Mirror Life

As far as I can tell, it is an accident of history that certain languages, such as English, came to be written from left to right, and others, such as Farsi, are written from right to left. What determined a language’s direction were the tools available as the technology of writing took hold. If you were right-handed, so the theory goes, and wanted to carve letters into stone, you held the chisel in your left hand and the hammer in your right, forming letters while moving from the right edge of the surface to the left. But if in your right hand you held a pen, you would want to move across the page from left to right, lest your hand smudge the marks as you made them. You would want, in either case, to leave your words behind.

Arbitrary as its establishment might have been, the direction of writing has had profound effects on our lives: it has given form to the experience of time. People who write from left to right tend to imagine time flowing in that direction—and vice-versa. Cognitive psychologists have shown that when giving native speakers of English a series of photographs of the same person at different ages and asking the speakers to put the images in order, they will typically arrange the pictures chronologically from youngest to oldest, left to right. Farsi speakers will perform the same task from right to left. When I explained this finding to my mother, whose primary language, until the age of 33, was Farsi and who has lived in the United States for more than four decades since, she asked aloud (in English) what it meant that she would arrange, without hesitation, the images from left to right.

Perhaps time’s arrow can be reversed. During the period in which he composed the poems in his second full-length collection, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021), Kaveh Akbar was slowly teaching himself how to read Farsi, the language of his infancy, a language—for him as for me—long since displaced by English. (Over the last few years, Akbar and I have from time to time corresponded about this overlapping history and other mutual interests: poetry, criticism, my Lakers, his Bucks. I was touched to find my name in Pilgrim Bell’s acknowledgments.) In the poem “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic,” Akbar’s attempt to regain the literacy for which he might, in some alternate time line, have been bound is presented first as a scene of halting, frustrated progress: “The title,” the poem begins, “is a lie; / I can’t read Farsi.” What the poem’s speaker is trying to read is a poem by the 20th-century Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad; the speaker pauses over one of her lines that he cannot at first decipher:

ما هر چه را که باید از دست داده باشیم از دست داده ایم
 
I can make out:
 
“we lose,
we lose.”
 
I type it into a translation app:
“we have lost everything we need to lose.”

We soon learn that this is a slight mistranslation, but it presses a question that haunts the poem’s speaker and Akbar himself throughout Pilgrim Bell: what has he given up to become the person whose words we now read?

The translation app wants him to believe that the transition from innocence to experience (Farrokhzad’s poem is about the threshold through which we pass at age seven) has been efficient—we lose everything we need to lose (and nothing we don’t). But the truth, which arrives in a text message from his father, is more unsettling:

When I text
ما هر چه را که باید از دست داده باشیم از دست داده ایم
 
to my dad he writes back,
“we have lost whatever we had to lose.”

A poet writing in English texts a line of Persian poetry to his father, a native speaker of Farsi, who quite literally reverses the direction of that line and texts back what becomes, in his son’s hands, a line of English poetry. The rhetorical term for the form of the exchange initiated here by the son (right to left, dad, dad, left to right: ABBA) is chiasmus, a figure of mirrored reversal at the core of Pilgrim Bell. The newly translated line lands with brutal force: anything we might have lost, we have lost; we have lost everything. It also lands, as Akbar notes in his poem’s next lines, with unforgiving irony, as “Hammering / pentameter”: blank verse, the heroic meter of English poetry, the line of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Wordsworth. Here, then, are the master’s tools.

Elsewhere in Pilgrim Bell, Akbar describes an attempt to trade in those tools and redress that loss. The rhythms of poetry, whether the pentameter of English or the sonorous cadences of Persian, suggest their own mental architecture but so too do the sonic atmosphere and ordinary turns of phrase each language affords. In “Forfeiting My Mystique,” Akbar presents language as the first home, the earliest object of nostalgic desire:

Some nights I force
my brain to dream me
Persian by listening
to old home movies
as I fall asleep.

