Marina Blitshteyn. Two Hunters. Litchfield, CT: Argos Books, 2019. 112 pages. $16.00.
Marwa Helal. Invasive Species. New York, NY: Nightboat Books, 2019. 144 pages. $16.95.
Coming to America, returning to America, or having a hyphenated American identity: the relationship of the immigrant to home often involves a queasy sense of possession. One holds a history and a self that does not properly speak American. Yet one also seeks the stability of a home—even when the failing empire that holds out the possibility is questionable at best. Do we want to possess and be possessed by America? What must be seen, questioned, and pushed against, even as we try to build a home?
Both Marwa Helal and Marina Blitshteyn address these (dis)inheritances in their debut poetry collections. Helal was born in Egypt and grew up in the United States, but spent much of her twenties struggling with a mercurial immigration system that rejected her visa application and kept her out of the US for years. Blitshteyn immigrated to Buffalo, New York, in 1991 from Moldova, escaping a rising tide of antisemitism in the last days of the Soviet Union. These writers’ lives elicit complicated engagements with America, and very different ones. But both Blitshteyn and Helal’s books foreground the alphabet as a system for ordering the experience of dislocation. And while they enter a long lineage of abecedarians and alphabetical orders, the poets’ taut relationships to American power and American language form a compelling statement on how our letters may help us organize the trauma in immigration.
Helal makes language an active zone from the first page of Invasive species, opening with her much-discussed formal innovation: a “poem to be read from right to left” that engages the English reader’s eye in the direction of Arabic.
of tired got i
number the counting
words english of
to takes it
in 1 capture
another
The reader is destabilized directly: their position in relation to language is overturned, their linguistic identity reoriented. Helal’s concern with representation (untranslatability and misrepresentation as kissing cousins) reaches down to the smallest units of meaning. “Let every letter represent a human standing in protest,” she writes. English, in Invasive species, is often mustered just so: as an army of signaling bodies to oppose the bureaucratic violences and silencings erected in its name.
This attention to letters reaches its apogee in the book’s long middle section, “Immigration as a Second Language,” which tells the story of Helal’s battle for a visa to return to the American home she’d known since age two. This lyric essay is structured in alphabetical order (A for Asylum, B for Birthplace, etc), with twenty-eight entries in total (two more than the Roman, but equal to the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet). In doing so, it is both a primer on the American immigration system and a gutting personal memoir.
The dramatic peak of the sequence occurs in E (for Embassy), the longest entry, when Helal describes being turned away by U.S. officials in Cairo:
Visit Three: July 21, 10:00 a.m.
I arrive with both my parents. My father flew in from the US specifically for this. It’s clear the officer has made up her mind before she sees my file.
“Did you burn your old passports?” she asks my father.
“Do you have health insurance?” she angrily asks my mother.
I’m not sure what this has to do with my application. I can’t remember what she’s asked me, what I’m trying to answer when she says, “I’ll refuse you for the fun of it.”My application is turned away (not denied—it’s as if they never saw it, as if I had never been there at all—erased, gone).
Helal’s sentences carefully reproduce the feelings of helplessness before a power that has no face. The nameless officer (at the end of the scene, the speaker will ask for her business card and be refused) interrogates, but no answers are reproduced on the page. The protagonist is rendered mute. Invasive species is rife with questions, interviews, and interrogations like this one, all serving to put the reader in the Kafkaesque position of fearful, beleaguered responder.
In such scenes of deprivation, Helal defends the self that exists between the flaccid categories of bureaucracy, in the interstices of its stupid questions. The interrogation “Where are you from?” is a microaggression commonly experienced by people of color; many nonwhite writers have used it as a prompt for poetry and clapback. But in this query Helal also uncovers a tenderness: “no matter where I am, the question never changes. The question is an uncomfortable home of sorts.” In recognizing that home is never stable, total, or trustworthy, Helal erects a new home in the movement of alphabets—the sure, progressive spine of A to B to C.
