you repeat them back syllable-by-syllable and then as whole words. I can’t deny that the repetition is effective; I feel like I’ll always remember to ask qui tuhanu Angrezzi onde heh? Or even tuhardu qui haal heh? (Do you understand English? How are you?). 

    That said, my style of learning isn’t exclusively auditory. I feel like I need to -see- the language. This is particularly true for some times when the pronunciation seemed to vary or shift. In particular, when they were teaching me how to say that I’m good, the male narrator seemed to say meh TEAK huh while the female narrator consistently sounded like meh PEAK huh. I had to defer to a Punjabi expert to clarify what I was hearing.

    I do wish that they gave you some more lessons for the cost; it gives some very introductory phrases, which is fine, but selling the lessons in packs of 5 left a little bit more to be desired. They sometimes explain why the language is the way it is, but I could have used a little more there. For instance, I was a little unclear on word order (and even the separation of some words), or why some words changed forms in different contexts. At times they explain the general idea; men say bolda to refer to the verb speaking and women use boldi. I *think* I’ve inferred that when you’re making a statement you say something like “manu Angrezzi bolda heh” but if you’re responding to a question you might say “manu Angrezzi bolda ho.”

    Anyway, I suppose it’s a matter of your philosophy of language and your learning style. The Pimsleur courses are reliant on conversational repetition. I wouldn’t mind, though, getting some more background on why the language works the way it does. I think coming out of French Immersion I got used to the idea of rules being well-established and then applying the rules; here it’s the reverse—you see rules in application and only afterward do you start to infer the rules. This approach made things like asking for directions particularly difficult because the word order is essentially reversed—something like “This road where is you know?” or when words changed in context; for instance, the word for speaking well is different from doing other things well. Actually, learning how to ask for directions was a hard unit and anecdotally it seemed like it went faster than the other units, but that may just have been my panic.

-Qui tuhanu Punjabi onde heh?

-Hanji. Qui tusee Amrikan ho?

-Naheenji. Parr manu tori tori Angrezzi. Manu Punjabi bhoti ziada nahee onde heh.

-Tuhanu ta Punjabi bahot changitera onde heh!

    I ended up reviewing each of the lessons several times, though they build in helpful repetition from previous units. I feel like I’ve more or less mastered the first three of the five units, but I’m still struggling over the directions and the words for saying you want something to eat or drink (helpful memory tip: if you associate words in a different language from the one you speak to words in your own language, it can help! For instance, “later” sounds like “bad witch” in English and I enjoy that very much.”

    Ultimately, Pimsleur courses are going to be very restrictive by nature. You’ll learn conversational phrases that might work in small talk. I’m sure that eventually the lessons will get increasingly difficult and more complex. Overall, though, I think I will need additional resources to help me learn the language—I need to see it, hear it from more voices, speak it, read it. I need the full experience, especially if my goal is to write some poems in Punjabi.

    If nothing else, trying to learn a language really can promote some empathy for all the people trying to master English—a different script, different sounds, different grammatical structure. Eesh it’s tough.

    Anyway, ਖੁਸ਼ ਪੜ੍ਹਨਾ!

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

    I am a man not unfamiliar with making missteps, and there are two that feed into my reading of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. First, I picked up the book because I mistook the author’s name; I thought I’d found a free copy of one of my prof’s old books—it was only when I brought it home that I remembered Elizabeth was not her first name.

    The second misstep I took when reading this book is that I read the foreword. I generally try to avoid reading the foreword to books, but after reading Angela Davis’ helpful introduction to Assata Shakur’s autobiography I decided to go for it. Unfortunately, it did what I fear of forewords: it coloured my reading of the text in a way that narrowed the book. The introductory comments painted a narrative of epic / mythic allusions as foundational to the text—it’s not wrong, but I did feel that the richness of the text was reduced by examining it in such a particular framework. [Also, I tend to have an anti-epic bias due to my own ignorance of Homer, Ovid, and so on, so the significance of many of the references is probably lost on me].

    In any case, after my missteps I persisted in reading By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It’s apparently quite a ‘big deal’ (Morrissey recycles phrases from the text!) but somehow I had never heard of it. The book is, to some extent, a novel, though only the faintest sketch of one. Really, it’s a work of prose poetry. The narrative emerges in hints of shadows but the real heart of the story is in the interior experience of the central character and her emoting through flowery and incisive language.

    From what I can divine of the story, the central character falls in love with a taken man (I’m a little unclear on whether he and his other partner are married or not). She travels to stay with him and his partner. It presents an initially uneasy idyll where I found the narrator actually spends a fair amount of attention on the other woman, with some of the most tender and lovely passages dedicated to her:

“Then she leans over in the pool and her damp dark hair falls like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity. Sitting nymphlike in the pool in the late afternoon her pathetic slenderness is covered over with a love as gentle as trusting as tenacious as the birds who rebuild their continually violated nests” (23).

