The Delicate Art of Survival

by Carl Landauer

When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, Rooja Mohassessy, Elixir Press, Denver, Colorado, 2023, 116 pages, $17.00 paperback, elixirpress.com/when-your-sky-runs-into-mine. Winner of the 23rd Annual Elixir Press Poetry Award.

ROOJA MOHASSESSY TALKS ABOUT her poems as driven by the memory of her uncle, Bahman Mohassess. Before the revolution, he was an eminent Iranian artist with public-art commissions from the queen of Iran; and then, as an artist not shy about nudity in his art and openly bisexual, much of his art was destroyed after the revolution, and he would remain mainly in Rome. Mohassessy even speaks of her poems as an ekphrastic response to his art. But her poetry is not ekphrasis in the sense that one meets up with his works in her poems the way Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus appears in W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." Rather, Mohassessy's contemplation of his artwork allowed her, as she wrote for periodicities, "to recover bits and pieces of the young person I was before and shortly after exile, when traumatic experiences had made me dissatisfied with myself." Mohassessy's When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is broadly autobiographical, if not every narrative "I" is Mohassessy. As we work through her poems, we see her engage in her delicate art of survival, dealing with various oppressions and aggressions, beginning with poems relating to the early years of the Islamic Republic and the Iran-Iraq War and ending with her experience in Northern California. At the same time, she displays immense skill in focusing our attention on the deeply intimate detail.

Mohassessy was too young for her act of memory to retrieve the Iran before the Islamic Revolution, the way Javad Djavahery's novel, My Part of Her, begins in the shimmering light of Caspian Sea vacations experienced by a thirteen-year-old before everything burst asunder. Instead, her early memory in "Hijab in Third Grade" is being fitted for a new school uniform: "In the mirror buttoned up the midline / to the schoolgirl's throat is midnight / falling darkly to her ankles, shunning / her shins." As the schoolgirl is fitted, with the shop assistant's fingers carefully wedging errant bangs back under fabric, there is a realization that it is "time to come to terms / with the dark." Poignantly, reflecting the fall of darkness all around, Mohassessy's schoolgirl "looks up to give thanks / but the lady has forgotten every shape there is / to a smile." (page 4) This is the earliest memory of the book—except for a clamorous television set with statues from the Shah's regime toppling from pedestals—and it is one of innocence literally enshrouded. As the title of her poem "By Age Ten I Understood the Heft of Fabrics" suggests, Mohassessy's child narrator, looking at the black-chador-wearing women filling the streets after the revolution, relates that she had "no way to know what to feel / about the woman folded inside // those cascading yards of darkness / that transported her like a deluge / down the sidewalks of Tehran." The narrator had enough of a struggle with her own manteau, not the black chador of the women on the Tehran street, "[w]e raised the arms / of our navy manteaux to guide the passing / breeze to our armpits…." (page 23) Still, the sight of black chadors surrounded them: "Then the black cloth // appeared, yards suspended from the coatrack, determined / to accompany us out of doors. Like our own guilty // shadows we could not shake…" The sight embedded in the children a deep sense of unworthiness: "We knew / no doubt we were undeserving." ("Death Was Like a Desire," page 7)

In a rare glimpse into pre-revolutionary Iran in her poems—we are not introduced to her uncle's lost eminence—Mohassessy tells us that the 1950s and 1960s "had ushered in the tango, / the twist would arrive next in cassette tapes / packed with overlap miniskirts." She relates, "My aunt shows me a photograph of women / clapping to each other's jig, her belly-dancing / hips swaying in the warmth of a kerosene heater." But this all disappears. Mohassessy tells us that "[m]ost, me included, miss out / entirely on Swayze's steps," the steps of Dirty Dancing, "[s]ome friends of friends / get ninety-nine lashes for playing / the clandestine soundtrack past earshot, one lash / for every name of God." (page 5) Setting the background of the women's rebellion that exploded in late 2022, with the fate of Mahsa Amini, Mohassessy writes:

…Virgins get it the hardest—

guards insert Coca-Colabottles

into rectums. Determined to seal each fate beyond repair,

they take pains to leave vaginas gaping in their wake.

The girls dare not leave their cells, their souls splayed,

pronounced no longer fit to pass

through Heaven's narrow gate.

(from "Before and After the Revolution," pages 5-6)

Mohassessy's childhood is also witness to the Iraq-Iran War that started in the 1980s and seemed to reinvent the trench warfare and chemical weapons of World War I. Drawing wider, however, than from a child's perspective, Mohassessy devotes a poem to the horrors of gas warfare in "They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing, There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People." She starts by playing with the names of gases and the oddity of ironically positive associations:

Chemical warfare is child friendly

smelling of sweet apples,

geraniums,

fresh mustard fields mowed at blooming stage,

chlorine—the conflicted scent

of humanitarian aid

that cleans and kills as needed.

