Review by New York Times Review
MARWA HELAL HAS LIVED, not always by her own choice, both in Egypt and in America, belonging to both countries and to neither: "I have been missing home my entire life," she writes. In the same way, Helal's first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none. It contains prose and verse; polemic and introspection; remixed pop lyrics and pellucid memoir; straightforward narration and constellated word games. The volume shows her powers - and her amply justified anger - in most of those forms. Helal grew up in Ohio, the child of an Egyptian academic; during the early 2000s she applied for permanent residency in the United States but "aged out," turned 21 and became ineligible "as a result of I.N.S. processing delays." In consequence, she had to "return" to Egypt. There she made a new life for herself while applying, again and again, for the right to live in the country where her family made their home. Her fight to get back, and to understand herself as both-and, neither-nor, Egyptian and American, exposed the arbitrary cruelty, casual racism and occasional kindness of people within the United States immigration system. "I'll refuse you for the fun of it," one officer in Cairo said. All this experience also gave the poet occasion to think about the institutions and systems - military, bureaucratic, linguistic, religious, economic - that connect and separate the modern United States and the Middle East. At its worst Helal's America is "a country that ensures we are harassed for being whoever we are presumed to be and never who we actually are." She adds: "I come back because I am American.... It is hard because I am Egyptian." Helal's essay on her departure and her return takes up most of her book. That essay has 26 prose sections, each taking its title fromanother letter of the English alphabet: "One-800Immigration" for O, "Permanent Resident" for P, "White men," "the X in Brexit." That essay's sad, or shocking, moments build to a muted, perhaps optimistic conclusion: "The America I return to is the one we are making together." Other, shorter segments of the volume show just as much fire, and more variety. The more-than-clever opening piece introduces a form that Helal dubs "the Arabic," whose lines must be read (like Arabic) right to left as well as left to right: "language first my learned i / ... for mistaken am i native / go i everywhere." An ode to DJ Khaled imagines his music as a resource for displaced Palestinians: "yours is the rhythm they rebuild to / what do you say, / we give them all the keys?" A poem called "reality show" proposes TV premises with global and topical bite: "amazing race for clean water," for example, or "survivor: post-deportation edition." Other passages manifest hip-hop cadence: "I was made invasive species beast of no nation ... a pitted bubblesong of zebra bones spread against an empire of skinned accusation." Helal's title puns on the ecological concept of invasive species (like Asian carp in United States lakes) and on the notion that immigrants cannot belong here. The poet may be safe in Brooklyn now, but how many others - how many other Arabic speakers, how many Arab-Americans, how many African-Americans - are not? How many are still seen, and by whom, as illegitimate, or as invaders? How, and when, can that cruel misprision end? Such questions generate Helal's best work: "This is how trauma learns to behave," she explains, "how i learn to push against the page." It is a push that could, and should, open doors. STEPHANIE BURT'S new book, "Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems," will be published in May.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This ambitious, groundbreaking book of poetry is the first full-length collection from poet and journalist Helal, who arrived in the U.S. from Egypt as a child and has experienced firsthand the violent policing of migration. Helal's incisive lyrics cut to the core of persistent issues and explode boundaries between genres, combining sparse new forms with newspaper scans, blank maps, scholarly abstracts, and official correspondence. Centered around a long hybrid section called Immigration as a Second Language, Helal's collection blends verse and prose, memoir and reportage to recount the troubled passage from Egypt, through customs, and back again, a process that requires breathing human beings to define themselves through bureaucracies over and over again. Footnotes and citations complicate the relationship between author, text, and audience, as the book defiantly refuses to categorize itself: journalism is the work of the sleeping. poetry is the work of the dreaming. Helal has succeeded in generating poetry that is uniquely African, Arabic, and American. Highly recommended, together with Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us (2018) and Solmaz Sharif's Look (2016).--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Physical, psycho-spiritual, and linguistic displacement form a nexus of poetic lines that course through this restless, memoiristic, and deeply felt debut from Helal. The book opens and closes with sections of short, plainspoken poems and blocks of runaway, breathless, form-shifting prose texts. Meanwhile, the core hinges on an abecedarian mini-memoir of Helal's family emigration from Egypt to the U.S., and her subsequent travels back and forth as she navigates 912.5 days of a dehumanizing and bureaucratic visa process to remain in "A country that fakes left but passes a hard right." Much of the collection takes place in cars, airports, waiting rooms; in dreams and songs; and in inventively reworked immigration documents. In this latter form, Helal reverses expectations (and syntax) and deflects the unidirectional flow of state authority with a biting sense of humor that jumps from threat to cartoonish mockery to near despair, her only constant a dead-aim of purpose: "these motherfuckers have a green card lottery while refugee babies wash up drowned at sea." Drawing on influences as disparate as June Jordan, DJ Khaled, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, Helal finds in poetry something that goes beyond resistance or balm, and might even approach hope. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With her first full-length collection, BOMB Magazine Biennal Contest winner Helal gives us a deep look into her search for a homeland-a long and roundabout journey that takes her from Egypt to America-scored with equal measures of pain, ambivalence, and determination. Here are the places and pieces of her story, the voices of the people who aided or slowed her journey-all registered by a wise eye and recorded in a kaleidoscope of forms that include poems, essay, letters, reportage, diary entries, and news clippings. The collection is a moving contrast to daily news coverage of immigration that never rises above partisan politics: "The dilemma of my disorientation is this: sometimes. When I'm driving through the tunnel on Geary Boulevard-under Masonic Avenue-I look at the fluorescent lights overhead and feel sure that I'll find Cairo on the other side. I step hard on the gas like a child who believes she can dig her way to China." Helal cites the "uncertain certainty" of this feeling, which pervades the book. VERDICT As the book jacket promises, "The result is gorgeous and gutting, rising to its own invocation."-Iris S. Rosenberg, New York © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