Two Hunters is also cagey about the idea of home, but Marina Blitshteyn focuses more on the interiority of the immigrant as she fashions a self through language. Blitshteyn’s work is consumed by an attention to sound, to the fruitful slippages of meaning that occur in rhyme and pun and rhythm’s natural bricolage. In “self-portrait w/documentation,” the speaker considers how her American self is made, and under whose surveillance:
TV met your new face
smiling at the screen
we told youshow us your
hands show us
what you got there
got there in your
pocket show us
the forms
worn and all still
going by the wayside
show us what you
know mother
country you mother
country you
mother
The result is a passionate tension between the American one wants to be and the system of disenfranchisement by which one is repulsed. Blitshteyn’s lyrics examine another problem of assimilation: even when you succeed in making yourself American, are you succeeding? Or are you, to quote Helal’s muse DJ Khaled, playing yourself?
Hip-hop is a presiding spirit for both Helal and Blitshteyn. Helal invokes the Palestinian-American Khaled, as well as Juvenile, Kanye West, and The Game, drawing upon their ethos and their song structures. For Blitshteyn, hip-hop is a passport to Americanness. From ’90s rap, she has learned swagger, rhythm, and the satisfaction of changing up a flow mid-verse, landing solidly on the one. She has also learned the value of having a song to recite. Blitshteyn’s relationship to hip-hop lyrics is similar to that of much of her generation, and is metonymic of that central experience of childhood: sounds first, implications after.
i meant what i knew at the time
as far as the sounds of words
my limits of knowing
my love of rhyme
my whiteness here
somebody stop it
. . .
i memorize lines
i pick them up quick
performed in close quarters
so nobody listens
and nobody does
but my family
who love that i know
all the words
but not what they mean here
To the family audience, the sounds of American seem applaudable. Yet the last line’s ambiguous “they” is several retrospective revelations at once: parents might not have known what black slang meant, but they were equally unsure of their own roles in this new country. This is what it means to try on a new language: you can master the sounds, but context lays traps everywhere.
The book’s third section, “Cover Letters,” positions the speaker’s adult struggles (as a writer seeking employment) in relation to the alphabet of her childhood. Eleven poems in this section are titled with letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. Each is highly musical, working over the sounds of Russian and its echoes in English to build uneasy, lilting syntheses between past and present. In “л” or “love in Moldova,” a rhapsody for the homeland links sound and sense across languages. Blitshteyn addresses the country as “moya / moldova, moya lyubovnitza” (my Moldova, my mistress)—then uses the unspoken English “mistress” to pivot into the next half rhyme: “missed you last winter, / darling, moldova.” Yet the music also reveals the difficulty of knowing what to do with a past that’s been decontextualized:
moldova moya, moy
gorod, svoboda, my little
mother, my proper model,my small apartment,
my playground, my bottle
my cobbles, my sled,my awkward muddle
Blitshteyn’s alphabetic lyrics alternate with poems of professional undertakings, some written as actual cover letters and grant applications in verse. Other poems paint visions of well-to-do American families (several are called “The Americans”), as if the immigrant watches the good life from outside a window. In total, “Cover Letters” inscribes an order on the experience of assimilation, using the mnemonic touchstones that one’s first alphabet provides. Yet it also points to the ungainly, unending work of trying to be American—a continual performance that occurs in speech.
In response to a world that refuses some part of their humanity, it seems natural that both Blitshteyn and Helal often foreground their own qualifications. Helal reminds the reader of her Americanness: “I was a National Honors Society student; captain of my Midwestern division three state qualifying tennis team . . . .” Blitshteyn’s letters are even balder in their plaint: “Dear Sir or Madame, / I am a highly qualified / and gifted person” begins “Grant.” These bids for acceptance might cloy at a reader, but they are also what the power-knowledge bloc of American empire demands of us: we are meant to seek approval, even from that which we detest. This is the fundamental erotics of living in relation to power. We beg to be taken in; hate the system from which we need protection; and hate ourselves for desiring such accommodation.
Which returns us to the question of possession. An alphabet is the primary non-material possession: it precedes any awareness of citizenship. It enlarges our world. A speaker’s capacity to hold and harness the alphabet for her personal purposes is the ultimate vindication. As two emerging voices so fully in possession of their materials, Blitshteyn and Helal claim their place within American letters, yet remain conscious of the harm those letters can cause.