Late at night, just before sleep, my mind sometimes fills with Farsi—snatches of conversation, voices young and old, male and female, perhaps some half-remembered gathering in which I was barely seen, barely conscious. For Akbar, such reversals, when he can will them into existence, are provisional; the cost of living, of wakefulness, is an ever-increasing alienation from one’s origins:

                    In the
mornings I open my eyes
and spoil the séance. Am I
 
forfeiting my mystique?

The person he is marks the outlines of the person he never came to be, a paradox of presence and absence that, as it happens, his first language describes well:

                    In Farsi,
we say jaya shomah khallee
when a beloved is absent
from our table—literally:
 
your place is empty. I don’t
know why I waste my time
with the imprecision of saying
anything else, like using
a hacksaw to slice a strawberry
when I have a razor in my
pocket.

Who has filled the space left by possibility? Akbar’s first collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), tells the story of the poet’s journey from intoxication and addiction to sobriety and recovery; that book narrates his hard-won attunement to life as it is. In Pilgrim Bell, that personal history is amplified and its consequences extended into an ongoing challenge: how to find the language to tell the truth about a fall from language, a fall from potentiality and into mere life. More vexing still: how to do this in English, whose aesthetic, formal, and political demands pull the poet away from the objects of his attention. “I can’t write this,” Akbar admits, in a poem about his father’s spoken accent, “without trying to make it / beautiful.”

In response to this problem, Akbar has, in Pilgrim Bell, invented a new form. He has found what feels like a secret passageway in the house that is English-language poetry. That new form is evident in the volume’s six title poems, which share not only a title but also a novel way of realigning the two basic systems that organize most poems: syntax and line. Typically, readers think of a poem as end-stopped when the endings of syntactical units tend to coincide with the poem’s line breaks. When this doesn’t happen, when syntax spills over the line, a poem is enjambed. Lines in the “Pilgrim Bell” poems are extremely short, phrase-length—and yet, unlike, say, the short lines of poets such as William Carlos Williams or James Schuyler, they are, as a rule, end-stopped. Though they therefore feel tight, they also rely heavily on caesura. Their sentences are fragments, which sometimes follow from the previous fragment as, in ordinary speech, one phrase might follow from another and sometimes attach forward to the following fragment. In fact, though they are end-stopped—each line ends with a period—they somehow feel enjambed: the period is transformed into a kind of trapdoor. The lines thus produce a weird temporality: they stop and start, occasionally seeming to reverse their tracks before proceeding forward again. They position readers relentlessly at the point of dreadful anticipation, contemplating both the finality of the fall to come and the uncertainty of the steps that have led to this point.

Here, for example, are the opening lines of the first “Pilgrim Bell” (also the volume’s first poem):

Dark on both sides.
Makes a window.
Into a mirror. A man.
Holds his palms out.
To gather dew.

The first line reads initially as a bit of scene setting, but once readers see that it is the grammatical subject of the second line’s predicate, the period at the end of the first line becomes not a marker of closure but a hinge into what follows. The period at the end of the second line operates similarly; the poem, as all poems do, teaches us how to read it. Darkness on both sides makes a window into a mirror: once the line breaks and the periods are removed, what is left is a fact about optics, familiar to anyone who has, at night, attempted to peer into (or out of) a darkened house.

But the periods and line breaks also create a linguistic equivalent of that optical phenomenon. Readers confront barriers and can’t be sure whether they see through them or whether what is visible, as though beyond them, are their own images reflected in a polished surface. That uncertainty is on display in the caesura of the poem’s third line. If periods are read not as full stops but as brief rests, as hinges, then readers are inclined to take the third line’s “A man” as an appositive phrase to the preceding “a mirror” (Darkness on both sides makes a window into a mirror, a man). But then the fourth line shows readers that this is wrong—or at least not the primary sense of the lines: “A man” must have been the grammatical subject of “Holds his palms out.” Is this man, who seems ready to receive, a traveler? A pilgrim? If so, his progress is halting, broken, uncertain.

