HCSHR: 6:09 - Nayyirah Waheed, salt

Waheed, Nayyirah. Salt. Manufactured by Amazon.ca, Bolton, Ontario preWONDERoo, 2013 and 2019. 978-1-492238-28-7. 251 pages 5” x 8” paperback. 

review by Sandra Stephenson

 

you broke the ocean

in half to be here.

only to meet nothing that wants you.

 

water/ clings to my wrists

it has been /my fragrance

since birth

 

the morning is younger than you

but

you will always be more tender.

I’ve extracted these poems from the very beginning of Nayyireh Waheed’s collection of experimental poems, salt.  I ask myself why they are not haiku and tanka.  I will be doing a presentation on the subject at the Haiku Canada assembly in Montreal on May 22, 2023

(see http://haikucanada.org/conferences/hcwe.php?page=hcwe&lang=en),

but here I’d like just to examine this lovely set of works by an immigrant, largely about immigration and loss, as they are and as they could be, compared to Japanese-style haiku.  

To my mind they are decidedly haikuesque, to borrow a term sometimes used to imply a loose application of the ghost of haiku to North American free-form short poetry. *  Waheed’s poems are not deliberate attempts at haiku.  They are expressions from a culture neither white North American or Japanese, which happen to find their best form in three, or two, or five, or six lines.  They have yugen.

my

mother

was

my first country.

the first place I ever lived.

Waheed writes this poem in five lines, spacing it out to make the point, to cause the reader (and writer) to savour the meaning.  Would it be concrete enough for haiku if the first 3 words were in one line?  Is there a season?  Yes.  The season was youth, and the concrete references are mother and country/ place.  Would it have been a better haiku if it juxtaposed sounds and smells from the first country with Mother?  Can it speak for a person who has lost her country - maybe never knew it - who is in a sense countryless?  What are white North Americans, once immigrants, doing when we turn to the form of another culture, seeking simple expression?

Does getting concrete cause us to find that which we have in common on different sides of the ocean: cherry blossoms, spring, sweet smells, birds, food?  What about when you are at sea, in between, without references or the same seasons, unsure what you will find and what your kin left behind?  Can you write about it, as traveller?  Basho focussed on what was under his nose:  the dandelion beside the trail he walked, not on his conversation with the monk beside him.  We remember him for that.

 

to not be safe on the earth.

simply

because

of the colour of your skin.

how does a being survive this?

 How does a being write about this?  How does one accept forms and restraints when the subject itself is already restrained?  “Don’t try to write haiku, then,” some will suggest, and Waheed does not try.  It is I, interested in haiku, who sees haiku in them.  I surely don’t see in them limericks, the cultural heritage I should be using if I were using my own!

Why would we look for the haikuesque when there are so many delicious haiku in English to read? Do the concrete haiku that evoke feelings rather than speak of them make our experience more poignant or more muffled and less painful?   Maybe North American haiku as we know it leaves something out; in fact, excludes something that sensitive haikuists could be including, something abstract words can do that is not entirely cerebral.  Maybe something relevant and even important.  Should haiku be important?

I’ve asked a lot of questions here, and I’m hoping some of you will attend the presentation in Montreal in May at McGill, where we can talk about them together.  I think haiku has the form it has, and the power it has, because it is a basic structure that fits human thought, speech, and experience.  I think this is universal, in every language and culture, every age and gender.  I think we ought to pay attention, as haikuists, to other such ways of communicating than the Japanese, to find each our very own deep structure, which I believe is there without referring to a culture we admire.

*See part 2 of a review I wrote on Wales Haiku Review in Haiku Canada’s blogspot at https://hcshohyoran.blogspot.com/2020/02/hcshr-31-wales-haiku-journal-winter.html.

Many North American poets have preferred to call their work “short-form” poetry rather than get into discussions of whether it’s haiku or not, partly out of respect for the Japanese.  “Haikuesque” is a compromise word used in haiku as well as other contexts:  in searching the term on-line, I found a lovely 4-minute song with this word as title.  Ironically, it was listed alongside a book of instructions on how to write a haiku.  Is haiku inherently an exercise in form, or is it an eruption which takes the form because the form is inherent?

*****

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