What Can We Say?
| Kaveh Akbar questions language’s potential and bemoans its failures while still reminding us of its weight. |
Review by Whitney Rio-Ross
When a boy starts speaking
his trouble begins.”
—“There Are 7,000 Living Languages”
Kaveh Akbar is obsessed with language.
Akbar’s second full-length collection, Pilgrim Bell, covers a number of topics: his childhood, God, heritage, politics. Then there’s language. The book includes poems with the titles “How to Say the Unsayable Thing,” “In the Language of Mammon,” and “There Are 7,000 Living Languages.” But even poems seemingly about something unrelated include lines touching on the power and perils of speech. In “Shadian Incident,” which refers to the 1975 People’s Liberation Army attack, he reminds us that “grief requires / only a tongue and a crown.” “Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997” tells the story of a boy eating with his father but reaches its emotional climax when it turns from the scene to note
. . . my father built
the world the first sound I ever heard
was his voice whispering the azan
in my right ear I didn’t need anything
else . . .
All decent poets are captivated by language. Phrases can take a hundred drafts to perfect. Changing one word can redirect an entire poem. Some add to that the impossible craft of translation, a profoundly important aspect of Akbar’s poetry, which often refers to other languages and occasionally includes Farsi. Poets are obsessed with silences, too—a pause at the end of a line, syllables left on the threshing floor. All poetry is an art of said and unsaid, and plenty of poets write about this language game in their poems. Akbar is far from alone in his obsession; his poems dazzle for how they perform this topic.
Akbar’s relationship with language is complicated. He questions its potential and bemoans its failures while still reminding us of its weight. Above all, Akbar sees language as a risk, a risk he can’t resist. Many poems play out this internal struggle between his fear and his call to speak. “The Value of Fear” is “in its sound, sewing song / to throat.” Yet in the politically charged poem “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic,” he magnifies the implications of translating a sentence of Farsi, as if the world depended on how to say and understand a handful of words. Akbar is constantly wondering when something must be said and when it’s best to shut up. There’s a war raging on the poet’s tongue, and he doesn’t even know which side he wants to win. At one point he cleverly notes the contradiction outright: “haven’t I always been happiest / when a little simple / when too sad and sleepy / to speak.”
When God and language meet in Pilgrim Bell, they reveal the faith of poetry.
The book is filled with contradictions and retractions, often amplified by the poem’s linguistic turns. The poems titled “Pilgrim Bell” come in short phrases, sentences disrupted by several periods. In some poems it reads as a stutter, in others as a firing round of certainty. Of course, the poems are more than a set of interesting questions and claims about language or God. A stack of even the wisest fortune cookies isn’t poetry. Akbar’s abstract statements are grounded in stellar images. They are surprising and often strange, but somehow exactly right. Reading them is like coming across the precise word for a feeling you thought had no name. His comparisons are especially illuminating: the parts of him that claim to understand God are “tacky as jugglers at a funeral.” When listening to his prayers, God is “like a virtuoso / trying not to smash apart her / flute onstage.” Trying to say something better than a beloved phrase in Farsi is “like using / a hacksaw to slice a strawberry / when I have a razor in my / pocket.” There are also plenty of narrative poems where his musings are grounded in a vividly rendered moment. Language, Akbar shows, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither does God, who usually tags along with language in Pilgrim Bell.
Akbar examines various ideas about God’s character, meditates on faith and doubt, and boldly takes on questions like “How to Pray.” As with language, the relationship is complicated; God both agonizes and holds him together. Fittingly, tones range from terror to awe to pleading to blasphemy. Faith can be hopeful and worth fighting for; one of the “Pilgrim Bell” poems claims, “All day I hammer the distance. / Between earth and me. / Into faith.” Yet Akbar also wonders if supposedly holy things can in fact be evil. “My Empire” offers a chilling and vivid interrogation of his religion’s possible flaws. The speaker imagines, “The prophets came to participate in suffering / as if to an amusement park, which makes / our suffering the main attraction.” The poem ends, “My empire made me happy / because it was an empire, cruel, / and the suffering wasn’t my own.”
Like the tone, the speaker’s confidence fluctuates with the moment. The first “Pilgrim Bell” ends with a tremble: “Fear. / Comes only. / At our invitation but. / It comes. It came.” Yet in a later one the speaker is bold enough to say, “I demand. / To be forgiven.” In other poems, the speaker offers outright statements of his beliefs but often second-guesses himself and falls into apophasis. We see in these poems that the stakes of speech and silence are immeasurably higher when we believe God is listening in. Akbar tells us as much in the opening epigraph. The first page claims, “Any text that is not a holy text is an apostasy.” The next page says, “Then it is a holy text.” We cannot speak of God in our limited language without risking irreverence, and Akbar believes that even irreverence can speak a holy word. He writes, “There is something terrible / beneath all I am able to say.” Yet the poet keeps singing before God, whom he believes is “always so charmed / by my weaknesses.”
When God and language meet in Pilgrim Bell, they reveal the faith of poetry: We grasp, we wrestle. We speak and stammer out imperfect offerings. We hush in hope and fear that we hear and be heard. The words we have are both ache and gift. Using them is risky, but we should take Akbar’s advice.
How to find your voice:
try.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS JOURNAL, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
Pilgrim Bell was published by Graywolf Press on August 3, 2021. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
