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Disbound
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Review
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Stone, Scissors, or Paper
On Disbound by Hajar Hussaini There are objects we must break before using. Books as physical objects belong to that realm. There are the book covers we fold three sixty, the spines that come off like new ballet pointe shoes we smash against the floor only to pick up and peel off their instep. Disbound, Hajar Hussaini's first poetry collection, published in 2022 by the University of Iowa Press, asks us to take a vow of faith in its name, and imagine that what we hold in our hands was previously collected and now has lost binding. Its title commands us so-–the act of dismemberment— if we approach it in its imperative reading. Form, then, gives us time: the book begins after its disintegration. "The fall of Kabul was so intense," says Hajar Hussaini regarding the events that transpired in August 2021, a disposable coffee cup between his hands, "that I couldn't not engage with it. My relationship with Kabul was contingent, it happened and then I became an exile," explains the Afghan poet. Disbound is testimony to a body that lost molding, a disintegrated memoir where rocks, paper, and scissors invert, disarrange, cut where there is no paper, and crush something that long ago lost edge. The book warns us from the dedication: "for the sisters without whom I have no meaning". The self, that collective that was once amalgam, splits into distances, the words become embedded in the pages given to us. The first poem, for instance, is the sequence that lost the order of the game: notes from Kabul on being fine when others aren’t; notice graphic, how quotes wax truth & assassinate anecdotes the surplus of survival guilt covers pages & the data at the price of two boiled eggs rectangular streets grind us like watercolor powder we wash blood off bags & hats & the few branches of tree are un blaze yet we still play stone scissor paper In Kabul, there are two intellectual groups. One camp was the Persian-philes. Educated in Iran, they came back to Afghanistan. They read Iranian literature, and made their living by small businesses, journalism, photography, sometimes art. They are the gatekeepers of Persian. The other camp were the people who were part of the diplomacy, the government elite, those who benefited directly from the US government. They were educated in Pakistan, the children of former leaders, they came from the West, “they drank alcohol because alcohol is expensive. They are culture consumers.” Although Hussaini does not belong, under the headings of ancestry, to any of them as such, her poetics does drag linguistic sediment from both sides. From the year she was born, 1991, to 2003, Hussaini lived in Qom, Iran, two hours away from Tehran. “We were in the periphery,” says Hussaini, her coffee growing cold, “we thought the war was over when the US invaded Afghanistan. That's why I use images of my body as a metaphor for what has happened to Afghanistan." One of the meandering streams along the books is that of the transformation of shapes: a kind of transubstantiation: “before owning our cellphones/ we were two mothers,” reads one of the poems whose embroidering of womanhood breeds into the language. The book is a recollection, a Persian etymology, a road trip, a funeral, the field of death, a simple cafe, a self-checkout chorus, a meta-variable self-parody where “the hyphen belongs to an element feeding off cord one attempts and aborts.” The history Hussaini attempts is that made from the everyday life of people, not the approach to Afghanistan that we have today: that which filters through specific events: either the Soviet invasion, or through the United States intervention. "You get away from the people if you look at it through specific events, as if Afghans don't make their own history,” says Hajar, her eyes decisive, transfixed by words. Disbound is a commentary on form. A child’s game gone whose actors, just like their chanted spell, lost the order of things agreed upon: the scissors sliced what was written on paper. Like the language it collects, corporate words with new poetic inflexions, Disbound is also bureaucratic, a collector of ruptures that compromises its own title: although the printed words, when bound, are collected, and assume an imposed sequence in their concatenation, the book begins by prefacing our reading of its pages: this is one of its many orders, an order composed by units of paper and ink that were, one can assume, previously, and ultimately, scattered. |
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Moriana Delgado is a Mexico City writer. Her first poetry collection, Peces de pelea, came out summer of 2022 with The National Autonomous University of Mexico Press. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in spring of 2022, and she is currently a PhD student at UIC. She writes a monthly newsletter called ‘Alone at the Party.’
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