Smart returns to the hair imagery later in the text, noting, “her hair, falling like grief, floats in the deserted park, lifted with every dead leaf the wind disturbs; or her gesture that stumbled with too many meanings to stroke his temple with the back of her hand” (86).There’s a wispy gentleness in the description of the lover’s lover that shines brightly against the underlaying infidelity; I also appreciate the tenderness toward the betrayed. She first seems like Narcissus at the pond, oblivious to her similarity to “birds who rebuild their continually violated nests.” After Narcissus, we get an Echo of nest imagery: dead leaves in the wind. It’s a beautiful, if sombre, depiction of the poor woman.

    While staying with the couple, the narrator and the man have a charged attraction and, eventually, under the pretence of being the man’s stenographer for his own writing, they find some alone time to consummate their passion. The narrator’s account reads: “For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration” (25). You can see how Smart embellishes the moment that takes the work from a novel into poetic flare: “He has a book to be typed, but the words I try to force out die on the air and dissolve into kisses whose chemicals are even more deadly if undelivered. My fingers cannot be martial at the touch of an instrument so much connected with him. The machine sits like a temple of love among the papers we never finish, and if I awake at night and see it outlined in the dark, I am electrified with memories of dangerous propinquity” (25). The personification of words is a nice way to elevate the scene—words dying on the air, the mess implied by the papers never finished, and the disconnect between a manual typewriter and the electrification the speaker experiences are all great ways to take an ordinary moment into something more grand.

    Following their initial tryst, the relationship seems doomed. At one point, there is something involving authorities at the border; whether this is a metaphorical or literal barrier to their love is of secondary importance. From an outsider perspective, following this moment, the relationship looks one-sided. While the narrator battles her parents over the immorality of the relationship, the narrator’s love remains with his other partner. He seems committed to his other partner, and the middle section of the book is largely an outpouring of frustrated and complicated emotions of a lover scorned but devoted. To be honest, the initial charm of the book starts to wear off in this section; the combination of catharsis and inaction is a difficult position for an author to navigate; it is only through Smart’s linguistic flourish and variety that the book doesn’t fall apart at the seams.

    As the book continues, there is a surprising pregnancy and birth, the child of which comes to bear symbolic significance for the narrator’s connection to her now absent lover. I found that the book sort of peters out; by the end I’m not sure what is left to say from a position of such stasis. 

    Central to the text is the antithetical, paradoxical relationship between despair and hope, which is also reflected through the intensity of Smart’s style in moments of profound despair or hope, and, at her best, both at once. In one moment, the narrator is skulking through streets hoping to pass by unnoticed and says, “But I was afraid, I was timid, and I did not believe, I hoped. I thought it would be like a bird in the hand, not a wild sea that treated me like flotsam” (42). The way Smart problematizes hope as non-linear feeling is fantastic; hope is not a thing with feathers, but a storm. Those contrasting images perfectly encapsulate the complexity of such feelings.

    For a book that is so focused on a love story, Smart engages in a fair amount of violent imagery. Again, reversing the expectations of despair, Smart includes passages where something extremely dark gives birth to something more optimistic: “Letters blackly scarred with the censor’s knife translate the unimaginable: ‘I heard a child ask where its legs were.’ ‘We think with longing now of onions and lemons.’ The radio voice says: ‘Out of privation and the death of friends arises a new determination.’” (79). These ideas emerge in the context of war, and it is such passages that seem to resonate: “Bombs are bigger, but the human brains they burst remain the same” (79). Smart continues, “It is the faces we once kissed that are being smashed in the English coastal towns, the hands we shook that are swept up with the debris; the headlines speak to us of our private lives: yet still the mangy dog skulking under our window arouses a realer pity. Babylon and Sodom and the Roman Empire fell, but the winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever, and love still uproots the heart better than an imagined landmine” (79). It’s worth noting how grandiose Smart’s metaphors are, but the animal imagery is what really speaks to me here. The notion of mangy dogs inspiring “realer pity” than humans is a heartbreaking reality and the “winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever” is just a great line—despite buzzards being associated with the desert, aligning them with winter gives them a new dimension. If you’d like to do a little experiment, take that passage and add some line breaks: the poetry will emerge even more clearly.

    Tragedy is at the core of the book, and some of the lines encapsulate such a wonderful sadness. Smart’s description of depression is often apt and touching: “For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action” (83). Just wonderful.

    The risk of such a text is to become to self-absorbed, but there are moments when the tenderness of the central character emerges beautifully. There’s some controversy around pregnancy early in the novel and it seems like the lover’s lover lost a child. The narrator takes responsibility on herself and notes, “I have broken her heart like a robin’s egg. Its wreck reaches her finite horizon” (35). Again, the depth of feeling is never easy. Despite experiencing such intense love, it is necessarily at the expense of someone else. Immediately after the moment of sympathy, the narrator notes: “But it is not for her my heart opens and breaks: I die again and again only for myself. For her moving image prevents even my cry to him for help. For even if he loves me, he is in her arms” (86). Once again, love is rendered selfish.

