“Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time,” wrote John Berger some 40 years ago. He continued, “Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but also undoing the very meaning of the world and, at its most extreme, abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd.” Does anyone have a “home” today? The tribal animosities that CNN’s talking heads call “geopolitics” are both lethal and obsolete, like blood-letting or asbestos. With the dissolution of the notion of home comes, said Berger, “the untold story of a life being lived … The one hope of recreating a center is now to make it the entire earth.”
The poems in Charif Shanahan’s second collection, Trace Evidence, abandon themselves to the situation Berger recognized. The poems exist in both the wake of emigration and the “unreal” conditions it entails. “When I tell you / I don’t know what to do with my life, / I mean I don’t know how to stay inside it,” he writes in “Control.” If the poems, then, are forms in which that life may be seen at last, perhaps we can say that Shanahan’s work enacts the enjoyment of what has not been granted to him. The stark, stricken beauty of his utterances also creates a presence that is gorgeous in extremity, a promising tactic when looking for love. When he asks, “Is it possible that my function is to hold / All the intricate, interstitial pain / And articulate clarity?”, we catch him at the very moment when he may be about to answer “yes.” Shanahan’s clarity is antidotal – even as we wait to see if what hasn’t yet been afforded has a chance of becoming actual.
His backstory is present here – he was born in the Bronx to a mother who emigrated from Morocco, and an Irish-American father. But the persona in Trace Evidence yearns for more than merely fitting in, of being accepted – especially when his conceptions of selfhood and purpose are ungrasped. There is the task of “recreating a center” that Berger points to. For Shanahan, this entails encountering both personal and societal turmoils, both discrete and blended when gathered within a single glimpse. These are the opening lines of “My People”:
I have longed to say My People
Not because I was born
Of two peoples, of blue
Tiled walls and strip malls,
Not because I don’t know
Where I belong, or
With whom, or worse
“Who I am”
As onlookers have
In their pity proclaimed,
The lovers, too,
After they‘ve exited
My body, which they felt
Emboldened to name …
The repetition of “Not because” signals his impatience with us, since we are too quick simply to proclaim our pity and leave it at that. But he won’t linger within this familiar disappointment. He continues:
… I
Have wanted to say My people
And to be clear
To all people, to any you
Imagined by the mind
Of an embodied you
That was also first imagined.
I am interested in repair
Without shame. I am
Interested in restitution
With anger. I am
Interested in anger
As love, in having
Anyone who hears the phrase
See it vanish into the edge
Of what they know, to know
How far I mean it to reach –
This singular moment of speaking contains the trials and traces of emigration, the discomfiture of the present moment, and the “reach” into a vision of potential oneness – which makes this moment of dispossession archetypal, since it repeats (has and will repeat) for all of us. Berger wrote, “Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates.” Shanahan’s work exactly. The poem’s final lines:
My people
As redundancy, as symbol
Of the first truth,
Immutable, almost
Banal in its assertion:
If you are on this earth,
You are of this earth.
Depictions of social life are minimal or ungratifying or ephemeral in these poems, suggesting that the social life itself is the warrantor of turbulence and upheaval. He writes, “Your breath says go on, live; / The world says go on, die.” When Shanahan says “I have not known from where to speak,” he is expressing both personal and social concerns. A common location is missing, a site for speaking and listening and replying. In effect, speaker and listener are two displaced persons, in touch for the first time, perhaps potentially sociable. This positioning – abetted by the candid crispness of his phrases — is what allows Shanahan’s verse to skirt sententiousness – everything here is tentative, even if passionate. The challenge to address such a looming and continuous disaster of relations tempers his confidence. On the other hand, he is generous to the reader — neither his convictions nor his griefs are expressed for the purpose of seeming to be more deeply felt, more relevant than my own. On the other hand, my own disquietude over things as they are seemed chaotic and diffuse until I said these poems aloud.
