Browsing through a photo-album, making a long distance call, receiving a letter or a visitor, heading home, complaining about work, picking someone up at the airport, using a paper and a pencil, having sex, having a family, having a state, having a language, having a name; these “daily, daily things,” as Solmaz Sharif puts it at one point in Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), are privileges tightly controlled and distributed by political, legal, and cultural institutions whose power is maintained by specific grammars, protocols, processes. And by textual sites like the US Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a source that Sharif, an immigrant of Iranian descent, draws on, disrupts, repurposes, and tangles up with the experience of the minoritized bodies it encodes, targets, and kills. The re-appropriation of found language is at once a method and a subject for the poems, which explore the circulation of meaning through military chains of command, mass cultural channels, family histories, and who-knows-where as it comes to us, the readers.
Sharif begins by defining a zone of combat whose borders she goes on to flaunt, to redraw: “Look—(*) In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.” The poems are mined from an admixture of official and personal accounts of human experience in such a way that this “mine circuit” calls up questions of self-ownership and the relation of a self to the influences that may shape it. Read in the context of formal play, of poetry’s capacity to relieve words from the burden of everyday usage, the “sanctioned twoness” of reference illustrated by mine/mine is something to take pleasure in. But it creeps eerily, urgently, through the realities that matter to Look, highlighting the double standards that undergird forms of disenfranchisement and aggression against people from the Middle East, of Muslim faith, and of color in today’s political climate.
The longer history of biopolitical control and its ties to white supremacy is taken up in The Work-Shy, Blunt Research Group’s investigation into early twentieth-century eugenics initiatives in and outside the US. Like Look, the book falls in with contemporary trends in poetries of citation, documentation, and witness, in which the political and ethical stakes of using found language are often heightened by a focus on representing those deprived of the right to—or the instruments necessary for—their own self-representation. Attempting at once to acknowledge the historical violence embedded in its archive and to avoid its reproduction, the members of Blunt Research Group enforce a constraint: they will only use language from the records they uncover. Their choice to remain anonymous as they rearrange what they call “loan words” raises important questions for the entire field of citational and conceptual poetics—which includes word-borrowers of many stripes—about sources, sourcelessness, and what sorts of realities inhere in projects of linguistic remediation.
“The names are real.” So says the Blunt Research Group in the preface to “Lost Privilege Company,” the first of three sections in The Work-Shy. Frances, Cornelius, Josephine, Dorito, Edward, Pedro—they emerge, ghostly yet bearing intense gravity, from the cabinets of the Eugenics Records Office, in which their case notes are filed with those of twenty-thousand other American youths who were detained in reformatories, workhouses, and asylums, deemed unfit to procreate and surgically sterilized over the first half of the twentieth century. We meet them suspended in atmospheric, grayed-out print as the poems transcribe, translate, and assemble textual fragments and images in a “gesture seeking permission to listen.” The structure is straightforward, progressive, a careful and serious loosening of stories—Carl’s, Wilhelm’s, Jacqueline’s, Hyacinth’s—from the reductive strictures of institutional frameworks. “Lost Privilege Company” is primarily composed from the notes of “fieldworkers” at California’s Whittier State School; set in italics, the voices of “wards” bubble up, pleading for recognition—“i’m here”—only to be dismissed and pathologized, derided as “depraved,” “profane,” “obscene,” or “immoral,” attributed to a “cold-blooded schemer,” a “High Grade Moron,” or a “great big over-sexed boy,” as symptoms of “mania,” “lachrymose excitability” (crying), or the “onset of incorrigibility.” The gazes of Victor R, Edward Leiva, or Leonard H, which reach out from intermittent photographic portraits, convey none of these proclivities to antisocial behavior. Instead, these images are marked by the racialized, criminalizing conventions of the mug shot—brown and black skin, numbered plates bridging the lapels of jackets, profile shots peeking from strategically placed mirrors.
The photographs, even more so than the case notes, highlight the historical fact of the silence imposed on their subjects. Keeping in mind the fine line between inviting and coercing them to speak, The Work Shy’s middle section pauses to reflect on methodology. The series of meditations that comprise “The Book of Listening” (the absence of the visual field is striking here) bear out important “distinctions between listening, overhearing, and eavesdropping” in a search for kinds of writerly and readerly attention that, as the poems move forward, can “satisfy an aversion to theatricality.” “CREEDMOORBLANCA” gathers the “infidel language” of inmates from additional archives: Nazi institutes in Heidelberg and Breitenau, the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York, and the Pacific Colony for the Feebleminded. As if the fieldworkers were away from the premises, an in-group’s private idiom develops, registered in the proliferation of such words and phrases as “trikadero,” “exactology,” “jiggered up,” “crooked it off’n him,” “societologically,” and “Ish gebibble!” The free-floating lines and tentative spacing of the early poems give way to more internally regular, stanza-like forms that vary page by page and name by name, so that individual voices seem to be solidifying, accruing particular rhythms and vocabularies. Similarly, the portraits yield to a wider range of images, some of which capture the creative output of inmates themselves; once displayed as examples of “degenerate art,” they are recontextualized here not as symptoms of illness but as traces of subjectivity. Sewn dresses and doodled curves are scrawled over with what might be handwriting exercises, or diary entries. Often barely legible, graphite impressions softened by time, the words are hard to make out.