    For a book so intensely focused on language, there are actually moments where it fails beyond repair. It begs the question of whether words give voice to feeling, or whether they give rise to them—do feelings exist without the words to describe them? In the midst of her tumultuous longing during the early visit, she notes that “days go by without even this much exchange of metaphor, and my tongue seems to wither in my throat from the unhappy silence, and the moons that rise and set unused, and the suns that melt the Pacific uselessly, drive me to tears and my cliff of vigil at the end of the peninsula” (21). Elsewhere, she notes that “texts are meaningless, they are the enemy’s deception” (35). These seem to emerge in moments of particular destruction: “My foot danced by mistake over the helpless, and bled no solace for my butchery. My heart was not great enough to assuage my guilt. Tell me how to atone, dove in the eucalyptus, who speak with thunder of the future’s revenge” (35). As texts and words disappear, an incantatory tone emerges—it makes me think of the poems people used to write prior to the poem they actually wanted to write, a kind of prayer to a muse. She continues, “A wet wing brushes away the trembling night, and morning breathes cold analysis into my spectre-waiting mind. The vines assume their social airs, ingratiating green with children’s fingers” (35). I find the language here so evocative; moreover, it speaks to a contrast between artful language and more ‘cold’ methods for perceiving the world. She describes “cold analysis” here, and elsewhere she refers to “the irregular graph of my doom, merciless as a mathematician” (21)---funnily enough, the “lowest vines conspire to abet my plot, and the poison oak thrusts its insinuation under my foot” (21). There’s a kind of angular violence associated with mathematicians and scientists and the fluidity of artful vines assists the evil plans of the narrator—perhaps ploys are only bad when you’re not the one doing them.

    Incidentally, I did a little bit of searching on the author of the book. From what I can tell this novel is essentially autobiographical. There are so many parallels (her being mistress to a married man, bearing children with him, him not leaving his wife, her working in the war, and so on). If we consider the book a journal, it’s one of unparalleled poetic turns of phrase. If we consider it a novel, it’s a bit awkward how closely it follows her life.

    Ultimately, this is a complex little book that confronts some uncomfortable paradoxes and contradictions. Despite not resolving them, the book is reasonably engaging, if somewhat solipsistic. Towards the end of the novel, something seems to go wrong for the beloved. There’s a poetic, paradoxical question I’d like to end on; because the book ends without real closure, I’ll follow Elizabeth Smart’s lead:

“How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his?” (108).

    Happy reading, folks!

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

    A common adage would have us believe that history is written by the victors. I would contend instead that history is written by the writers, which might sound like tautological nonsense but the official record of history, in my mind, is nothing if not the most thoughtful and compelling narrative of the time. Victors are all too often selective in their relationship to fact and victors are rarely good writers.

    Assata Shakur’s autobiography, by contrast, is writerly, poetic, and offers incisive societal commentary. It’s rare to find nonfiction with such a novelistic approach, much less one that is so well-achieved. The structure of the book is highly attuned to the literary medium and takes full advantage of its potential. Not that Shakur wrote the foreword, but Angela Davis’ introduction to the book gives excellent background to Shakur’s life that helps to contextualize the narrative. It outlines the crimes for which Assata Shakur was accused, the role of the FBI in creating false evidence, COINTELPRO’s program of targeting Black Liberation activists, and Shakur’s escape. It was a helpful primer for people who may not be familiar with the injustices of the time.

    Following the introduction, the autobiography is presented as a compelling story. The first chapter is a tense account of her in the hospital after having been shot, with police trying to extract a confession. The dramatic tension is then interrupted as she recounts her early childhood in chapter two. From there, Shakur expertly navigates two storylines, alternating in short increments between her incarceration and trials followed by her upbringing and budding engagement with Black Liberation. Her approach was an excellent way to keep me engaged. I found it riveting. Moreover, the chapters of Shakur’s early life always seem to be oddly prescient. They often end on a poignant note that applies to her future trials.

    The engaging effect of alternating time periods is heightened by a sort of mixed media approach; Shakur often punctuates moments with poems she has written, and inserted into other chapters there are transcripts of kourt conversations. Shakur offers an impassioned speech while on trial that is absolutely stunning and remains relevant today—more on that shortly.

    Assata, as a literary character, is incredibly endearing. Angela Davis’ foreword highlights Assata’s positivity in the face of horrific conditions; she notes that Shakur downplays the awfulness of her conditions in prison, but I also want to highlight the joy and warmth that radiates from the text. For instance, Assata recounts a boy having a crush on her for the first time. He leaves flowers on her windowsill every day and her mom says “You tell that boy to stay away from that window [...] Now he’s putting flowers in the window, the next thing you know he’ll be trying to climb in” (72). Immediately after, Shakur comments, “But she still thought it was kinda cute. The next thing I knew she was telling all her friends about it. While I was embarrassed, it also made me think I was cute. No boy had ever paid me that much attention before and I loved it” (72). Given Shakur’s storied life, the fact that these simple moments of humour and joy make it into the book are so endearing, but also aligned with Shakur’s approach to revolution: it cannot happen without love for others and a kind of gentleness of spirit.

