“Quarantine” first appeared in a journal as a separate poem, but it is also part of a sequence called “Marriage,” which appears in Boland’s book Against Love Poetry (2001). The structural turn in the poem at the beginning of the fourth stanza ties in with that title: “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.” Boland seems alert to the fact that these deaths in Irish history stood outside the genres of love poetry and heroic action, and yet they could have had the power to clarify those genres, though they were never visible enough to do so. Here, Boland is critiquing an aspect of love poetry—its tendency to sentimentalize experience. Boland says that she wrote this poem “as a reproach to the sentimental love poem,” which she characterizes here as “the inexact / praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.” There is no place in this account, Boland argues, for such falsifications. Like Zbigniew Herbert, she dislikes what she thinks of as the corrosive history of the sublime, which inadvertently obliterated ordinary people and erased other kinds of quotidian experiences. By contrast, she takes an ethical stance toward a true love story, which is more private, more complex. Against the easy love poem, she poses a historical consciousness, her feeling that Irish people tend to forget “the levels of strength and survival and near-to-the-edge dispossession that we once had as a people.” Boland returned often to the gap between the past and history, between life as it was lived and history as it was recorded, “how,” she says, “one was official and articulate and the other was silent and fugitive.”
Boland uses a colon to cross and connect the penultimate and the final stanza. The poem itself is warily self-conscious about how much it must inevitably leave out. It doesn’t pretend to be a poem of witness. One of the central precepts of Boland’s work is that we are always belated and thus helpless to capture the past or know it truly. The dead form a firmament; they are like stars, “outsiders, always.” They keep their distance from us; they never entirely reveal their secrets. There’s an inevitable cruelty to history as well as to poetry, which suffers from its own shorthand, its own condensations. Thus: “There is only time for this merciless inventory.” Here is the shorthand list:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
Notice how the inventory is enacted through a series of stand-alone fragments. The adverb “Also” and the repeated conjunction “And” contribute a sense of progression. The word “what” is used as a noun and suggests the true nature of the couple’s suffering and the deep connection between them. The stanza also moves from the past tense (“what they suffered ”; “How they lived ”) to the present tense (“what there is”). In the final line, a modal auxiliary verb and a main verb, “can be,” suggest an ongoing possibility, stretching from the past to the future, “in which darkness it can best be proved.” The word “darkness” takes on additional resonance; it means not just the absence of light but also the absence of witnesses, allowing something important to remain unnoticed and fall outside of recorded history. The word “proved,” with its overtones of mathematics and the law, carries a sense of validation, of a truth established. Thus, the couple has become emblematic in the way they have permanently verified their love.
In the end, “Quarantine” remembers the death of one couple in the worst season of the worst year, 1847, but it also directs our attention to what they suffered and how they lived. It memorializes them. It also illuminates a true love story, the unshakable bond between a man and a woman. Boland shines a light on a nearly anonymous couple who demonstrate their love to each other not in the light, where others may be watching, but under the cover of darkness, where it matters most.
Agi Mishol
* * *
“Woman Martyr”
(2002)
Agi Mishol is a sly, subversive, empathic Israeli poet. Born in Romania to Hungarian-speaking Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust, she carries that history into her poetry. She was four years old when her family emigrated, and she writes in Hebrew. She has never thought of herself as a political poet per se, although, as she puts it, “We’re not sitting in the Himalayas meditating—we’re sitting here in turmoil in this mad, aggressive country and the politics percolates, seeps into my poetry.”
An heir to Yehuda Amichai, with whom she studied, Mishol seems closely akin to Wisława Szymborska in the way she brings a light touch to heavy topics. Like Szymborska, whose poem “The Terrorist, He Watches” stands behind “Woman Martyr,” Mishol creates poems that are unexpected interventions, sometimes on contemporary topics, and often run through all the ramifications of an idea. Here Mishol suggests that she can’t get over her obsession with a young woman who has chosen to become a martyr rather than a mother, who has killed herself and mothered a great destruction. In Israeli poetry it’s an extremely rare, somewhat radical move to focus on the humanity of a suicide bomber.
Woman Martyr
The evening goes blind, and you are only twenty.
Nathan Alterman, “Late Afternoon in the Market”
You are only twenty
and your first pregnancy is a bomb.
