Poetic Appropriation

Page 15 May–June 2009 Poetic Appropriation John Domini Determining the elements of postmodernism may remain a bit of a blur, something deconstructing metanarrative something, but even thinkers otherwise miles apart agree when it comes to appropriation from the past. The past exists for rummaging, if you’re an artist in the current mode: the out-ofdate must be scavenged and reconfigured, so that a Roman mythography becomes, in the hands of Mary Zimmerman, a Broadway hit. On this ingredient of the pomo mix, everyone agrees, but less widely understood is how the process invigorates creative work out of marginal cultures. What was rap, when it arose out of the South Bronx, if not a life-giving assemblage of old materials? Such cultural complexity , however, generally poses too great a challenge for arbiters of taste; instead, if a conventional critic looks at art from Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” at all, he tends to celebrate either the sentimental or the documentary. In literature, it’s either Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) or Roberto Saviano ’s Gomorrah (2007).Yet these days even subtle aesthetic shifts ripple across the globe (it’s top-dog vanity to think otherwise) and the latest tremors give shape, quite pleasing shape, to 67 Mogul Miniatures, a new cycle of poems from Raza Ali Hasan. Hasan’s compact yet far-reaching sequence is not a translation. A Muslim born in Bangladesh, raised in Indonesia and Pakistan, he has an AngloAmerican education, including an MFA from the Syracuse program. Within the first twenty lines of his second collection (his debut was Grieving Shias [2006], a slender miscellany), we come across a number of locutions that work only in American English, in particular a punning usage of “family feud,” just following “grainy black and white.” The author’s notes call these “free verse” adaptations of a rhyming Urdu form, three couplets apiece in the original. But these Miniatures read more like blank verse, their unrhymed triplicate pairs often iambic and never much longer or shorter than pentameter. But then too, Hasan’s rhythm and pacing prove impressively flexible. Each poem sets a well-balanced package, achieving a swift development and closure; after that, the lower half of the page seems a space for meditation, wide open—in keeping with the vast and unusual frame of reference. Hasan isn’t appropriating Shakespeare, but rather the poet and statesman Muhammed Iqbal (1877–1938). The man was little more than a name to me, naturally, before I came to 67 Mogul Miniatures, and Hasan’s closing notes lay out all that readers need to know. A bit of additional research, however, establishes Iqbal as something more: a Punjabi Muslim who long championed Pakistani nationhood, and a literary titan who, after studying in Europe, produced dozens of titles in a number of languages. The new book revisits Iqbal’s argument-via-poetry with God. If you’re an artist in the current mode, the past exists for rummaging. A century ago, in musadda form, Iqbal first issued a “Complaint to Heaven” and then imagined a “Response to the Complaint.” These books, however, had less in common with Job and Jehovah than with Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi; their real project was the search for common ground between the poet’s culture and that of the West. Hasan, multicultural postmodernist that he is, takes the common ground as a given; his complaint isn’t with the Omnipotent, but with the American Who Thinks He Is. This poet’s craft and precision may recall the Ottoman-era paintings alluded to in the book’s title, the illustrations forever described as “exquisite,” but his argument is nothing so decorous, pitched hard against the cultural imperialism out of Hollywood, the military might out of Washington—and against the backlash within his own culture. Consider the following, an entire poem from the “Complaint” section, which describes the tragic latter-day adventures of the mythicArab lovers Quais and Leilah: Quais runs stark naked through the Hera’a Avenue Mall in Jeddah past Mothercare, United Colors of Benetton, Esprit, 67 Mogul Miniatures Raza Ali Hasan Autumn House Books http://www.autumnhouse.org 79 pages; paper, $14...