(page 12)

But, of course, as the poem's title already tells us, chemical warfare is the furthest thing from child friendly. Mustard gas is used to "blind and blister, / beyond recognition / a shoulder-to-shoulder wave of sons of mothers—" (pages 12-13) Mohassessy imaginatively marries the Iranian soldiers' religious fervor to their perviousness to the gas:

culled from near and far villages,

advancing for the love of God. And it won't be

shy tufts of downy beards,

but their zealous cries that break

the suction seals, fog

the gas masks, tawny mist blearing their sight,

acid dissolving eyelids.

All that's left to do for the afflicted soldier is to "caress him tethered to catheters / and nasal cannula." In the form of a Persian ghazal, Mohassessy tells the story of the martyred child soldier, Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh, whose suicide with grenades wrapped around him under an Iraqi tank was heralded as having stemmed the tide of the Iraqi advance in 1980, and this story is told from the perspective of the mother, who first intones to her husband at the front, "Once you left us, our son flushed as a redbud, / his temples wrapped in a green headband," before returning to an innocent past, "Remember how they'd chase that ball / past twilight?" (page 17) And we hear the mother's call to her dead son: "How I snapped that day, You are thirteen! I cried, too young to be drafted!" But the poem ends, after her son's death with a plea to her husband, "Husband, won't you come home now? In the courtyard, / a lone mourning dove now sings of war." (page 18)

The War does invade Mohassessy's childhood home, first economically, "draining from its corner seat / my father's middleclass pockets," hitting a middleclass existence with its "faux-Baroque table" (page 9) and "sprawling imitation / Louis-the-fourteenth armchairs." (page 10) Her parents quarreled, and "I stared at the corner / and accused war of stealing my feline bottle / of Coca-Cola, my Friday drink, the skewer / of dripping mutton, the coals cold…" Then, things turned worse for the mother: "I begged war to drown / her gnarled screams and rush us underground / in respite where she rocked me like an infant / before the neighbors." (page 11) Indeed, rushing underground is part of the most dramatic phase of the war that Mohassessy narrates about the war coming home—the so-called "War of the Cities" with its bombing missions over the cities, even titling one of her poems after that phase of the war. Sirens and blackouts invade her verse. "Flowers smell of salt / and ashes and War of the Cities is intent / on shaking us like dust off the face / of the map, burying us where we hunch / at the kitchen table over tomorrow's schoolwork, / my sister worried the trembling / flame of the oil lamp could give us away." But with both of her parents seemingly deaf and dumb, the loss of sight eliminates one more sense. They "move blindly / about the house, what senses they have, / honed, the sky overhead resigned. Starless." (page 19) Indeed, Mohassessy describes how her mother "couldn't hear the night sky / rip into starry strips, /she felt the warheads rumble, / listened with her feet." (page 22)

The traumas of Mohassessy's childhood do not end with her coming to the West with its own oppressions and aggressions. Her "Interview for Asylum," noted as "after Sylvia Plath," riffs off the ironic officiousness of the bride salesman in Plath's "The Applicant," where the irony drips even more in recordings of Plath's reading the poem. Mohassessy's poem begins, "Discarding your hijab is non-negotiable, ma'am." (page 70) And from there it descends into asylum interview as rape, all in the matter-of-fact voice of the interviewer. "The nude inside / of a thigh, the front slit / of a skirt will do for openers, though rather common. // You'll need to support yourself / on your arms and keep at it till we come. It won't be long." Before the officious order, "Please step up on the scale now," Mohassessy's applicant is instructed, "Now remember, blow jobs should be airy—" (pages 70-71) The same bureaucratic voice runs into the following poem, the title poem of Mohassessy's book, "If you've left behind your hands, organs, / dimensions, / senses, affections, passions, / I'll assist you in seeking immunity, in signing / the requisite papers." Of course, "[w]hen your sky runs into mine / I'll grade your pigmentation by degrees, / screen you under fluorescent glare / and adjust your Protection Factor." (page 72) Mohassessy also devotes a poem, "Sanctions," to the re-imposition of sanctions by President Trump. There she writes, "Bloated with wealth and bombs collecting dust / your suit buttons about to pop / you squirm, itch to burst. / You ask my sisters and I to taste / your pearl-white power / entice you to come / teach our men how you do it." (page 74) The oppressions and aggressions, East and West, in Mohassessy's poems are largely, if not entirely, visited upon women and girls. Even in the most mild aggression of Mohassessy's "First Kiss," she begins by depicting a girl's adolescent innocence, "I wish someone had explained / how wide to open for that French / kiss, how to keep my front teeth / out of his way, angle my nose, // breathe and let the tip of his tongue / probe like a feeler…" But after announcing this sense of inadequacy, she rebounds with a recognition that a kiss should be a pas de deux, "No, I wish someone had explained this / was an invitation of sorts…I wish he'd curtsied and waited…I wish he'd lingered at my lips.…" (page 56) So, this too was an act of aggression.