In one of the book’s epigraphs, the Prophet is asked how inspiration is revealed. His answer: “Sometimes it is revealed like the ringing of a bell.” So it is in these poems, where meaning, like the ringing of a bell, can feel sudden and discrete, struck by a single blow, resonant and recursive, a sound that unfolds even as it echoes, that accumulates in the interplay of the volume’s linguistic memory. The “Pilgrim Bell” poems can also sound violent and full of dark power: “I am a threat. / Even in my joy. Like a cat who. Playing kills. / A mouse and tongues. / It back to life.” That power has mysterious origins; it emerges from the toxic brew of the desire to speak and the need to breathe:

How long can you speak.
Without inhaling. How long.
Can you inhale without.
Bursting apart. History is wagging.
Its ass at us.

That last end-stopped enjambment is deflationary and funny, even if sinister—this poet is one of us, he, too, is beset by larger forces—but elsewhere the speaker makes extravagant claims:

I demand.
To be forgiven.
 
I demand.
A sturdier soul.
 
Every person I’ve met.
Has been small enough.
 
To fit.
In my eye.

Later, in this vein: “I would prefer. / Not. To be outlived. / By anyone.” Each phrase secures the foothold for the next, even as it amplifies the peril of a potential (or perhaps inevitable) fall:

I am so vulnerable.
To visionaries.
And absolute.
Certainty.
 
Tell me how to live.
And I will live that way.

In ordinary language, the period is the marker of absolute certainty. In these poems, though, certainty is revealed to be the dreadful fiction that readers must believe to move through life at all. Akbar worried about the impulse to make his writing beautiful. Here beauty takes hold, then shimmers and dissolves: it, too, was part of the fiction.

The cost of this revelation is made plain in “The Palace,” the volume’s final poem, as well as its longest and perhaps most ambitious. The title refers, in one sense, to the comfort of the poet’s American life, which, he reveals, is “growing monstrous / with ease.” What makes the ease monstrous is the history that has produced it. That history is, in part, family history:

To be an American my father left his siblings
                            believing
he’d never see them again. My father
                              wanted to be Mick Jagger. My father
            went full ghost,
ended up working on duck farms for thirty years. Once a sleep,
            a couch,
            he coughed up a feather.

The father gives his body to make the comfort his son enjoys; his body literally becomes “monstrous / with ease.” In this poem, the material comforts of American life are inseparable from the imperial violence encoded into the nation’s past and present and casually threatened by its most secure and ostensibly innocent citizens:

There is no elegant way
            to say this—people
            with living hearts
            that could fit in my chest
want to melt the city where I was born.
 
At his elementary school in an American suburb,
a boy’s shirt says, “We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!”

One persistent question Akbar contemplates is how to maintain a connection to one’s origins, and thus a continuous sense of one’s own life, when working in a language that moves, in almost every sense, in the opposite direction. “Any document of civilization,” Akbar writes (paraphrasing Walter Benjamin), “is also a document of barbarism.” Among those documents are these poems. Akbar knows full well that they can neither simply exempt themselves from the cruelty of the language in which they were written, the language of empire, nor undo its violence.

The tools of poetry, the tools at hand, are inadequate to that task. The courage of this poetry, however, its terrible beauty, is that it has given its artfulness over to the scene of its fall: “The dead keep warm under America / while my mother fries eggplant on a stove.” The poem cannot redress the violence it describes, but it can hold a place from which, for poet and reader alike, that history can be known:

I am not there.
I am elsewhere in America (I am always
elsewhere in America) writing this, writing this, writing this, English
is my mother’s first language,
but not mine.
I might have said bademjan.
I might have said khodafez.
 

            Sizzling oil, great fists of smoke, writing this.

 

This writing, like this cooking, produces smoke. It shows readers the fire. It turns its language back on itself, and—here is its miracle—it quickens the lives suspended in its flames.