The most attentive and tender gestures of recognition manifest in such moments of strained or distanced receiving. Take the words that seem to give voice to an inmate called Jules, over which we may stumble, and dwell, in the realized incongruity between the seen and the heard:
Ive lost tutch with mye selph
Ide bee blyged iff yoo
cood spair a pockit hanker cheer for Jools
[…]
mye syst her througher alms
surround mye nekk Yore syst
hearse herb itch Getcher sell foam
The personal testimony begins to wiggle out of the straightjackets of spelling rules, articulating experience in its own terms—Jules has not a self but a “selph,” not a sister but a “syst her,” whose arms become the “alms” of embrace. The poem deftly refuses to figure this fragile, unconventional correspondence between sound and sign as a result of illness, as a cyst, instead lavishing in the phenomenological aspects of phonetics that make it possible to imagine the “lost tutch,” the stolen intimacies, of a displaced and confined child.
Yet it is difficult not to sense the skilled hand of the assemblers in this moment of brief catharsis. Is this reconstructed scene as real as the names of inmates? How much room for invention does an anonymous listening gesture permit? Despite the Blunt Research Group’s sensitivities, the suggestion of homecoming in “Getcher sell foam” feels too easy, even false, especially when read alongside the ways Sharif manages such gestures in Look, which circles around and reaches toward reunions with loved ones but never touches, never arrives. Perhaps my feeling has something to do with the contemporaneity of Look’s subject matter, or the fact that it can lean on a pseudo-autobiographical foundation lacking in The Work-Shy’s anonymous authorship. Then again, Sharif’s “I” is profoundly un- or up-rooted, epistolary but redacted, circulating in anti-Muslim stereotypes and speaking “like the world listens”—because, for those under NSA surveillance, it does. This of course raises the issue of anonymity as a privilege. It also brings me to a subtle but crucial insight offered in Look: the institutional “mine warfare” that seeks to control the expressions, movements, and representations of particular individuals is enabled all the time by abstract, anonymous mediations and remediations of found language and images.
That’s because, as Look makes visible, the military’s organizing logics saturate and animate the “daily, daily” verbal-visual mass media discourses that at turns erase and spectacularize the suffering of marginalized bodies. Take one of the book’s first poems, which redefines a military term by way of an image:
BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION on fire
a body running
Glaring out from an otherwise blank page, “BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION” does a kind of captioning, naming a scene that is at once shocking and familiar, recognizable, out of a movie; and in movies the people on fire are rarely the good guys. Heroes make appearances, too: for instance, when, “At the WWII memorial, FDR thanks women / for sacrificing their sons / and their nylons. ” The zeugma’s equation of human beings with stockings draws attention to the incongruities between defense discourse, heartwarming media moments and precarious realities that, as Sharif emphasizes, are in practice easy to gloss over. She makes a similar move in “DESIRED APPRECIATION,” as a White House PR photo-shoot morphs into its obverse, a scene of interrogation and torture that supposedly also informs the public sense of security: “the nation must administer / A bit of hope…. Must muss up / some kid’s hair and let him loose / Around the Oval Office. click click could be cameras / Or the teeth of handcuffs closing to fix / The arms overhead.” Elsewhere, poems consisting entirely of captions—“Soldier, Home Early, Surprises His Wife in Chick-fil-A,” or “A young soldier (pictured above) the son of an imam, brother to six, is among the latest casualties in the military campaign of Susangerd”—intensify our sense of the precarious relation between a given reality and its unanchored, unattributed signage.
There are no photographs in Look, no possibility for ogling; figuring the un-pictured, the poems enact a kind of ekphrasis. This is another strategy, an unrelenting one, to “satisfy” The Work-Shy’s “aversion to theatricality,” as an epigraph from Susan Sontag near the center of book suggests: “Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” The apparatus of visual culture referenced in Look—cameras, shutters, lenses, albums, stages, and film reels abound—is charged with producing a sort of pornographic “CONTINUOUS STRIP IMAGERY” that frames people as objects rather than subjects. As the sequence moves toward an imagined meeting with a deceased uncle, and as institutionalized forms of representation penetrate even the most private spaces—“The enlarged ID photo above her mantel,” Sharif writes, “means I can know Amoo, / my dear COLLATERAL DAMAGE, // as only a state or a school might do”—we sense how thoroughly imprisoned we are by the many-layered conventions by which we might encounter ourselves and each other. Meanwhile we can catch glimpses, as in a description of a camera rolling on Sharif’s father, “his hair
black as mine is now, I’m four and in Alabama, I see him
between odd jobs in different states,
and on the video our friend shows baba a picture
of me and asks how do you feel when you see Solmaz?
and baba saying turn the camera off then
turn off the camera and then
can you please look away I don’t want you to see my baba cry
Struggling to escape the confines of “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT” is a laborious, confusing, and painful process. We can’t dress in camouflage, steal the keys, and release wards/words, as, for this reviewer, Blunt Research Group seems to. Circulation, anonymous or not, has its own strictures; within them, Sharif’s look lingers like “a film projection caught / in theater dust.”
November 2017
This review was published in Issue 61:1.