After living all of my post-teen and newly minted adult years in the States, I returned to my family in Pakistan late last August. I used to know who home is, where it’s located, who lives inside it, who wants to run away from its shadow, who wants to burn it down, and who will put it back together when it crumbles. But now I know nothing. All I bring back to my first family is a fragmented, ocean-straddling, other self who simultaneously belongs in their arms and to other arms they will never shuffle past. It is a given that I will be going back after my year-long sabbatical from being the guest daughter because of limited career opportunities in my home country. My mother gently reminds me of that when she repeats her favorite nugget of wisdom: “Distance is the salt of relationships.”
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In the poem “Arab American Syntax,” from janan alexandra’s debut collection come from, the poet’s speaker says: “Distance is my luck & my long grief.” To me, this felt like the sun around which the collection revolves, as it captures the essence of the eyes that stare at the reader throughout the reading experience—longing and belonging, while the speaker’s indeterminate self attempts to close the gap between them through covering various distances, including:
“the distance between the language we speak and the language we want to dream in;
we are whirling
through Beirut
the city I visit most
often in my sleep
I take this to mean
I am making
my best effort
to dream in Arabic
the distance between who we are and who we could have been had our ancestors never left their homeland;
You can tell, I am reformed. Returned.
Assimilation lasts only so long before
we become our mothers and conjure a way
back to the homeland, which exists mostly
on our tongues, because mostly the home
is long gone, rubbled or razed to the ground
the distance between dream as memory and memory as dream;
The dream dissolves. But on the road to Karpaz,
memory surfaces in shiny scraps of trash and glass
washing up in the drift.
and the distance between the places we reside in physically and the places which carry parts of our souls/soles
For years, I carried an eraser that was shaped like Cyprus
with a map of the island printed on its surface in primary colors.
Probably a trinket from a gift shop.
I loved to hold it in my hands like a soft hook, touching
& smelling the sweet sharp rubber
on my finger. I lost the eraser somewhere along the way to
America.
Is where you come from what you have lost along the way?”
The title of the collection alludes to perhaps the most-asked question of any immigrant: “Where do you come from?” Alexandra answers with a question of her own: “Is where you come from what you have lost along the way?” This made me think of the larger question of where does anything come from? The heat in our bodies, the swing in our steps, the ancient roots of language on our tongues. The collection is preoccupied with origin stories, whether they are of prayer, people, houses, or language. Alexandra dedicates the entire section four of the collection to an intriguing study of the seeds of a language—its letters. Each letter’s origin becomes a parable of sisters, cousins, broken bones, a field, thanks, water, and mothers, and the poems give way to an exploration of its sounds, cries, and ancestors in relationship to ‘girl,’ the primary speaker in this particular section, who “fogs a mirror / in the mouth of sea.”
Inevitably, the theme of origins and origin stories is intertwined with the larger theme of movement, displacement, and return. The speaker is constantly in motion, in transit, always between homes, experiencing multiple homecomings, which indicate all the times she has had to leave her different homes. Yet as the opening poems says, “small utterance / of a loss I practice / & repeat, hope / to repair,” the speaker is determined to continue on a journey of repair, returning to mother, tongue, and mothertongue, both inherited and brief community and companies to become “a little alone, a stranger a little less.” The collection surrenders to Aracelis Girmay’s idea of a constellation: “when the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! . . . Gloriously, fantastically mixed & monstered.” This idea of movement and constellation is further punctuated throughout the collection via the myriad of forms it utilizes and quickly jumps from: sonnets to odes to long poems and prose poems. And above everything, breathless poems full of lists that open the archive of inheritance.
The process and theme of fracture (of the tongue, body, history) echoes throughout the collection, and the speaker frequently sits down to do the arithmetic of belonging in confusion and frustration. Nevertheless, what the reader and speaker are left with at the end is an invitation to togetherness, learning we as a first word, a hand stretching to ask as the speaker says in the poem “parable of water & mothers,”—WouldyouWewithme?—and the Arabic expression the collection ends with—ahlan wa sahlan—I welcome you as my own ‘ahl’ (family) and wish for things to be ‘sahl’ (easy) upon you. Alexandra elaborates on the expression: you have come to the people who are like kinsfolk/family, and to a place that is smooth/plain/easy, or not rugged. To a We wherever one goes.
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In all, janan alexandra’s poetry transcends time and place and come from is a valuable addition to the long lyrical tradition of poetry that explores postcolonial, migration, displacement, and diasporic narratives. come from beckons the reader to go where there is love and keep “caring for what lives, living for what cares & moves in us, oh each brief company” and serves as a reminder for me that even if the salt of a relationship might be distance like my mother says, I belong and will belong, as long as our tongues say We.
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