    As I mentioned, though, even these personal moments are connected to broader social commentary. After recounting this moment of sweet childhood tenderness, there’s an absolutely heartbreaking moment. The boy with the crush asks Assata out and she says no. When he asks her why, she says, “Because you’re too black and ugly” (72). It’s absolutely crushing and Assata immediately provides commentary on how wrong it was and how it was formative to her future politics:

“I will never forget the look on his face. He looked at me with such cold hatred that i was stunned. I was instantly sorry for what i had said, but there was no taking it back. He looked at me as if he despised me more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I felt so ugly and dirty and depraved. I was shaken to the bone. For weeks, maybe months, afterward, i was haunted by what happened that day, by the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth. The sneering hatred on his face every time i saw him after that made me know there was nothing i could do to make it up to him. There was nothing i could do but change myself. Not for him, but for me. And i did change. After that i never said ‘Black’ and ‘ugly’ in the same sentence and never thought it. Of course, i couldn't undo all the years of self-hatred and brainwashing in that short time, but it was a beginning” (72).

I love this passage for a few reasons. First, it connects the personal and the political in one paragraph, highlighting the way Shakur’s autobiography weaves the threads of her life so thoroughly. The emotional tenor of the moment is so powerful, especially in being presented after a moment of sweetness. Moreover, you can see Shakur’s poetic lilt here; describing her words as “the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth” is a great turn of phrase that encapsulates the horror and venom of the moment.

    On the topic of poetry, Shakur’s poems are paired with chapters in a logical way. I’d be curious to know whether Shakur wrote the poems at those times in her life or if they were written after the fact for the sake of the autobiography project. In any case, some of the poems are clearly revolutionary in their approach—she uses repetition to emphasize key ideas, appeals to brother and sisterhood, lays claims to a better world—and she reframes her experiences in the grander scope of amerikan politics. I’d like to highlight, briefly, my favourite line from her work:

“Love is a contraband in Hell,

cause love is an acid

that eats away bars” (130).

I am always a fan of unexpected line breaks, so to have “cause love is an acid” establish such a painful idea and then follow it up with how it’s an acid “that eats away bars” in the next line is just a chef’s kiss. Again, it also seems to embody the need for compassion and care for the self and others that drives Shakur’s politics.

    The text is full of tension. While the trial procedures, imprisonment, and kourt battles read like high drama, Shakur’s early experiences are also riddled with a quiet (and sometimes overt) tension. One moment that is stranger than fiction is when Assata goes home with a “nice guy,” who calls his friends for an attempted gang rape. Not knowing about Assata’s life, I felt genuine horror for her. It’s the kind of scene that would read as outlandish in a novel, but here comes across with such genuine suspense. The boys start fighting over who gets ‘first’ with her and when things start to break, the host boy starts panicking that his mom will be mad if things are broken. It’s kind of funny how pathetic it is that he’s doing this horrendously awful thing and a broken vase is what allows Assata to escape unharmed. The only thing I’ve seen in fiction that comes close is when there’s a chapter from Londonstani by Gautam Malkani that builds up for a violent gang fight and then it gets cancelled at the last moment because one of the boys had to buy groceries for his mom.

    From Shakur’s time in prison, there’s a series of circumstances that lead to her being pregnant. I was never totally sure where things were going (again, since I lacked background knowledge to her life). I wasn’t sure if the pregnancy would last or how it might affect her experience in prison. It was interesting when the racist doctor gets replaced and the new one essentially evokes an anti-choice argument for altruistic purposes, saying that he’s “prepared to testify in any court that to deny you proper medical care would be tantamount to committing murder” (128). I can only imagine the gratitude Assata must have felt for hearing those words.

    In kourt, Assata’s statements are prescient. She clearly was speaking to her times, but also speaks beyond it. While the focus might have changed a little, this passage could have had a few words changed and been read out in kourt today. I’m going to quote a passage at length here and allow you to think of how it resonates:

The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massing unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of this BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people. / While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centres and fire stations. (169)

The passage highlights so many issues that remain pervasive. Given the recent history of the space race between billionaires, it’s easy to parallels to what Shakur writes about building rockets and going to space while day care centres and fires stations close down.

    Incidentally, one of the compelling elements of the narrative is Assata’s gradual conversion to socialism and communist philosophy. Watching her education happen is interesting for a few reasons. First, she offers commentary on her elementary and high school teachers, and it’s encouraging that all of the components of education that actually resonated with her have become, essentially, mainstays of public education now. It actually made me think of the book Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad, which also historicizes Black reading groups. Then, when Assata grows up you see her engagement with the work of Revolutionaries like Mao and Marx and Castro. Even more importantly, I found it compelling to see Assata navigate revolutionary circles. She complains of groups that are all talk and no action, and groups that are not thoughtful in their approach, groups that struggle to maintain coherence in their tactics and become paralyzed in their own work. Watching that trajectory felt relatable and really humanized the process of revolution.

