Invisible Publishing, 2018
The title Port of Being lends itself to over-interpretation. The difference
between the capitalizations strikes me. It’s lacking on the cover and front
pages, which suggest an intimate entry into a state, a way of being, in
contrast to the arresting imposition of the spine in all capitals. Nothing in
common between that capital port, the indecision it induces, and the mystically
philosophical suggestion of the accolades on the back page that capitalize
according to convention. A capitalized Being that is all-encompassing – nothing
to do with the verb-like simplicity of the lowercase being. Being, being, BEING
is demanding in this book.
I will not say collection because I wasn’t
able, am still not able, to read the poems individually. They call to each
other, draw on each other. From rich suggestions of day-to-day experiences they
expand toward states, both personal and geopolitical. Shazia Hafiz Ramji writes
with measure and subtlety to let us feel, run our hands across the simplicity
of these experiences. Anchored as they are in events, her poems are full of
emotion, concern, and attachment to a deeper truth about what makes up
humanity.
In the middle of the book there are ships.
“Flags of convenience” denoting an attachment to a port that offers lower taxes
and looser laws. The ships are not a metaphor. They work like flags - they are
not insignias, but indicators, semaphores. They point toward movement, respond
to a desire for movement. The book interrogates fluidity - hence the themes of
the sea, but also of this factitious attachment to what allows us to give up
responsibility. There is fluidity without continuity in the “Flags of
Convenience” section - only patterns where fragments on the page seem to float
like debris on the sea (perhaps better yet, in “Spatula” Ramji speaks of “space
debris”). Let me approximate the layout from “Bahamas” (41):
on fire in the North Sea twenty dead
bodies
in two dead ends
insured
for twice its value
sabotage
Fluidity is necessary because of power, of
surveillance. This is political poetry without a thesis or an argument (“Heat,”
p. 28):
Birth from our own
skin
Concerns over
devaluation
Body that hangs
and holds
Mushroom halos of
work
Dark faces glow in
oil
At the back of the
room hands wait
To be held in
court
To speak a warm
fabric of lips
Interpersonal relationships weigh as much
as wars, the violence and the distanciation it creates as a response cohabit
with a longing for proximity. There are cameras, social media posts, people
being followed, voyeurism. There is incarceration, loneliness, bombing,
vanishing, death. There are no guiltless, pure victims. This interchangeability
of positions feels more unbearable than the violence itself. The book might be
an attempt to come to terms with this human condition. The speaker, the
narrator, the recorder, but also Ramji thus place themselves in the same
position of surveillance, drawing us into the scenes they observe. The world
and the writer interject themselves into the poems with surprisingly little
violence, sliding into the openings and closings of poems to allow them to
breathe, to give them space, a wider spatiality than words have by themselves.
The experiment with form disappears to simply give poems.
It’s easy to come to these conclusions
about surveillance when reading the note at the end of the book or searching
quickly for interviews and reviews. The beauty of that note is that it comes
after the fact, to point to the original intention that carries the book, by
which point Ramji has already carried this intention to her past, her relations,
interwoven it with desires. The note confirms what has been written, brings
nothing the poems didn’t already give; it establishes a direct connection
between her not only as author and us not only as readers. Throughout the book
Ramji offers presents through her choice of voices - the book is full of
voices, recordings, quotations. Although the poems already make the intention
clear, the note remains necessary - not so much as explanation than as closure,
like the last words of a conversation that allow two people to take leave, to
close an exchange, to return to themselves.
There is more to fluidity in this book
than its themes. The writing plays with fluidity and knows rest. Full stops in
the section “Spooky Actors at a Distance” make each line an invitation to drift
into free association and meditation. A conversational tone runs in the “Port
of Being” section, where couplet-based poems are set against poems whose line
breaks melt - bordering on prose. Both forms give the daily life they shape a disjointed
feel.
The conversation goes beyond the tone –
literal conversations, not overheard but sought out, are part of the poems in
the opening section, “Container.” In these ten poems we are placed in the city.
Ramji writes in the city, we can feel it around her as around us; she writes
the city in the poem, into the poem, making it not palpable but audible, heard.
The city in this section is an auditory phenomenon, where voices surround
everything and become part of every experience. Voices of strangers, relayed in
later sections by voices of those to whom the speaker can’t get close. In
“People just changed” (p. 12, and again the layout is approximate) the
juxtaposition of voices shows the menace that emerges from the fluidity of
thought from one conversation to the next:
People just changed. I just remember the
sirens went on.
I don’t know how
to count what’s left prisoners
of conscience
Turned organ
transplants then transplantations
across a vast tract of folds in clothes
Later on, also, whispers in the back of
our head, voices that follow us, that inhabit us - that is how power shapes us,
how we continue to obey even when surveillance isn’t at play, when power isn’t
being exercised (“Nearness,” 51):
We are not angry.
We have come a long way.
I hear a whisper
in the guise of your boss.
We chatter in the
back of your head, but we are not your boss.
You have been
thrown into the fabric and it is why you sleep.
This last line could stand for the energy
behind the book, the active passivity, the strain and trouble of being.
