Poem of the week: from The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi
Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza, 2014)
I would like to tell her not to wear such flimsy shoes,
that rubble contains the whole spectrum of knowable
and unknowable dangers: sheets of metal ripped
to knife edge, live wires, bloated arms reaching
for light. Her hair, scraped back into a ponytail,
is open to sky; remnants of buildings filter down
one concrete chunk at a time, and the midday bells
of rockets ring out above her. She carries a boy
on her still narrow hips, his legs entwined around
her yellow dungarees. Like a rodeo rider, his left arm
grips her shoulder to steady himself, or her,
while his torso reels back and away; his body
is asking to slow down, to turn back. Instead,
her eyes comb the ground for a next step, fingers
of her free hand curled into a claw, as if
to frighten off what she somehow sees ahead.
Marjorie Lotfi’s first full-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask is clear-eyed, sometimes productively reticent debut, and was one of three winners of the James Berry Poetry prize in October.
Migration and exile are significant themes in Lotfi’s poems. Born in New Orleans to an Iranian father and an American mother, she moved with her family to Tehran while she was still an infant, but left “with one suitcase and an hour’s notice” at the onset of the Iranian revolution. She lived in various parts of the US, studied law and has now settled in Edinburgh. Her cultural literacy produces a finely observant poetry of difference, as when Lotfi records, in Two Grandmothers, the pair’s first meeting in Tehran in 1978. One is from the north-western city of Tabriz, and, during the encounter, speaks only Farsi, the second language she learned in school. The other grandmother, speaking English only, is from Frankfort, Ohio. Lotfi captures photographically their gestures of calmly accepted non-communication (“meaning can be mistaken”) and a final act of gracious contact I won’t divulge, as that would spoil the storytelling art that is a further pleasure of Lotfi’s approach.
This week’s poem is the first in a diptych, in which Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza, 2014) is paired, on the facing page, with Boy, Looking Away (Gaza 2015). The poems are numbered I and II in the collection but not presented under a single title. The boy in the second poem is named, and isn’t, I think, the same child as in the first. I chose the latter because the anonymity of both children enhances the photographic story, and brings it closer to those of us with a current daily experience of watching videos of civilians in a distant war zone. It’s also a reminder that what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war” extends beyond specific politics.
Universal embodiments of the effects of war on childhood, the girl and boy are presented in sufficient detail for some of their most basic sensations to be imagined. They’re not depersonalised; the poem begins with an expression of almost maternal empathy and continues to give the figures of the children life and depth. At the same time, their inaccessibility is absolute.
Despite its formal dress of four quatrains, the poem skims its diction from the language of reportage. It’s colloquial and unfussy. There’s a moment of inexact grammar (“Like a rodeo rider, his left arm / grips her shoulder to steady himself / or her”) and a potentially awkward cliche (“her eyes comb the ground for a next step”). Both instances are in fact brilliantly self-redeeming. The “rodeo rider” analogy creates visual dislocation. The boy is not in control; he’s pulled about in a torment of conflicting directions. That his legs are “entwined around” his sister “while his torso reels back and away” reveals perceptively how war skews even the unwounded body of a child, and, by implication, childhood itself. The grammatical misplacement of “boy” as subject by “arm” is integral to that effect.
Again, with the fourth stanza picture of the girl’s eyes “comb[ing] the ground for a next step”, we remember what the ground was like in the first, the “sheets of metal, ripped / to knife edge, live wires, bloated arms reaching // for light.” It’s a messy, weaponised conglomeration of what must be untangled visually with extreme care and avoided before taking a single forward step. To imagine those “eyes” is to wince.
The vulnerability of the girl is focused on additional body parts and bodily senses. She’s wearing “flimsy shoes” so her almost-bare toes also have to act as combs. It’s her hair, memorably, that “is open to sky” – the “remnants of buildings” still descending as skull-crushing “concrete chunks”. The pathos of attempted normalisation is mocked by the routine noise of the midday rockets, the recurrent sound that the child hears, perhaps, as a reminder of school bells.
Hair “scraped back into a ponytail” - a hairstyle that is practical as well as proud, and demands a last scraping of all resources. Ledging her brother’s weight on the hips she still barely possesses, the girl is forced to carry a maternal burden beyond her years. Back at school, she might be studying, playing, preening. But even her free hand is “curled into a claw, as if / to frighten off what she somehow sees ahead”. Like the boy’s skewed body, the clawed hand has been forged by tension. And it has become a potential weapon.
The poet presents herself initially as a participant in in the scene. So there are three figures in the poem, each of whom is being differently torn against their wishes. But Lotfi is a quiet and faithful witness. There is no self-indulgent introspection. She insists on seeing what she sees.
Commonly transliterated in English language reports as Bureij, Burij refugee camp has suffered frequent Israeli airstrikes. Two freelance journalists, Hassouna Sleem and Sary Mansour, were killed there last month.