    I have very few complaints with Assta’s autobiography. The one area I felt ought to have been given more attention was the ending. The penultimate chapter is Assata in prison. Her grandmother comes to visit her to tell her about a dream in which she was free. The postscript is then an account of her being free and her new life in Cuba. The book closes with her grandmother, mother, and daughter coming to visit her. A few thoughts crossed my mind because I wanted to hear more about how the escape actually happened. I initially thought that the FBI had killed Shakur, which would account for the ending feeling more abrupt than necessary, but when I looked it up I found that she is still alive. Knowing that she is still alive, I can understand why she might have left details of her escape out of the book. Certainly if her accomplices are still alive, publicizing the information would be unwise. The FBI still has a $1 million reward for her apprehension.

    The whole book felt so prescient it could have been contemporary. The social issues Shakur writes about have persisted, the phrases she uses have become part of our modern parlance, and the spirit of the work offers inspiration for the work currently being done by groups like Black Lives Matter. It was extremely compelling hearing about the shady tactics that the FBI was using to railroad her, the mistreatment she faced by police, the false evidence, the slew of injustices committed against her in her wrongful arrests, and so on.

    Assata Shakur’s autobiography is a wonderful reflection on an extraordinary life. It’s well-written, beautifully structured, informative, inspiring, personal, and political. I often don’t find autobiographies that compelling, but Assata is a wonderfully literary work well worth the read.

    Happy resisting!

She'll Find The Sky by Christy Ann Martine

    Sometimes when I read poetry collections, I open to the back section to read the thank yous and acknowledgements. I don’t know why I have that affectation, but when I did this for Christy Ann Martine’s She’ll Find the Sky, I found statements not like “Christy Ann Martine is the publisher of three previous collections and has her work in Fiddlehead, CB2, and The Malahat Review” but instead a passage that read “celebrities around the world have shared her poetry on their social media accounts, including Julian Lennon, Misha Collins, The Jacksons, Mena Suvari, Good Bones star Mina Starsiak Hawk, actress Amyra Sastur, and TV personality Matt Johnson” (25). I have never seen anything like that before, except, perhaps, when Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke’s acting reel included a section called “Famous People I Know.” Both cases have a dubious notion of celebrity and both make me feel awkward to experience. Perversely, though, the tactic worked—it did make me want to know just how low this book could go.

    And it really is bottom of the barrel.

    Hopefully Christy Ann Martine never reads my review; I would feel knowing terrible knowing she put her heart and soul into self-publishing this book and then being panned by some nobody know-it-all.

    The reality is, there is a market for this book, but I am not that market. I won’t bother rehashing my problems with instagram poetry in any level of depth, but in short I am very critical of any poetry that, rather than creating an experience for the reader, simply employs stock greeting-card phrases to allow readers to self-insert any actual content. The poems do not create an experience of love; they rely on readers to know what love is like already and then read a poem and say, “girl, same!” Again, this is me speaking from some sort of ivory tower-adjacent structure when I discuss the unpracticed hand that has big feelings but doesn’t have the craft to shape them into an experience.

    These problems manifest in the recycled similes and metaphors throughout the collection. Everything is rain, everything is fire, everything is stars, everything is flowers, everything is butterflies. Reading the poems individually may not yield the same effect, but when you read them all in succession (it took the length of 1 dog walk + dinner making to read the 254 pages of this book), you start to get the sense that all these published poems are drafts for a poem that never gets written. I present here a few ad hoc selections, but plenty more abound: “Love is a soft rain, / gently falling / on my heart, / nourishing my soul / so it can grow” (42), “She’s in the clouds, / heavy and dark, / waiting to fall like rain” (164), “I want to live / in a world / where love falls / from the sky like rain, / washing the pain / of the past away” (168), “My mind is dark / and filled with pain, / like the dark sky / before the rain, / I need to let go” (175). When so many things are like rain, rain stops being like anything; it’s a placeholder for meaning, an idea devoid of content.

    If you feel that I’m cherrypicking lines from poems to help lampoon Martine’s book, an important detail to note is that each of the quotations above is an entire poem. One thing to be said for the collection is that it is a page turner: I’m already turning the page as I start each poem since the poems are nary more than four lines. That may be why many of them feel like false starts. For example, in “Dreams of a Full Moon”, Martine writes, “The roar of the ocean / holds secrets of / moonlight lovers. / Love rises with the tide, / it lives within the waves” (51). There’s a reasonable premise of intrigue there: the idea of roars that overshadow secrets and the hush of foam rendering moonlight lovers hazy could be developed into something engaging, but there just isn’t enough to latch onto.

