Poems Without a Passport: Solmaz Sharif’s “Customs”

“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”

The opening poem of the astute poet Solmaz Sharif’s Customs is worth reproducing in its entirety.

Dear Aleph,

Like Ovid, I’ll have no last words.

This is what it means to die

Among barbarians. Bar bar bar

Was how the Greeks heard

Our speech—sheep, beasts—and so we became

Barbarians. We make them reveal

The brutes they are by the things

We make them name. David,

They tell me, is the one

One should aspire to, but ever since

I first heard them say Philistine

I’ve known I am Goliath.

This book launches with an act of speech rooted in the most famous first letter, aleph, prized for its humility by virtue of accepting not being the first letter of the Bible. The poem begins with this Semitic abjad of a title, taken from a writing system that depends on skill at inference, a taste for which happens to be one of Sharif’s best writerly qualities. Yet this austere poem, while all about the power of inference, is also about the opposite of humility. The script is flipped in a historical-religious yet contemporary exposition of othering, in which Goliath becomes the doomed hero to aspire to.

Why not, if you are already marked as the barbarian? Sharif’s reversal of expectations is brought off with placid, acid sass. Her tone is what makes this poetry sing. In lesser hands, the fated giant’s plaint would come off as one more angry accusation about dominance and subservience. But this speaker does not get ruffled. She and her ancestors have had a long time to reflect on historical injustice, sifting it down until it becomes simultaneously a matter of the utmost seriousness, and a black cosmic joke. Political poetry at its best is inspired backtalk with a purpose. Here, the purpose is remembrance.