Under your broad skirt you are pregnant with dynamite
and metal shavings. This is how you walk in the market,
ticking among the people, you, Andaleeb Takatka.
* * *
Someone loosened the screws in your head
and launched you toward the city;
even though you come from Bethlehem,
the Home of Bread, you chose a bakery.
And there you pulled the trigger out of yourself,
and together with the Sabbath loaves,
sesame and poppy seed,
you flung yourself into the sky.
* * *
Together with Rebecca Fink you flew up
with Yelena Konre’ev from the Caucasus
and Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan
and Suhila Houshy from Iran
and two Chinese you swept along
to death.
* * *
Since then, other matters
have obscured your story,
about which I speak all the time
without having anything to say.
(Translated by Lisa Katz)
“Woman Martyr” tells the story of the Palestinian suicide bomber Andaleeb Takatka, who, on April 12, 2002, blew herself up at a bus stop located at the entrance to the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem. Mishol has said that it was the suicide bomber’s last name, Takatka, which generated the poem: “Her name sounded like the ticking of a bomb—taka-taka like tick-tock . . .” You might not have guessed that onomatopoeia, words that imitate sounds, triggered this troubling, tragic poem, and yet we are continually reminded that poetry, whatever else it may be, is always in some sense about language itself.
A quotation from Nathan Alterman’s lyric “Late Afternoon in the Market” rhetorically launches the poem, which speaks directly to the young woman, almost as a familiar. First, Mishol addresses her as “you” and names her only at the end of the first stanza, thus turning to the third person. Mishol is both speaking to Andaleeb Takatka and talking about her, narrating in the present tense what Takatka is doing and what she has, in fact, already done. As an older woman, the poet feels connected to the younger woman, but she is also both bewildered and appalled by her. We must come to terms with a twenty-year-old woman who walks into a bakery wearing a “broad skirt” to make people think she is pregnant. In other words, pregnancy is her disguise—she is actually “pregnant with dynamite.” She enters the market “ticking among the people.”
The second stanza suggests that someone weaponized Takatka’s psychology by loosening the screws in her head and turning her into a walking time-bomb. Mishol literalizes the colloquial phrase “having a screw loose” as a way of talking about craziness. The poet can’t resist the li
nguistic irony of the situation. Takatka is a native of Bethlehem, which literally means “House of Bread,” and yet decides to turn a bakery into a murder site. The woman and the loaves of bread, baked especially for the Sabbath, scatter together. Mishol doesn’t mention that the etymology of Bethlehem also suggests “House of War.” The poem contrasts the life-giving property of bread to the destructive act of going to war by blowing up a bakery.
The third stanza presents a roll call of helpless victims, who come from many different places. The diasporic nature of the group somehow heightens the horror. From the suicide bomber’s point of view, as Israelis they are all guilty, but from Mishol’s point of view as an Israeli citizen, they are all individuals who came from elsewhere, who probably left their countries because they were unsafe there. Mishol’s naming of the individuals memorializes the slaughtered.
Most political or historical poems seem certain of themselves; their poets know what they think. Many such poems are undone by their own didacticism. It’s therefore highly unusual for the poet herself to seem confused or bewildered. Yet Mishol concludes with a sense of profound incomprehension at an act so horrific. Others have moved on, the story has faded from the news, but the poet can’t stop talking about the young woman who killed six other people and herself. It’s unspeakable and yet needs to be spoken about. It’s inexplicable and yet needs to be explained. That’s why she can’t stop obsessing over the needless sacrifice, the murderous martyrdom.
Harryette Mullen
* * *
“We Are Not Responsible”
(2002)
Harryette Mullen likes wordplay and linguistic games, puns and palindromes, extreme measures, what she terms “language machines.” She is like an American outlier of the French avant-garde group Oulipo; though she never joined the ranks or attended the meetings, she goes on experimenting in her own laboratory of literary invention and serious play. Some resulting poems, like the one that follows, have unexpected undertows that yield pointed social criticisms. Here is her prose poem “We Are Not Responsible” from her book Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002):
We Are Not Responsible
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and are unable to find the key to your legal case. You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.
