Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Graywolf Press, 2022
As we trudge another year of COVID-19, our customs still bear marks of the pandemic. During these last few years, most of us have had to abandon holiday gatherings, opening day(s) of our favorite sports, and working in the office. We adapted by moving online via FaceTime, Zoom, etc.
Of course, there is another type of “customs”—one that has not seen as much drastic change. Customs and Border Protection is an arm of the government that’s often the first face that immigrants and refugees see. And we, America, are not always as welcoming as we tell ourselves.
These dual meanings are combined and examined in Solmaz Sharif’s Customs. The book begins with a serrated prologue poem, “America.” In it, a speaker ominously opens with “I had / to. I / learned it.” Had to what? Learned what? Why? Nothing is “spelled out” here—the title does the heavy lifting. The unease is further amplified by two-word lines in three-word sentences and their unconventional line breaks; it suggests the speaker isn’t allowed to elaborate. Several lines later, the speaker continues:
[…] I
was dead.
I learned
it. I
had to.
The use of past tense points toward a turning point in the speaker’s life, a before and after America. To get along, the speaker had to learn to “die” because if she didn’t, well, there was no other option.
This sentiment is present throughout Customs. Speakers are made all-too-aware of their otherness. The most striking example of this comes at the beginning of the long poem “Without Which”:
I have long left all that can be left
behind in the burning cities and losteven loss—not cared much
or learned to. I turned and looked
and not even salt did I become.
“I turned and looked / and I did not become salt” might be what we would expect (and still eerie). Using the passive voice further draws the reader in.
As a result of being made other, anger permeates the poems. “The Master’s House” expresses this in a heartbreaking manner: “To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat.” Other poems express it bluntly: “Fuck the British. / The Soviets. / The Shah.” When the speaker in “He, Too” states her occupation as a teacher of poetry at customs: “I hate poetry, the officer says.” Later in the poem:
I don’t tell him
he will be in a poem
where the argument isanti-American.
Writing is one of the most damning indictments, and Sharif utilizes it fully in Customs. The book is largely a lament on loss and the resulting anger. Customs is also a reminder of how much language matters. As the speaker in “Dear Aleph,” observes, “We make them reveal / the brutes they are by the things / we make them name.” Let’s choose to be thoughtful. Let’s choose some new names.
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Nate Logan is the author of Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019) and the chapbooks Apricot (above/ground press, 2022) and Small Town (The Magnificent Field, 2021). He teaches at Marian University.