Some disclosures: Nat is a friend, and a fellow resident in Edinburgh. Raha’s poetry and criticism are grounded in radical transfeminism and Marxist theory, about which i know relatively little, and reference transphobia, misogyny and racism, of which i have no personal experience. Please note that due to wordpress’ limited formatting options, the quoted poems are not exactly as they appear in the book. Gratitude, as ever, is due to Muireann Crowley for significant edits to this review.
Review: Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines (2018) is an unusual book. It is Raha’s first full collection, but strictly speaking it is an assembly of five of the poet’s zines, pamphlets and one-off projects, each written and published between 2012 and 2017. Through dedications to and epigraphs from Vahni Capildeo, mendoza and Sean Bonney, the book situates itself within its immediate literary contexts, alongside contemporary poets whose work similarly worries at the seams of language and its relationship to cultural and political power. On the page, the poems shift unpredictably through the white space, often leaving words or phrases crossed out or marginalised, marked with non-standard punctuation, or with ambiguous relation to the main text, as in the frequent use of cut-and-pasted newsprint and archive photography. The poems’ typography often seems to deny the reader the opportunity to slow down or decompress by leaving precious little blank space on the page. As a book deeply invested in questioning how political noise often drowns out sincere discourse, it’s a highly effective strategy. (Her publication in the magazine EOAGH shows some of these effects in action: the magazine publishes a jpeg file rather than attempt to reproduce the effects of the typesetting.) It’s worth noting that this is musical as well as visual notation: in the video above, Raha translates the poems’ idiosyncratic punctuation into sound, sometimes as a sharp inhale, deliberate stutter or recorded loop.
It’s worth noting that Boiler House’s beautiful production is not exactly how the original poems appeared, though there are signs that fidelity to the original publications was a high priority: looking between my copy of Raha’s pamphlet, de/compositions, and its reproduction in Of Sirens, precious little has been altered. It feels consistent with the book’s sharp attention to local and historical contexts that a concerted effort has been made to retain the materiality of Raha’s original works; ‘The Marriage of George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith (Epithalamion)’, for example, was originally a flyer distributed during London Pride 2013. The conditions under which these poems were written and published are presented as a core aspect of their meaning and expression, making Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines, alongside its literary strengths, a fascinating historical document.
Examining the book’s structure and themes as a unity, then, is a little more difficult than usual. In recent years, collections by debut or early-career poets are often arranged around a central theme or subject, a single metaphorical domain around which the smaller domains of their individual poems orbit. I’m thinking of language in Harry Josephine Giles’ Tonguit (2015), shame in Sophie Robinson’s Rabbit (2018), or articulating the self in Nuar Alsadir’s Fourth Person Singular (2017), for example; though admittedly broad categories, the extent to which individual poems consistently touch on these central thoughts feels deeply purposeful, as the collection is shaped by rhetorical argument rather than Raha’s chronicles and archives. The five discrete sections of Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines are arranged chronologically, and many poems carry dates, times, and places as part of the text: the book is at pains to locate itself in time and place; the names of companies, Acts of Parliament, activists and writers abound. The book is not the pristine proof of a lyric vision, but a detailed journal of an artist’s evolutions and aesthetic experimentation over the course of several years. The themes and recurring images across these sequences, then, are the consequence of the poet’s sustained engagement with questions of government, culture and citizenship.
