The first poem in Hussain Ahmed’s debut collection, Soliloquy with The Ghosts in Nile, begins with a harrowing vision of renewal:
If a new life begins after each blackout,
all the ghosts in this house would have to wake
from their slumbers. The last man
steps out of the makabarta
and it seems like learning jazz again.
This vita nuova strains between the conditional “if” and the recursion of “each.” The latter (“each”) feels perpetual, as though these blackouts are continual, inescapable; the former (“if”) calls into question the certainty of a new life, of coming back from each abyss. And what labor for those ghosts, to be repeatedly called back, in this depiction of a beginning (the poem is called “Genesis”) which foregrounds “last” rather than “first” things. Is the “last man” the last ghost, seen here stepping from the cemetery? Or is he the last person living? Ahmed’s collection troubles and grieves those distinctions: “on the grave, I see names that sound too close to mine,” he notes later in the poem. Many of those graves lack distinction (“only a few had epitaphs”), though some are honored by what obscures them:
A piece of her bedsheet was wrapped around her marker
as if to remind us all
that only the living should crave warmth
because the sky has never been closer
no matter how high we jump.
Names, layers, warmth — these elements cycle through the collection, remaining dissonant, or irresolvable, even as they resound (“I do not recognize the songs that slip out of my mouth”). The burden is heavy: “I felt all our dead reincarnated in me today,” Ahmed writes, in a poem that seeks to “celebrate” everyone “who had a name / similar to ours.” Ahmed’s soliloquy is spoken “with” ghosts, and this “with” is both choral and directive: the poems speak along with the ghosts, and they are speaking to them. It may be the last one living or the last one dead who tells us, in “How The War Made Us A Name,” that “before the war, we had names we inherited / from the dead. They keep us warm / until we start to lose those names to the wind.” To be “made a name,” in this sense, also suggests a war’s erasure of names, their collation into a shared identity, acute and amorphous. Against this loss, we see the persistence of relationships and the potential for comfort, however difficult. “I feel strange in my father’s frock too, / even though it keeps me warm,” Ahmed writes. That layering recalls the bedsheet warming the grave.
Such warmth also has a foretaste of ravages (there’s a recurring mythos of fire, at once past and approaching), which can also commemorate. “How The War Made Us A Name” concludes with another evocation of involuntary song. Its inheritance devastates and sustains:
We learn to escape the burning
before we learn that every name we inherit comes with allergies.
I threw a harp inside the fireplace, and it poured out the tunes
I once heard baba play on it. It stopped when it got swallowed
in the flames — all we inherited still burns.
Throughout the collection, the primary losses are continual (“this too is how we lose our names”; “I could lose my name at age twelve or younger”), though Ahmed’s poems, particularly in the book’s second half, also consider possibilities for restoration or, at least, for relationships and familial identities that endure among loss:
It’s cold, but mama asked that I leave the door open.
Today, even the stray cat will get a name.
A child was to meet Grandfather,
but that dream ended mid-flight.
This moment of naming, tender and capacious among all the lost names, is a tonic depiction of something like peace, although it may be another instance of “mistaking silence for peace.” Ahmed focuses further on that moment after the dream ends in “mid-flight,” an end that might be more gentle in the imagination than in reality:
They waited for the announcements,
hours passed and there were none.
A hologram of coral skeletons projected on the wall.
& no one will miss the flight
that returns phoenixes to shredded eggshells,
instead of ashes. No one will mourn today.
Given the density of deaths and grief in this collection, amid torture and soldiers and fires and war, to have “no one” mourning raises the possibility that no one is left to mourn, or perhaps no one has the will for it. Ahmed’s poems often linger at this threshold, considering, among all that is missing, what might incite further entangling (“our shadows orbited our bodies from a distance / until they became entangled”; “strands of my hair entrapped the ghosts in the wind”). We might have “fancy names” for describing these states of poetic transmutation, or of “psychosis,” but Ahmed also highlights the more homegrown and durable — however precarious — rituals by which one might live on such a threshold. These moments often appear in relation to gardens and growth:
On the day Baba left, she started to bury seeds
every month of his absence, to keep track of her memories
in her body, which loses more heat than it generates.
I see her now, through the eyes of a raven, in a garden
that’s also a diary. She forgets all else, but not the time
to bury a new seed. This was how she grew what had been lost
to water and bullets.
“We become what we walk upon,” Ahmed notes in another poem. The new seeds, the new life, do not offer restitution, and they may merely substitute the consolation of “remedies for miracles,” but they might also bring us back from silence, since “everything new needs a name.” And so Ahmed’s poetry, while mourning the loss of names and those they held, also insists on speech that takes root in the spaces between losses. “I left home in search of a name and became a tourist of borders,” he writes. “No matter how unsafe home is, I won’t identify as an alien.” This attention to borders brings him to places from which “satellite phone calls” may reach farther into grief, toward “where the ghosts of the dead gather to keep the water warm.” His poems offer intimations of the exchanges (“the veins on my hands are telephone wires, lined by crows”) that can flourish in such places, leaving a reader with a clear sense of the radiance, the decay, and the absences at the heart of this remarkable collection:
Ten years after, mustards had grown from the decay of all we left
behind. It had our blood in its vines, but it looks dark as semiconductors.
The broken windows are enough evidence that we once lived
in ruins. The classroom is full of flowers, metaphors for the isotopes of red.
The leaves grew radiant in our absences,
and here we are, learning to walk in our new blouses.
[Published by Black Ocean on November 15, 2022, 88 pages, $16.00 US]