TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA. In the Absent Everyday. Apogee Press.
$14.95.
Reviewed
by
JAMES BELFLOWER
Raised in
From the beginning, she argues there is a
necessity of knowledge when displaced, “This world is a lie. I think of all/
the futures you will miss. Life goes/ by the center. We are drinking./ We are eating” (10). She continues by questioning the
role of traditional knowledge in contemporary society, “It is always the elders
who have the last word./ There will be other and
better venues/ to plan the perfect future” (20). In “Striped Damsel,” she
inquires into mystic versus quotidian knowledge,
In a village not
far from her town, a cow gave birth
to a calf with two
heads. Black and white they were.
For days people
came to visit the cows insisting on a miracle.
The story made her
reflect she was in the wrong place (36).
Finally, in
“Salvage,” Dhompa questions cultural versus universal
knowledge, “The distance of one word is a quietus but there’s/ what’s left:
retrieval or remorse” (65). In
addition, the urgency of this inquiry emerges in the formal amalgam of the
poems. Similarly to the books content, the formal strategies embody and express
the need for knowledge. On a micro level phrases shift in and out of
connectivity because of the various logical/intuitive/narrative leaps between
them. This continually disrupts a reader’s access to the poem and his/her
knowledge of its semantic landscape, at the same time compelling us to form
multiple levels of connection between these shifts. For example,
All the
possibilities of syncretic solution from experience
and illusion make for
a consistency that involves
strangers and deadlines: a
weatherman, a garbage
collector, the Friday
morning special flowers.
No memory for
folly. Yet a heart beats (29).
The varied
connective points provide a horizontal, rather than vertical, semantic thrust
recalling Maureen Owen’s recent work. However, this
technique provides so much information that a reader is disoriented, possibly
forgetting the significant, in the overload of specifics. Her statement of
poetics in an interview from Caffeine
Destiny may provide a reason for this disorientation, “Form and syntax seem
to grow out of a need for a certain balance or harmony between form, rhythm,
idea and image.” While the combination of potentially meaningful syntactic gaps,
rhythm, idea, image and the horizontal thrust discourages reductive readings,
as a formal strategy this emphasis on “balance” becomes tiresome. Since it
comprises the entire book, the repetition bombards and bewilders a reader: the
seemingly arbitrary ordering of the poems may also contribute to the confusion.
Though their titles argue against stasis, the first poem, “A Matter Not of
Order,” and the last, “A Geography of Belonging,” hint alternately toward a
prefatory and a forward motion,
Day life postpones
impulses
to the future as though it sits
ahead with a symbol for
permanence (3).
The world runs
above or below, and no one stops
to tell me they can
read the future in my face (73).
Nonetheless, these
only bracket the middle of the book which languished because of the unvaried
formal technique. I found myself asking, “Would the book suffer if its sections
were reordered, would the book benefit from a narrative reordering to contrast
with its form?” This caused me to question the length of the book also. At
eighty-one pages it is only a few pages longer than most; since the first and
last poems are serial would they contrast with the similitude if dispersed
throughout the book?” Considering the
identical formal technique their similarity made some of the poems
indistinguishable. I want to make clear that I am not arguing for hierarchy but
for a variance in the formal strategy of the book. I realize that the stasis
caused by horizontal semantic motion and the disorientation could very well be
a goal of the book, however, its length and persistence stretches a reader’s
commitment.
Though I believe
the text embodies its subject of absence, it could not account for my lack of
empathy toward the characters of In the
Absent Everyday. Probably my own shortcoming but it may have stemmed from Dhompa’s persistent use of third person pronouns, the
aforementioned formal strategy and the overbearing nostalgic tone. She ends the
book with this line, “How can/ it be that the rich are thin and the poor are
fat where you live/ wrote a little boy from far away” (81). Considering the
skepticism toward sentimentality in modern poetry, I was suspicious of the
nostalgia that saturated the book. However, to distrust or ignore this tone is
to grossly neglect what binds this book together: the author’s deeply felt
loss, and exile from, her national identity. Dhompa
writes,
They say home and
point away from the cement rooms
they have built. At
home they says the grass was tall,
the milk was sweet. At
home, there was no need for sugar (66).
In an interview for
TibetWriters.org Dhompa
reaffirms this sentiment, ““Nostalgia is political in our experience as
‘Tibetans,’ and nostalgia is a recurring voice in contemporary Tibetan poetics
in exile.” For Dhompa, exile is the very condition
for cultural knowledge and her text articulates the root of this complex
position, “Where you are/ is who you are” (7). What I find puzzling is that,
although a nostalgic tone shades the entire book Dhompa
appears to let its implications go unquestioned. I find this sentiment
disconcerting, because of its concentration on an irretrievable past.
Considering the political turmoil in