* * *
Raha’s rendering of myriad political actions into an aesthetic domain is difficult to articulate prosaically, and near impossible to quote without reproducing the entire piece. The poems are often possessed of alarming velocity, each phrase or image charging or melding into the next, an accumulating residue of meaning that often wrongfoots the reader or removes the grammatical tissue one might expect to logically connect the poem’s ideas. For example, from the book’s first section, here’s the closing passage of ‘the modern legal system is not for saving you’:
‘trans* collective global loss / break
the pillars / amnesiac /
burying the ribbon & its referents
/ deviance struck off the // official
history of civil rights according us freed –
compelled through the prohibitions’
The poem seems to alternate between richly suggestive, if oblique, allusion (‘burying the ribbon & its referents’) and deceptively straightforward, if grammatically off-kilter, statement (‘the sanction / of good / of / socially-necessary incarceration’). The poem’s purpose is clear enough – its subtitle is ‘in absolute solidarity with CeCe McDonald’, a Black trans woman and civil rights activist incarcerated in a men’s prison at the time of the poem’s composition – but its ideas do not unfold neatly; to think of one issue at a time is not an option, and Raha’s poem seems to embody the act of holding many concurrent threads simultaneously, not least the difficulty of the task. The closing lines draw together the social-historical trend of dominant cultures sanitising official histories and ‘compelled through the prohibitions’, an ambiguous statement that feels heavy with frustration. In ‘(shoes, danube)’, the book’s recurring concern with the recording and relating of history – both as social narrative about the past and as personal experience of an event or moment – plays out, specifically in terms of the body and physical space:
‘,, my eyeslide and accumulate /
laid ‘cross generations we are
retelling to days of us, arms as
wrapped quiet / ‘til we
instigate politics
echo out immediate universe
/ its frail coherences. grasped
for preservation / memory ground out
, churning
emotives :: what we can
gain in space & archive / #
amnesiac quotidian & demolition’
On the page, these lines are interpolated with fragments of photocopied words and newsprint, which literally undercut what appears to be the poem’s primary text. The words ‘poverty […] of future wealth / abolition’ are obscured or upside-down, but legible, and their relationship to the poem’s ‘frail coherences’, ‘memory’, or ‘churning / emotives’, and their intended impact on the reader, are open to interpretation. The poem’s generationally long view, made faintly parodic by its archaic abbreviation of ‘across’, is countered by the poem’s awareness of how individual and collective narratives are maintained and destroyed: by things as banal as physical archives and a personal will to forget.
* * *
Throughout the collection, there is a constant awareness of the fragility of Raha’s own place within a national culture, and the means by which queer, trans and BAME people are excluded from who counts as a citizen, either legally or culturally. In ‘(society will execute itself)’, a poem which begins, ‘we have already lost the 2015 general / vows austere realpolitik blessed’, are the following lines, italicised and in the margins:
‘traumas of hunger
& work
& hetcultures
bleaching the minds
our history
felt
reversed’
Meanwhile, in what appears to be the main body of the poem – it’s significant that throughout the book, such categories are largely unfit for purpose – reads ‘the formations of life we have been inventing since / every decade / shackled us closer’. The poem holds in tension this pairing of ideas, between the relationship of the poem’s speaker to ‘het’ culture, and the unspecified ‘our/us’ that the poem returns to. The dramatic movement, as far as one can be unequivocally defined, shifts from the seats of political power, to the personal adaptability necessary for simple survival, to the poem’s imagining of what might be possible in a world free from the dehumanising bottom lines of capitalism, ‘<< our possible beyond / << value’s conceptions and births’. It’s a movement that recurs throughout the book’s sections, across its years of thought: understanding the past is what enables any viable conception of the future.
The poem seems to hold several trains of thought in concert, as Raha’s analysis of late capitalism harmonises with queer theories about the strangeness of the experience of time. In “Queerness and Translation: From Linear Time to Playtime”, an essay in Modern Poetry in Translation (2018:2), Mary Jean Chan describes a very similar process of resisting social norms in favour of a truer experience of reality, in the present, in memory and in imagining the future:
‘I am eager to re-read and re-write my life as an ongoing poem, but no longer in linear time. Linear time suffocates; it forces the now into the future and refuses any meaningful engagement with the past. I want, instead, to inhabit a state of play – a form of playtime – where time dissolves’
What Chan formulates personally, Raha seems to explore socially: if widespread and radical social change is not immediately realisable, then let us be playful; under such conditions the imagination is a powerful tool. Of Sirens’ penultimate section, £/€xctinctions, is aware of its standing at a precipice; its foreword from the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James reads, ‘mankind has obviously reached the end of something. the crisis is absolute.’ The book’s most intense passage of political anxiety and critique works in tandem with its most strident attempts at envisioning a viable future. Where the majority of the poems in this section are densely woven and finely focused, ‘of future’s england / its stratifications’ is a remarkable rhetorical and tonal shift, as waves of data are let loose. Where other poems’ logic is traceable, however obliquely, ‘of future’s england’ momentarily dispenses with the need to connect its vast number of urgent nodes:
‘of future’s england / its stratifications
& the economic,
of the economic &
sarah reed
, of sanctioned benefits & health blackouts
& the economic
of sectioned nerves & muscles & the mental health act 2007
& the economic, of the economic / remedial productivity
& demands on all bodies &
psychologically sanctioned work, of
sectors glowing eviscerate working &
the economic
of terror’s industry & the safety
of europe from itself’
The poem’s exaggeration of refrain and repetition highlight how much the book employs these tactics more subtly throughout, how despite the unconventional typography and grammar, these poems are designed to be spoken aloud. ‘of future’s england’ seems to enact the speaker’s attempts to remain forewarned and forearmed and retain their sanity, as a list of radical authors and activists occasions:
‘momentary reprieve & laughter & hands &
carnivals & the economic, of love’s purr here &
the economic’
As the poem’s conclusion suggests, even these brief interludes, these recovery periods, cannot quite expel the ‘quotidian terror & the conservative party / & the dismayed capital of the economic’. The crisis is absolute.
