by Donna Fotoohi | Contributing Writer
Customs
Solmaz Sharif
Graywolf Press, 2022
In all her writing, Solmaz Sharif wrestles with language, prying at and creating truth from within its tight fist. Customs, her sophomore poetry collection, does what she has always done bestâ reorient herself within the specificity of language. Sharif moves from her own experience as a forcibly displaced person in a country that seeks to destroy her, scrutinizing the countless physical, legal, and linguistic contradictions she faces along the way. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, she says:
 âI generally have a reticent relationship to place, because it is one of the most obvious and glaring reminders that I am not living the life I was supposed to have lived. Once, I told my friend, the visual artist Samira Yamin, that my life in Iran was the life I âshould have lived,â and she said, âWhat should be is happening.â We tried to find a tense for our displacement. Not âmight have,â not âdidnât get to,â not simply âlost.â Nothing seemed quite right. We finally settled on âthe life we might have otherwise had.â Something has been lost that is unnamable, and place is a surefire reminder of that loss.â
In Customs, this reminder comes in international airport customs, a place that demands she navigate the precariousness of national identity. In her previous collection Look, Sharif used the Department of Defenseâs Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to consider the way language has been used to perpetrate political violence. In Customs, however, she no longer turns toward something outside of herself to wrest meaning from; she now relies on her own relation to the space she occupies.
In her poem âVisa,â Sharif waits just beyond international customs for her expected arrival. The poem uses vision as its mode of movementâ when the physical railing stands in the way, eyesight reaches beyond. Still, sight is controlled by objects, âthe sight decided by officer,â deciding who gets to pass through to the other side; âour sightline is obstructed by opaque sliding doors,â each line unearths a new visual limitation. State borders have impinged on the beauty of arrival, turning an event of joy into one of anxiety. It is sight that is a threat to the stateâ leading to limited free movement, blocked viewsâ while also being the method employed by the state to determine a threat. The modes of eyesight are both punitive and liberatory; it is eyesight that finally beholds anonymous shapes, turning them into loved ones:
âAs we wait for her to exit customs, our sightline is obstructed by opaque
sliding doors, the twisting hallway behind it, the small convex mirror
hung in the corner in which we catch shapes growing larger, into hair
color, into gait, into age, and finally, as they turn, into kin.
The hours Iâve stood there, behind that railing.Â
The hours Iâve stood to savor the seconds earlier, seconds more by which
my eye may reach the disembarking and exclaimed, âSheâs here,â
watched, from shadow to shape to gait, my imagined life come to life
and approach, briefly, me.â
In the second part of the poem, eyesight shifts to the imaginary. Suddenly, the literal interpretation performed at the railing enters her mindâs eye: âMy imagined life come to life / and approach, briefly, me.â Her imagined life arrives at the railing in this in-between space of customs, where citizenship status and country of origin come to a head to determine who shall pass. This imagined life is her own; a life where she arrives at customs, a guest to the United States; an arbitrary positionality that could have been her reality. âAll my waiting at this railing. / All my writing is this squint.â All her writing occurs at this literal and theoretical railing, where âsquintâ becomes the method through which she struggles to understand her identity within the US, and her position as a writer trying to parse through the capricious system of legitimate citizenry and personal legality. Customs is an attempt to gain clarity where there often is none, through a keen eye slit between words on the page.Â
In âHe, Tooâ Sharif becomes the person traveling through customs to meet whoever is waiting for her on the other side. Shielded by the poem, she places her self in conversation with a Borders and Customs officer at this moment of re-entry:
âAnything he asks, I must answer.
This, too, he likes.â
This officer maintains all power in the interaction, demanding her subservience, but soon she will seize that power to trap her subject, freeing herself. She confines him inside her poem, where he cannot escape, instead subject to her whims:
âI donât tell him
he will be in a poem
where the argument will beanti-American.
I place him here, puffy,
pink, ringed in plexi, pleasedwith his own wit
and spittle. Saving the argument
I am let inI am let in untilâ
Sharifâs conditional existence in the United States is dependent on the state and its agents. It is a place she is forced to live that does not want her. In this almighty land of free speech, she is forced to save her argument until she reaches the pageâ where she may finally speak honestly, âuntil.â Until what? Until the poem is published, until she no longer can manage to save the argument. Until the state decides her Iranianness is a threat, enough of a reason to disallow her of her status.Â
Her Iranian identity seems like a fixed constant in Sharifâs life, yet even this identity is conditional; she is of it but also removed as an Iranian in exile. When she travels back to Iran, she feels alien, lost, missing out on the little beauties she would recognize if she had remained. Sharif brilliantly articulates her displacement as an inescapable truth that has determined the course of her life. It is what propels her, grieves her, exalts herâ and that which has the power to destroy her. In âThe End of Exile,âÂ
âAs the dead, so I come
to the city I am of.
Am without.ââTo the life that is not mine.
is as not
as never.ââA without which
I have learned to be.ââThis thing: a without which
I cannot name.