There is more formal and rhetorical variety in Trace Evidence than I have indicated here. The middle section of the collection, “On the Overnight from Agadir” (a city in Morocco), comprises individual long lines – “Where does the inquiry begin Does it begin in my particular body / In my particular mind Does it begin centuries before me / Does it begin in my mother …” Trace Evidence is a beginning that claims no destination, no goal. The destination is unlanguaged. These are poems that appear to have emerged not from a comprehensible “I” but from the disruptions and retardations of the world at large. A startling achievement.
[Published by Tin House on March 21, 2023, 112 pages, $16.95 US paperback]
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After my first book of poems was published in 2005, I was invited to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to spend a week with the MFA poets who would soon be applying for teaching jobs and looking for a publisher. I was warmly welcomed and enjoyed the workshops and one-on-one meetings. One topic recurred — the young writers wanted to know why I had walked away from academia in 1979, pulled my manuscript from the press that had accepted it, ceased writing for publication for what turned out to be 18 years, and set off to work in business. How could I have given up on teaching and poetry, elements of the life they most wanted? As if they were asking Could this happen to me?
“Giving up certain things may be good for us, and yet the idea of someone just giving up is never appealing,” writes psychotherapist Adam Phillips in the prologue to On Giving Up. “There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us … This book, then, is about the essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change, we give up when we believe we can’t … We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are.”
Phillips’ references are often literary – he is a visiting professor of English at the University of York. In the first chapter, “On Giving Up,” he cites one of Kafka’s aphorisms, “From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached,” in which Phillips hears “an anxiety about … the intention to sabotage our intentions, to doubt our desires, or our capacity to fulfill them.” But the desire to pay any price to persist may hinge on or be an evasion of its very opposite – the desire to be freed of an obsession, the freedom to walk away. While reading Phillips’ work, one is chaperoned through the stimulations of understanding oneself and the urgencies of eluding oneself.
In “Dead or Alive,” he asks us to consider why “it is our deadness that we also desire.” When the turmoil and terrors around us become onerous, our capacity for numbness may feel like a salve. In reaction to disquieting aspects of private and political life, we may seek safety in a clutch of concepts: “If we have become, if we have made ourselves, great familiarizers and generalizers, we have been actively and determinedly narrowing our minds … Insulation, immunity, purity are the preoccupations of the self under threat” – perhaps a warning to both extremes of the political spectrum.
This leads to the core preoccupation of On Giving Up – “What has always to be given up, in giving up, is the wanting.” Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud – not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud’s language. “We are, in Freud’s account, fundamentally ambivalent animals …we are always found wanting – in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent need for others – and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want … Whatever our ambitions and ideals are for ourselves, they are underpinned by survival, and survival is underwritten by appetite.” We’re at mid-book now and considering childhood, “in Freud’s account, a ‘cumulative trauma’ of absences and exclusions and exile.” To want is to be excluded from something. Phillips: “We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want.” Is my identity what I am “left with” or might it take shape in the moment I pay close attention to what is happening? Phillips maintains that childhood is a precondition for adulthood, not its determinant: “childhood informs virtually everything and determines very little.” We recall only miniscule fragments of the years spent as infants – the moments we enshrine are hyperbolic in some way. So, there is the grooved pattern of our wanting, informed by our early experiences, what we learned about being in the world. And then, there is a different kind of attention we may pay to ourselves. But no overall consensus. All the lives each of us has lived remain within us.
It may seem that Phillips drifts away from “giving up” as his focus, but the connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants. Loosening up, we may create language, let’s say in poetry, that can dispel doubts about whether we can make language that clarifies what is actually happening to and around us. When Phillips says psychoanalysis can promote “a new kind of conversation in which people can acknowledge the benefits of not needing to know what they are talking about,” I think of poetry as well.
What I felt in my late 20’s as I left academia was that whatever poetry-making and teaching skills I had were not sufficient to give me the life I wanted, though several other reservations and reasons came into play, especially those of my wife. Phillips says “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism” form the “salient meanings of giving up.” Since the surrender of the will is impossible to will, one may struggle with the act of surrender more deeply than with the act of assertive action. As Phillips puts it, “When our preferred versions of ourselves are not an inspiration, they are a tyranny.” I believed that tragedy lay ahead for me if I continued my general habits at that time. Phillips: “Tragedy is what is created by people who refuse to give up.”
