Author: Sheniz
Janmohamed
Publ: Tsar Publications
Reviewer: Stephen D. P.

Over the last couple of decades, numerous scholars of post colonialism, many writing from their own privileged experience as diasporans, have identified hybrid personal identity as one of the defining characteristics of contemporary global living.

In these same decades, a vast number of books of poetry have been published, all over the world, by writers from what we used to call ‘mixed heritages’.  Most visible amongst these have been writers from South Asia, especially those whose families have a history and memory of the trauma of colonialism and the uprootedness of emigration.  Some of this poetry has a faint whiff of cynicism, as it seems to cash in on the recent taste that the Western literary consumer has developed for urbane, ‘chutnified’ writing.  Where such poetry is not cynical, it is often either too essentialist, in which case the poet portrays her hybridity as only a painful rootlessness, or it is naively middle-class, in which case the privileged poet presents her personal hybridity as a glorious cosmopolitanism that fails to recognise the lack of such privilege enjoyed by the vast majority of the postcolonial poor.  In both cases, the poet seems to have come to her conclusion: I have a new, mixed-up Being, and it is either simply good or bad.

Sheniz Janmohamed’s new poetry collection, Bleeding Light, is an altogether more interesting example of this genre.  It is a collection of ghazals, an ancient Persian poetic form that traces a woman’s journey through the night, a journey in which she finds herself ‘caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness and the knowledge of light’.   In short, the character, Israh, is profoundly hybrid, a hybridity that reflects Janmohamed’s own identity as a second generation South Asian Canadian who has ancestry in both Kenya and India.

Indeed, the very name of her central character, Israh, has valency.  Yes, it is a woman’s name, but one that recalls the Qur’anic Sura, Al-Israh, ‘The Night Journey’.  As a consequence, we can say that the journey from the first to the last ghazal in this collection is Israh – she is herself a journey.  And this is where the fascination of this collection lies, for Israh’s identity is not a decided ‘Being’, something finalised, but rather is in a constant process of Becoming, shifting as the poems range from Queen’s Park (presumably of downtown Toronto, where Janmohamed studied) to coastal Kenya to South Asia, to all manner of other locations, alluding as she does so to numerous Asian writers as well as canonical Western writers such as Southey and Eliot, and cosmopolitan Indian writers such as Naipaul.  This intertextuality, this quoting of diverse others, is a device that clearly echoes the hybridity of identity than runs throughout the sequence of verses, and it works without drawing clever notice to itself.  Further, the process of Becoming in this poem does not simplistically end with the didactic conclusion that such diversity is only ‘good/productive’ or ‘bad/painful’; rather, Israh’s endless journey contains both joyful moments (recollections of love and of sensual and spiritual pleasures) and painful moments of past and present suffering.  As a consequence, this wonderful collection is as nuanced and rounded as Israh’s developing identity.

The choice of the ghazal form, written in English, is equally appropriate.  Janmohamed’s ‘translation’ of this Persian form emulates the translation of Israh’s identity as she moves from place to place and from the present back into memory; and that it is a form that has such a rich history of translation into other languages such as Urdu, Arabic and Hindi again draws attention to the palimpsestical identity that Israh develops. 
Any individual ghazal’s form is traditionally composed of discrete couplets that need not relate to each other in terms of ‘sense’.  As Janmohamed’s final ghazal states, this makes each of these poems something of a ‘string of pearls’ necklace, with each couplet standing alone as a pearl in a chain that co-exist on the page, but don’t necessarily cohere into an organic whole with any single sense.  The ghazal’s paratactic style recalls, for me, the postmodern novelistic technique of creating what has been called a ‘string of pearls narrative’, one that is episodic rather than unilinear in development, and indeed it often feels, when reading Bleeding Light, that the ghazals within this book could be inventively read in any order the reader chooses, and even that each ghazal could have its couplets read, similarly, in any order.  This is another reminder that our identities are never fully stable, never fixed, and never truly concluded – again, that we are always, like Israh, mixing up in the process of Becoming.  It is also something that weds the apparently ancient (the ghazal form) with the superficially contemporary (the habit in much postmodern poetry of constructing verse that is a flurry of disorientating non sequiturs), and in doing this Janmohamed’s ghazals seem to echo across both time and space, while remaining grounded in the personhood of Israh.

Yet, fascinatingly, if Israh’s identity seems fragmented, another ‘rule’ of the ghazal form seems to work to hold this identity together as we read: this is the need for the second line of every couplet to feature a refrain word (or ‘rhadif’).  Let’s take a random pair of couplets from the ghazal entitled ‘Salt and Saffron’:

The sea is a skin of watery gold: waves hazed saffron.
Dowse yourself until your soul prays saffron.

Before opening her chest to seal her holed heart
They rub her body with iodine: She glazes saffron.

Don’t worry too much about ‘sense’ as you read within and across these lines, above, for as we said, one of the rules of the ghazal is that the couplets shouldn’t necessarily relate.  But look at that word ‘saffron’, which appears at the end of both couplets and at the end of this poem’s remaining four couplets.  It is as if that word, ‘saffron’, is the needle that holds the string that joins the pearls of this ghazal.  By doing so, Israh’s processual and potentially fractured identity is given some element of cohesiveness that holds her personality together even if she and the reader can not always make fully coherent sense of it. 
Consequently, Janmohamed’s choice of the ghazal is inspired, as it leads to the form of Bleeding Light fitting the content perfectly, and unobtrusively.

In Mombasa’s ‘Old Town, Allah hu Akbar pounds the walls of crumbling Fort Jesus’, the muezzin’s call hammering on the defences of a once Christian fortress; at the same time, ‘A taxi cuts us off , Allah is Great plastered on his window’.  This is an everyday scene that all of us in Kenya can recognise as plausible in its mixing of high and low culture and its mixing of past and present and of religions; but it is also a scene of hybridity that we wouldn’t ourselves have perhaps stopped to notice and reflect upon as we walked down the street if Janmohamed hadn’t drawn it so creatively to our attention.  And this is the final brilliance of Bleeding Light: Israh’s journey is not only her own, for as we ourselves recognise the scenes that she encounters, we too are implicated in her search for identity, and so this profound sequence of ghazals becomes a generous invitation for us to investigate our own Becoming, our own personhood, our selves.

Stephen’s acclaimed new collection, How to Euthanise a Cactus, ‘one of the best four books in Africa in 2010’, is now available in bookshops, or at a special price from the distributor, Kwani, on 0721837151.