* * *
In their original incarnations, each of the sections of Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines stood alone as its own entity, and so it’s not quite a criticism that on my first reading, a sense of fatigue set in toward the end of £/€xctinctions: the imposition of fatigue as a means of social control is a key theme in Raha’s work, and it’s not wild to suggest that my experience may have been sympathetic. In any case, the movement from this atmosphere into the warmer, more careful, but no less impassioned de/compositions would have been far less affecting if not for the grimmer, bleaker poems that went before. The section begins with ‘[strid manig nines]’, dedicated to fellow experimentalist poet mendoza, the first of several pieces foregrounding friendship, love and physical intimacy in a time of nationalist crisis and authoritarian creep. It’s followed by ‘(after Vahni’s reading)’, a poem that stands out in the section for being relatively forthright and strident in its emotional expression:
‘the scope of purity & such myths / your
aggression utterly
entrancing to
-night, –
think the trails of roving & vicious girls
most detested & what we’ve been dreaming for
centuries’
The tonal contrast to £/€xctinctions is fairly stark, even if the subject is familiar. Previously, the work performed by Raha’s poems was in naming and detailing the exact means by which the state and its cultural agents enforced their will; now that there seems to be little good in repeating oneself, it feels as though the poems have license to come much closer to home. ‘(after Vahni’s reading)‘ shifts from social panorama to the intimacy of a poetry reading, a specific, charged emotional experience from which the poem draws its hope and energy. There’s something of a nostalgic tone about many of the poems in the final section, as if its lattermost position within the book has also occasioned a time for taking inventory, to understand its own aesthetic past alongside its other histories. Spotters’ badge, meanwhile, to one of the book’s very few full stops:
‘our softsteel english
shoes / beauty potent in cobble
/ fend off all satistics / a
book of ourselves, in living.’
Even if punctuation is unconventional in Of Sirens, its deployment here feels purposeful, permitting itself to reach toward a note of optimism in a collection in which such notes are few and far between. The collection’s final poem, ‘on the vision of yur futures, ruptured isles…’ ensures the book finishes in a stance of looking into an imagined future, inhabiting a state of possibility, however remote, of radical change. Again, the poem grounds itself first in the here and now, ‘the / gems of our arms & care’, its sine qua non of political thought; the collection repeatedly mentions arms at points of both emotional and political intensity, and it’s no surprise to see the image here. The book closes with a gorgeous coalescence of utopianism and lyricism, and i think it would be a shame to spoil it here, or take it out of its proper context, looking grim-hopefully towards ‘all foreseeable days’.
* * *
The question of how, or even whether, art and poetry should interact directly with political practicalities is unlikely to ever be resolved, but Of Sirens takes up the challenge with all due gravity, and kudos are due to Boiler House for the obvious care and attention that allowed the book to appear as an industry-standard first collection without sacrificing its diy origins. It’s testament to the weight of the work represented by Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines that this review only touches the surface of a variety of topics the poems contend with; ten other readers could write ten other reviews without crossing paths, and that’s before locating Raha’s work within its multiple poetic traditions. As mentioned earlier, the book is an unusual document, but this is also one of its great strengths, a work that strives to preserve what dominant historical narratives overlook, embodying an archive and record all of its own.
Further Reading:
Nat Raha – “Radical Transfeminism, Transfeminine Brokenness”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 116:3 (2017)
Nat Raha – “The Limits of Trans Liberalism”, Verso, (September 2015)
Mary Jean Chan – “Queerness as Translation: From Linear Time to Playtime”, Modern Poetry in Translation (2018:2)
Garry Mac – Introduction to We Were Always Here: A Queer Words Anthology (404 Ink)
Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe)
Reni Eddo-Lodge – Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury); see also Eddo-Lodge’s About Race podcast
Postscript:
I know a few people are hoping for a follow-up from me regarding my last essay: this is not it, nor will one be forthcoming here. For those seeking related reading, i recommend Jack Belloli’s generous and thoughtful essay, “Owning the Post-Libs: On Toby Martinez de las Rivas”, on his blog, or Helen Charman’s insightful review of Jericho Brown’s The New Testament and Martinez de las Rivas’ Black Sun, “Communality and Consequence” in the most recent Poetry London. Thank you for reading, and death to fascism.
Dave Poems. 