    A significant portion of the poems can be classed as what I would refer to as ‘advice musings’ (and what Christy Ann Martine refers to as “Little Life Sayings” in Chapter Ten) rather than experiences. It’s the telltale use of the imperative that should serve as a warning to any non-Instagram poetry aficionado: “Keep searching for the colors / when everything turns gray. / Even in your darkest moments / a brighter day awaits” (“A Brighter Day Awaits” 202), “Dance with the waves, / move with the sea. / Let the rhythm of the water / set your soul free” (14). This book is at its most, as the kids might say, certified cringe, is when it leans into the advice poems. In the last section of the book, suddenly the titles of the poems are missing and instead the audience is given a post-poem title in the style of Rupi Kaur. I suspect there may be a historical / cultural precedent for consistently putting the titles of poems after their namesakes instead of before, but here it just seems to be a kind of weird derivative technique. What makes it truly embarrassing, though, is that the titles are simply the advice the poems are providing. Let me give you an example. Here is a poem: “When life becomes so loud / that I can no longer / hear my own thoughts, / I need to turn down the volume / and tune into my soul, / so I can remember who I am / and where I am going.” Its title follows in italics: “your inner voice is always speaking to you, but you need to listen.” What, exactly, is the difference in the tonal register, word choice, or even the length of the poem and its title? It appears that the only difference is that what is presented as a poem has line breaks while the title follows a conventional left-to-right margin approach. Another example: “You can’t receive the gifts / the present moment is offering / if you are living in the past” (243). The title of the poem? “You don’t have to hold on to the pain forever, let go.” I am left perplexed by these titles and this approach. Is it the case that the titles are meant to clarify the “Little Life Saying” provided by the poem, as if it were not immediately obvious? It would be one thing to title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “It would be wise not to dwell too much on the past, lest ye become an old man looking for consolation in a universe in which you’ve had no impact”, but here it just makes me blush to see a life lesson parading as a poem followed by a banner that says “hey! Here’s exactly what the poem just said!”. Martine’s approach presents itself as a draft leeching off a different draft.

    While I was reading the book, my eyes were rolling hard, but as I write this review I actually feel a pain in my chest at how harsh I feel myself being. Please note that the book is, in all likelihood, sincere, and I want to value Martine’s personal experiences as an author. She is a survivor of neglect and abuse, and I in no way want to diminish the severity of those experiences. As an aesthetic object, though, I feel this book misses the mark. In the section “The Dark Years,” Martine offers a trigger warning for abuse, neglect, and depression. I commend her for showing compassion to her audience, though I don’t personally see these as being particularly triggering; because the poems are quite vague (allowing audiences to self-insert), I feel that whatever triggers arise are triggers you yourself have placed into the poems, rather than the poems themselves being triggering. For instance, the poem “Your Words Couldn’t Break Me” reads: “You tried so hard / to shatter my spirit, / but a soul full of love / can never be broken” (149). It skims along the surface; it intimates an idea (though is it a lover? a parent? a destructive teacher? a mean internet reviewer?) but it doesn’t create, in me, a visceral reaction through its incisiveness or descriptive qualities.

    I am well aware I’m not the target audience for this book. I’d like to be at least a little generous and say that there is a demographic that will love these poems, likely more casual readers or people beginning to get into poetry. If this book helps them get their feet wet, I am in full support. [I should confess here that my entrypoint to poetry was Charles Bukowski and, honestly, I’m not sure most of his stuff would be any better and it would certainly be more problematic.] The cynic in me, though, thinks that the vagueness is a marketing ploy to capitalize on a pre-critical audience (cf. Bo Burnham’s song “Repeat Stuff”). Poems like “Everyday Hero” speak to this concern: “You don’t have to be brave, / you just have to keep trying. / You don’t have to be strong, / you just have to keep going. / Maybe your superpower / is refusing to give up, / even on your weakest days / when you feel you’re not enough” (204). Granted, I prefer to read things that make me hate myself for being such a useless garbage bag of regret, but the compulsion towards self-aggrandizing feel-goodery doesn’t, to me, feel authentic or sincere. Maybe someday I’ll get to a place of unqualified self-love but when I do, I don’t think it’s going to come from a poem like this one. The most redundant platitude peddler is “Extraordinary Moments”: “I haven’t had / an ordinary day / since we met. / Each moment / spent with you / has been / nothing less / than extraordinary” (59). Don’t let the line breaks fool you; the poem is saying that the speaker hasn’t had an ordinary day because the days have been extraordinary. That’s it. It’s poems like that that make it feel like a cash grab of false fire and staged swoons (also if poetry is a cash grab now I really need to rethink what I’ve done with my life). 

    I’m coming to the end of possibly the meanest streak I’ve ever had in a review, and I want to end on a poem that I found interesting, though I am confident it’s interesting to me unintentionally. The poem is called “The Secrets of the Forest” and it reads as follows:

When the soft winds blow

I can hear the trees whispering.

Their leaves rustling

as they share their thoughts

with the universe.

They talk about the sun, the sky,

the people that roam the earth.

They say we are all one. (20).