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on March 26, 2024, 143 pages, $26.00 US hardcover]
To read Ron Slate’s review of On Kindness, essays by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, click here.
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The most critical character in Jonathan Buckley’s twelfth novel, Tell, may be one who never appears or says a word. Someone, perhaps a journalist or a screenwriter, has conducted a series of interviews with a woman who had been employed as an estate gardener for a successful British retail clothier named Curtis, his given name. What the reader encounters are five transcripts in which she tells this removed listener what she knows about Curtis, his late wife Lily (the brains behind the retail chain), his two sons (one of whom is dissipated) and their wives. There is also a Swiss art buyer named Karolina (the estate is filled with her curations), and a biographer named Lara, perhaps exploitative, who regards Curtis as her next project. The reader and the anonymous interviewer share a similar position, utterly reliant on another’s version of Curtis and his life.
That life has now experienced a grave setback. On the first page, we learn that Curtis has been severely injured in a car crash while on the way to Angkor Wat. He had traveled to southeast Asia to inspect his factories. The gardener then begins her retrospective tale – and though Buckley doesn’t structure the story by way of a conventional, suspense-accruing plot, one is drawn in by the rhythmic accessibility, and perhaps the credibility, of the gardener’s voice and deposition. That is, how she tells the story – the measured pacing of her assertions, pauses, doubts, aperçus – is the craft on which we travel through this extended sketch.
In a 2015 Guardian feature, Buckley spelled out his tactics: “Plot is not of overriding importance in my work. On the contrary: I am an episodic rather than a narrativist writer.” He took issue “with the prevalent notion that we perceive our lives as extended and continuous narratives, and that, to quote Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us, our identities’ … I think it’s false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths … even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way.”
The gardener certainly doesn’t story herself. As a staff member, she lived at a remove from the main players – but she does not employ this distance to claim a supposed purity of objective disengagement. We learn very little about her background and relationships – but quite a lot about how she thinks and assesses. Here she is, stepping to the side of her tale for one of her several asides:
“… you remember someone doing something, years back, and you know it happened more or less as you recall, that it was this person who did this thing in this way, but can you describe them, like you can describe someone who was in front of you an hour ago? You can’t. Your mind’s eye is seeing them, but you can’t describe them. The mind’s eye isn’t an eye. It’s not that kind of picture you’re getting. Not really a picture at all. Even the person you saw an hour ago. You can’t see them like someone who’s there. The fade-out happens right asway. It’s what the police always say.”
But Tell isn’t streaked with postmodern hand-wringing over the supposed incapacities of language. On the contrary, Buckley’s episodic approach enhances our appreciation for the complexities of experience, how we relate them and relate to them. The gardener repeatedly qualifies her judgments, often preventing us from reaching a critical conclusion about a character. Lara, the biographer, had written an initial piece on Curtis, now evaluated by the gardener:
“It isn’t entirely complimentary, what Lara wrote. Not what you’d call a puff piece. She makes him sound cold, which some might say was fair enough. And maybe a bit too pleased with himself. But I’d be pleased with myself if I’d achieved what he’d achieved. What she says about his charm being turned off and on, according to circumstances. There’s something in that, I’d say. Some people charm you, whatever they are doing. They can’t help it, no more than they can help looking how they look. But Curtis could help it.”
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there is no story here. Suspicions, resentments, mutual desires, obscure liaisons, bad habits – they bristle among the familial characters, estate staff, and interlopers like Karolina the art pusher and Lara. But in the end, this is a novel about narrativity, how to tell and why we tell – made riveting by Buckley’s canniness. The gardener is our cultivator: “… because you can’t see the back of your own head. You think because you’re you, you’ve got access that other people don’t, because they’re on the outside and you’re on the inside. But on the inside it can be darker than outside. And you’re too close to what you’re looking at.”
[Published by New Directions on March 5, 2024, 160 pages, $15.95 US paperback]
To read Ron Slate’s review of Jonathan Buckley’s novel The Great Concert of the Night, click here
To read Bailey Trela’s review of Jonathan Buckley’s novel Live; live; live, click here.