Without which is my life.â
Sharif yearns for a life that âwithoutâ cannot control. It is this âwithoutâ that she has grown up within and which continues to define her life. Her use of prepositions upends the poem, as each word strangles us, demanding regurgitation. The coupled âI am ofâ / âAm withoutâ begins the erosion of each preposition. To be of a place, while also being without it is a reality she has made the case for. As she continues: âTo the life that is not mine/ is as not/ as neverâ she demands we reread, reevaluate, and reprocess, continuously. This poem is a never-ending battle; constantly shifting our perception of each word. Each repetition of âwithoutâ is a reformation, from preposition to noun and into the imaginary.Â
Over the course of the poem the meaning of âwithoutâ is complicated. It begins as it is meant to, as she feels loss over being âofâ this city where she is also âwithoutâ it, as someone alienated from her homeland. The next mention âA without which / I have learned to beâ subverts the meaning of the word into something whole and complete. Suddenly, âwithoutâ belongs to her, she embodies it. âWithout which is my life;â a life without is still a life, it is her life. Her life of constant longing, of estrangement from herself, who she knows she will never be entirely connected to. The last line of the poem sounds like a triumph; when I read it, I mentally add a comma. A final proclamation âWithout, which is my life.â It is this âwithoutâ that no one can take away. It has brought her here, to the page. Her anguish is palpable in her attempt at naming the enormity of such loss. She contorts the word so that âwithoutâ is able to overtake the loss; loss becoming something that can be contained by language.
This notion of âwithoutâ is again muddled as we consider the historical determinism that has led us to our present. History acts as a backdrop to being âwithout,â which is most simply: there is a reason you are âwithout,â and that reason is the historical past and present of the globe. Without the political meddling and imperial intrusion of Iran throughout the 1900s, Sharif and millions of others may not have been uprooted. Hence, âwithoutâ is a present conditionâ no one can be removed from the history of their homeland, this history is what has led them to this point. In âThe Masterâs Houseâ she considers the implications of our past, and how it continues to inform our present:Â
âTo know, for example, that in Farsi the present perfect is called the relational past, and is used at
times to describe a historic event whose effect is still relevant today, transcending the past
To say, for example, Shah dictator bude-ast translates to The Shah was a dictator, but more literally to The Shah is was a dictator
To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyesâ
Customs is led by this torturous is-was. There is nothing, Sharif attests throughout, that is isolated from the past: âThe residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes.â It is why Sharif writes at all; historical reverberations persist to this day, casting millions of people out of their land, halfway across the world, with return so often an impossibility. As she contends in âWithout Whichâ:
âNo crueler word than return.
No greater lie.The gates may open but to return.
More gates were built inside.â
The rift that is built between those with and without their homeland is not one that can simply be mended with the exile’s return. The act of return itself is another rupture of the self, another broken attempt at healing.
In the book’s closing poem âAn Otherwise,â Sharif revisits Iranian history. She begins the poem with a scene of the Shah visiting a childrenâs school in Abadan; a city once known for having the largest British Petroleum refinery. The Shah has just ordered all Russian books be removed from school shelves, but âThe Dickens could stay. / You understand.â The Shahâs selective censorship is part of his plan to gain public support at a time when many were disillusioned with British involvement in Iranian oil. The Shahâs censorship is intertwined with a demand of obedienceâ even young schoolgirls are commanded to be a certain way, from what they wear to how they act, at the Shahâs behest. Sharif uses the imagery of pink, pure, untainted lungs (see: schoolgirls) until the refinery pollution inflames them (see: Shahâs repressive government).Â
âAnd the air is important to note
for what it is doing
to the pinklungs, bronchiolesâ
a life of inflammation.
Wave, girls, the teacher says
to the shiveringand ironed line of them.
And wave she did.
And if he caredto see
into the minds of teenaged girls,
this King
wouldâve seen thenthe rifles pointed at him.â
Two pages later:
âAnother way yet:
Fuck the British.
The Soviets.
The Shah and the righteousair of her life.
And bless the lung,
the sensitive bronchioles,the filigree of finite health,â
The lifeblood of the Shah resides in the people; these connected bronchioles that make up the lung uphold him. Without them, the blessed lung, âthe filigree of finite health,â cannot breathe for long. Once inflamed, the lung cannot revert back to its once pink and porous self. It carries the impurities of the past forevermore.Â
Throughout Customs, Sharif excavates orientations of space and time, revealing a tense lucidity. Sharif, along with countless other Iranians, carries the impurities of history closely, as they continue to rule the life she leads today. These impurities lend themselves to elucidationâ Sharif looks towards an impure syntactic structure, seeking truth within the contradictions of her form. She fashions her poetry within the âis-wasâ she so masterfully illustrates, developing a recognition of displacement that concedes the limitations of return. Sharifâs vulnerability materializes in Customs in a way that it could not in her debut collection Look. Customs delves within, each prophetic line a gasp of air for its author and a lifeline to its reader.
Donna Fotoohi writes culture criticism at Pop Torture on Substack. She is a Bay Area-based educator studying to get her MA in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State. You can probably find her reading in the park or saying hi to neighborhood cats.
Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs and Look, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writersâ award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in Granta, the New Republic, and Poetry. She teaches at Arizona State University.