In narrating the past, Mohassessy uses evocative imagery, ironic reversals, and odd juxtapositions—Jalal ad-Din Rumi (not just Rumi) voiced by the bureaucratic interlocutor in "When Your Sky Runs Into Mine" and the sweet apples and geraniums marshaled in her depiction of chemical weapons. But central to her poetry is an ability to focus on the deeply intimate encounter. Narrating her transit to the West, her adolescent self catches in sensuous detail the dappled light on the bus as it reveals to her a young woman:

I watched

it dip into her cleavage, gradually slip

off the curb of one shoulder as though teased

by the jolts on the road.

She'd left her throat bare, unaware

of the tiny tremors rolling

with the sip

of Evian,

and the moist syllables that cohered, her breath there,

very near her travel companion.

(page 37)

We are invited to join the girl with her "long-censored eyes" glued to the tiny tremors of the throat.

In claiming the body of her uncle in Rome, Mohassessy envisions an assistant in the mortician's office wielding an "unruly hose" to clean his body:

Did the stream follow the gnarled,

sinuous path through the ravine years of care

had carved into the blades

of your back? I could have

assured him

they were whittled

down in love. I could have shown him where

to linger, let the water

linger over varicosed calves,

over a gentle soul.

(page 98)

Mohassessy brings us an intimate knowledge of her uncle's back. But perhaps the most striking example of her intimate hyperfocus comes at the beginning of the poem with the water drop that remains imprinted on her memory:

For ten years now I have found

comfort in the freshness

of the one droplet on your corpse

clinging like morning dew

to your right cheek, refusing to roll.…

(page 97)

In essence, we have everything condensed in a single drop.

In "Ramazan in Tajrish," the ten-year-old child of Mohassessy's poem wants terribly to follow her grandmother in fasting and saying prayers and to keep their secret—a child so small should not be fasting—from her parents. In capturing her grandmother's hesitation, Mohassessy relates:

I knew in your low-cloud voice

that would nudge my sleeping cheek only once,

Did you think I would not hear you?

in the reluctance of it lodged the caress

of those childhood days.

(page 28)

We are introduced to the "paisley prayer mat" of the "faint, dehydrated child," but it is the voice-as-nudge that begins the poem—"You nudged me with a whisper" (page 27)—and ends the poem, and it is that sonic nudge on which we are intimately focused.

In "Intoxicated by Verses," the poem before "Ramazan in Tajrish," Mohassessy introduces us to a ten-year-old pious self:

Even the Farsi translation, the barely legible

print beneath each calligraphed line calls

for translation. How scholarly she is at ten,

squatting cross-legged, hunched over

the book of spells she spreads on her knees.

Thou shalt not touch the verses.

But after hearing "Thou shalt not recite in a foreign tongue," Mohassessy makes intensely palpable the feeling of the recited verses as they are mouthed by the girl:

She loves the Arab tongue of God, she loves her lips

sliced with surahs, the consonants he thrusts

to the back of her throat, the long vowels

he sustains on her breath.…

(page 25)

Mohassessy, who can convey to us the feeling of being transfixed by the sipping of Evian and the long vowels on the girl's throat while incanting Arabic surahs, is also here embedding in us the feeling of the little child absorbed in divine language. Later in her book, Mohassessy begins "The Immigrant Leaving Home and Guilt," by relating that "I kept both near—the miniature Qur'an of Madar, / and ameh's letter," and she would slip the letter "out of the frayed envelope / and gauge how far I'd strayed." She would be guilt-ridden for leaving her father with "his child-interpreter gone / for good." And the carefully saved letter included a couplet from the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, which brings Mohassessy to intone: "Oh how those lines tug still / at my denim miniskirt each time I make to take my seat." (page 35) Throughout When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, Rooja Mohassessy narrates—refracted through her narrative girl and adult—the phases of her life, with the weight of various traumas made present and manifest, but she also invites us to fix on the detail that transfixed her.

Carl Landauer is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Institute for South Asia Studies, and taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill. In addition to publishing articles on the history of the humanities and the history of international legal theory, he has written on poetry for Beat Scene and Poetry Flash. He is a Poetry Flash contributing editor.

— posted August 2024