Now here’s the thing. At the heart of this poem is a paradox. Let’s accept that “we are all one.” I appreciate that sentiment and largely believe it to be true. But, if everything is one, the premise of the conversation falls apart. Why would trees talk to one another to say “we are all one”; the need to assert the ultimate unity of all things necessarily entails a division. If everything is truly unified, there would be no need nor any way for formerly individualized trees to speak to one another; they would already be sharing the same experience. Likewise, there would be no distinction between the sun, the sky, the people—there would not be different appellations for different entities with which to refer to one another, much less so in the absence of a human ear [the very distance of which subverts the premise—if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does the person not also fall?]. I’m likely overthinking the metaphysics of this piece, but that was the poem that actually made me stop to think.

    I used to have a professor whom I very much admired and he would often use a phrase that was something like, “If a job is no experience necessary, there is no experience gained.” Essentially, it was about how if the barrier for entry (in this case to a text) is nothing, then it won’t provide much when you leave it. Essentially, that’s how I feel about “She’ll Find the Sky.” 

    I’ll bring this review to its natural conclusion here. I’ve exhausted myself with complaints, and I feel quite guilty for offering such a negative review to a book that may very well do good in the world. I hope it finds its audience and that my naysaying does not diminish the joy other people find in this book.

    Happy reading, with apologies to Christy Ann Martine.

Masks by Fumiko Enchi

    It’s rare these days to feel myself so unmoored by a book. At almost no point could I predict where Fumoki Enchi’s Masks was going, and the book felt surprisingly fresh despite originally being published in 1958. I will do my best to explain the premise, but it’s going to be a challenge.

Let’s start with the central characters:

1. Ibuki: A professor-type who is married to Sadako, with whom he has a child.

2. Mikame: Ibuki’s friend and a bachelor professor-type who’s a bit of a philanderer.

3. Mieko: A poet of some renown whose son Akio married Yasuko.

4. Yasuko: A widow who has continued to live with her mother-in-law follow Akio’s death.

5. Harume: A beautiful resident of Mikeo’s household.

    The first four of the characters above have varying interest in spiritualism, and when Ibuki and Mikame run into each other at the coffee shop at the start of the novel, they immediately recollect a seance they had attended with Yasuko. The seance is presented as suspect, but the fear of the medium speaking French and describing a situation echoing Akio’s death incites fear in Yasuko and she grabs Ibuki’s hand. There’s a strange erotic power in the moment that leaves its witnesses in an ambiguous situation.

    From there, the novel progresses along such strange lines. The four central characters visit a mask maker, whose daughter provides them with a kind of gallery tour with the masks haunting the characters in various ways. Following that, some last minute changes of plans force Ibuki and Yasuko onto a train ride together alone. The thing is, it may not have been pure chance. Rumours of a strange closeness between Yasuko and her mother-in-law pervade the text and while she rides the train with Ibuki, there’s an extraordinarily tense and engaging scene. Yasuko explains to Ibuki how she feels Mieko is manipulating her life, ominously pulling all kinds of strings and possessing her as if a spirit. The conversation makes me think of Hitchcock films at their best (is Strangers on a Train too on the nose?), or other modern noirs (à la The Invisible Guest). The tension and intrigue in the conversation is exquisite because it remains unclear whether Yasuko is paranoid or whether there are actually some terrible forces at work. Though both Yasuko and Ibuki are interested in one another, Yasuko suspects that Mieko is trying to manipulate her into partnering with Ibuki for obscure and shadowy reasons. In an act of defiance, she announces that she will get Mikame to marry her—though even that move may have been predetermined by her mother-in-law.

    While the train arrives at the station, the book goes off the rails.

    The novel shifts several times. In one section, the narrator presents a lengthy essay Mieko wrote in her younger years in which she analyzes a character from The Tale of Genji. Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the source material so I’m not able to comment on the incisiveness of the essay or its credibility in-context; its relevance is expounded upon later. Then, despite agreeing to marry Mikame and engaging in courtship, Yasuko maintains a secret affair with Ibuki. The rest of the novel involves private detectives, secret twins, unwanted pregnancies, secret movies, and mysterious plots against characters. The perpetual changes to the plot made this book unpredictable and thoroughly enjoyable.

    Overall, the book was profoundly compelling. I was engrossed in the strange dynamics influencing the characters and felt compelled to pause and reflect as if I were sleuthing my way through a mystery novel. Some of the moments are just magnificent in their quiet tension, especially since the possibility of supernatural forces continually looms in the background. In some ways the atmosphere is similar to a book like The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, where the haunting is always uncertain; the haunting may simply be a side-effect of characters’ psychologies. 

    One scene I’ve already alluded to—the conversation on the train—sets up the central premise of the book so beautifully. To add to the effect, there’s a parallel later on in the novel that is equally tense and enthralling. At one point, Sadako confronts Mikame about the relationship between her husband and Yasuko and the uncertain nature of the book exacerbates the tension wonderfully.