All of Mullen’s poems are extremely alert to language. “We Are Not Responsible” borrows the language of corporations and government bureaucracies. It evokes and parodies the phrasing of rules and regulations and thereby exposes the ways that institutions attempt to disavow agency or responsibility. Thus, the first three sentences begin with disclaimers: “We are not responsible . . . ,” “We cannot guarantee . . . ,” “We do not endorse . . .” The fourth sentence modifies the pattern, underscoring the authority of the “we”: “We reserve the right . . .” Mullen reworks this purposely bland, robotic language to expose what is behind it: racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices sanctioned by the state and other powerful entities.
Mullen has commented that the poem is about the social contract:
The borrowed language in the poem runs the gamut from airline safety instructions and corporate disclaimers to the Supreme Court’s ruling against Dred Scott. This was written before 9-11, when profiling was widely accepted as necessary for security. Yet, even before that terrorist attack, racial profiling targeted people of color as potential criminals, like the ’99 police shooting of Amadou Diallo. We that consider ourselves law-abiding citizens have surrendered a lot of our freedoms in order to feel safe. The poem plays back the language of authority in what seems to me a logical movement from the rules and regulations we must obey as airline passengers, to the whole system of laws derived from original documents securing personal property of mostly white male owners.
There is no lyric speaker in this poem, only an institutional “we.” The structure is associative, a kind of list, and employs anaphora, the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of each sentence in a series. Anaphora is most engaging when each repetition includes a difference: something is reiterated, something else added or subtracted. Mullen refashions this device, so often employed in sacred or prophetic texts, to evoke a numbing set of disclaimers, rules, and laws that target and control people, especially people of color.
While “We Are Not Responsible” adopts standard bureaucratic phrasing, it also aggressively deviates from it, altering the wording to reveal the covert motives and insidious cruelty masked in officialese. This pattern begins in the very first sentence: “We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.” By substituting “relatives” for the expected word, “items,” Mullen immediately brings race into the poem. People are treated as objects, and slavery becomes the underlying subject. So does immigration. The poet looks back to the Dred Scott case, then forward to the border policy of the Trump administration. After all, hasn’t the separation of families led to a lot of “lost relatives”? Like all institutions, the government has historically hidden behind a language of neutrality—as if no one is truly responsible for losing or stealing “relatives.” This poem is trying to hold it to account.
Thus, the seemingly innocuous sentence that begins “We cannot guarantee your safety” really means that you will be in danger if you don’t obey orders. In the sentence “We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts,” the final phrase clarifies the true intention of a policy: a refusal to acknowledge the rights and needs of poor and disenfranchised people. Mullen changes her strategy in the fourth sentence, presenting a warning that requires no change in wording to make its point. We’ve all seen it thousands of times: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Here, in the poem’s context of veiled threats, it evokes segregation and Jim Crow America. No wonder the critic Calvin Bedient speaks of Harryette Mullen’s work as “postmodernism with a memory.” That memory is historical.
Mullen uncovers the subtexts underlying bureaucratic statements and also inventively revises them to yield new meanings. For example, an airline announcement about carry-on luggage becomes an injunction against “carrying on”; it’s an order to keep to one’s place. She changes cigarettes into “smoldering resentments”; in a racist society, even appearing to be angry can justify retaliation. She exposes the prejudice behind the seemingly neutral (“If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way”). Linguistic confusions build up in these consecutive sentences: “Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and are unable to find the key to your legal case.” Here, the language of airline policy exposes an undercurrent of hostility toward immigrants. An innocuous word, “claims,” becomes something more ominous, “frightful claims,” and the “key” to the luggage implies potentially sinister legal consequences, “the key to your legal case.” Throughout this poem a “we” speaks to a “you.” There is always a subject; someone is always being targeted.
The poem turns to the topic of police detention: “You were detai
ned for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.” Mullen is unearthing a set of prejudices bound up in the injustice of racial profiling. There’s a clever but in the end not very funny substitution of the word “wallet” for “weapon.” If you are Black and reach for your wallet when you are stopped by the police, it will be assumed that you are reaching for a weapon. The sentence “It is not our obligation . . .” speaks to the suspending of law, supposedly to protect the safety of the public. But that also means suspending the Constitution.
The last section of the poem, in which an “us” addresses a “you,” is a series of directives: “Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.” Here the voice of authority talks to victims, people whose rights have been ignored or violated. And the poem concludes with a direct threat, returning to the start of the poem, but with a difference: “We are not responsible” turns into “we can’t be held responsible,” expressing the absolute power of the “we.” Stay calm and submit, the authorities declare, or something very bad is going to happen to you.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 39