    There’s another scene near the halfway mark of the novel that has a hypnotic quality akin to a Twin Peaks monologue. For context, Yasuko’s husband died in an avalanche and his body couldn’t be found until the spring thaw. Yasuko recounts to her mother-in-law a dream that she had, and given the fact that even small phenomena are charged with meaning, it’s clear that this dream is an omen of something horrible. Enchi is a master of the craft of developing that quiet tension. Yasuko describes the dream as follows:

“This time was by far the worst. Do you remember, right after the accident, how I went up with the search party? They gave each of us a long steel rod to poke down in the snow and hunt for buried objects with. It was frightening—I kept thinking, ‘What if Akio is down in the snow and I stab him with this by mistake?’---but every time I thrust down, when I pulled up the rod again, there in the snow would be a tiny deep hole of a blue that was so pure, so clear, so beautiful, it took my breath away. My arms have never forgotten the feeling of thrusting down…but tonight in my dream I did stab Akio with that rod. I stabbed his dead face straight in the eye” (63).

The dream offers such a viscerally gruesome image that retains some nice symbolic significance in the grand scheme of the novel. These moments really elevate the tone away from the academic register of some of its earliest chapters and into a more haunting domain.

    But if the book is unsettling for its central conversations, it is made more so by the fact that there’s no clear character for readers to grasp onto. The main character seemed to fluctuate and I was continually unclear if I ought to spend my energy predominantly on Ibuki or Yasuko or Mieko or Mikame or someone else; the narration cycled between them charitably, which is a great touch. Normally when we think of third person omniscient narrators we have the belief that we’re getting the most transparent account, but somehow that did not feel true here; because the novel orbits these characters in nearly equal measure, you never really get your footing. It’s an interesting technique that I usually only see achieved with unreliable narrators giving first-person accounts.

    To be clear, the above is not a complaint. Instead, I think it enhances the text and provides for opportunities which would not be available otherwise. Moreover, the unified vision of the book seems to be achieved more thoroughly by separating its characters. Early in the text, Mikame and Ibuki discuss the relationship between Mieko and Yasuko and Mikame compares them to a painting. They debate who is more spirit and who is more shaman between Yasuki and Mieko. Ibuko compares them to a painting:

“In T’ang and Sung paintings of beautiful women or in a Moronobu print of a courtesan, the main figure is always twice the size of her attendants. It’s the same with Buddhist triads: the sheer size of the main image makes the smaller bodhisattvas on either side that much more approachable. Perspective has nothing to do with it, so at first the imbalance is disturbing, but then it has a way of drawing you in …. Anyway, to me Mieko is the large-sized courtesan, and Yasuko is the little-girl attendant at her side” (13).

This passing description comes up a few more times in the text and towards the end of the novel I realized just how actively Enchi achieves this effect in literary form with the characters in Masks. They are always competing for dominance and their relationships are always presented in relief to one another. When I put that approach together with the early description of the painting, the book just clicked and its cohesion was exemplary.

    I am trying to avoid spoilers as best I can, so you’ll have to take it on trust that Enchi ‘turns the screw’ more and more as the story progresses. The stakes continue to increase, the tension continues to grow, and the mystery behind character motives only increases your sense of dread for them.

    Beyond the compelling story and characters of the book, Enchi’s literary style is well-achieved. From the literary essay section, it’s clear that Enchi is able to operate in different modes. While most of the novel reads as matter-of-fact, there are passages that  are aflame with poetry. In one of the closing pages of the novel, the scene’s imagery encapsulates the mood so serenely, balancing beauty with pinches of dread:

“One day, when a mottled layer of ashen clouds was deepening in the sky, and the air shone with a fine, soft drizzle, he got off the bus at Arashiyama and proceeded on foot.

Beside a narrow bamboo-lined path he spotted a stone marker engraved ‘Site of the Shrine in the Fields’ and halted, hands in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat. The sight of the desolate torii gate and shrine—exactly as described in the essay—aroused in him no strong desire to gain a closer view. [...] Muttering the temple name over to himself, he followed a stone pathway into the compound. Standing amid the fresh greenery inside were several tall chestnut trees, whose cream-colored corollas scattered a shower of powdery blossoms into the breeze, sprinkling Ibuki’s hair and shoulders with their petals. Their spacious grounds were hushed and deserted. Over the high bell tower drooped sprays of golden flowers—broom, perhaps—with the unstudied grace of a discarded kimono” (135).

I love the way the passage balances the light and the dark: “powdery blossoms” and “petals” and yet the grounds are “hushed and deserted.” There is no unqualified joy in the moment, and given the plot context it’s a perfect alignment of different elements. I suppose it would be classed as pathetic fallacy, though I think it goes beyond that.

    I will not spoil the ending of the book, so you’ll have to trust me that it’s great. Even until the very last pages I wasn’t sure where the book was going but nothing ever felt out of place or out of align with the logic of the Masks universe. The book begins on a mystery and ends on a mystery, which allows you to reevaluate other moments throughout the text. I repeat that the book remains fresh. 

    As I come up to the third page of this review, I feel that I have not yet said enough about Masks. There are many layers to it and many that are difficult to articulate. All I can say is that this book is one of the best spontaneous purchases I’ve made from an overstocked book store based on cover alone.

    Happy reading, everyone!