Carving Ashes: an Inter-Review with Hari Alluri
Hari Alluri is a poet and community facilitator who immigrated to South Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory at the age of 12 and believes in craft and movement. With work in several anthologies, his poetry has appeared in Cutthroat, Kartika, Kweli, Lumina and other literary magazines. He is a former reader for Generations Literary Magazine, editorial collective member for Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook for Youth and editor of Proma Tagore’s poetry collection Language is Not the Only Thing that Breaks. An alum of the VONA / Voices, Port Townsend and Las Dos Brujas Writers Workshops, he has a BA in Sociology with a Diploma in Intercultural Education and Training from UVic, and is currently pursuing his MFA at San Diego State University. His most recent collaborations are with Cinder Block, Los Migrantes, Poetry International Community Outreach, RAIN Zine and SafeTeen. Hari’s first book, Carving Ashes, is published by CiCAC Press.
I met Hari in 2007 when I joined the migrant justice group, No One is Illegal, in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. I hadn’t come out as a poet yet at that time, but I knew and admired him then as a spoken word artist of the urban underbelly, a reflection of those parts of the city whose vitality was often glossed over, erased and distorted by the gentrifying white literati. He would show up at rallies, cigarette hanging off the corner of his lips and coffee-stained notebook in his back pocket, and within seconds of gripping the megaphone, have the crowd chanting like thunder, our bodies pumping against the perpetual chill, as though in resistance, we had become the sun. Fast-forward a few years and Hari and I found a shared writing community in the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Writing Workshops for Writers of Color (www.voicesatvona.org). Our friendship grew, fed by and feeding our mutual hunger for poetry, eventually becoming a genuine sister-brother relationship. In parallel, our first books also flourished in a sibling-like relationship to each other; we were often each other’s first workshop for the latest drafts of our manuscripts.
I share this origin story of our books and our relationships to complicate the common belief that the most “objective” assessment of our work must come from a “dispasssionate” third party who doesn’t know us at all. I am aware of two types of useful “reviews” of our work. The first is someone (an editor or a critic) reviewing our work in the context of the broader scene of literature and publishing – which is very white, male, middle-class, profit-oriented, academic, etc. and with an extremely narrow range of permissible people-of-color voices. That reading allows us to get a sense of how our work will be or is being received in the cultural spaces it is entering (if it can enter at all). The second is a fellow crafts-person reviewing our work in the context of our development as an artist of language. For me, this is the most important reading because it is the one that offers us a true gauge of where we need to grow, from the perspective of one who has an understanding of a) what we are trying to do, b) what we are capable of doing, and c) our technical and personal limitations at a given time. This kind of relationship requires trust and individual responsibility to be able to hear criticism and move on it. As each other’s first readers, Hari and I were often merciless with the manuscripts because each knew the other could handle it.
If I had to describe it one sentence, Carving Ashes is an emotionally-charged journey into the fault-lines of masculinity, cultural identity, language and place. But since this is not a soundbite, consider these lines:
“…i’d rather name / the cracks in the pavement after those / who died on their jagged calligraphy / but i can never remember. introductions / the only things that fill me with terror.” (from harboring the docks)
“anything not to show the pitiless stare behind the counter / that you spent the previous night in your own bed / alone, trying in vain to love a horn riff that, elsewhere, / in more beautiful ears, wounded you to the floor; / …you, who is afraid of this place, / where you’ve bled the most, will become your home…” (from jackal’s discord: kayode ni)
“longer than all the dravidian words / i never lived: indentured, asylum. / others too familiar: separation, / displacement. and those are my sinews, / …my left wrist welcomes / your bodies like water / to this place mine never quite reached” (from some wear bodies)
Hari has a gift for revelation through the most specific, intimate details of an event, a memory, a vision. He works in gestures, in shifts, like fingers kneading soil, shifting grains bit by bit and then suddenly, there is a hill, a rupture in the surface calling the reader to descend. Like the best poets, he does not merely pose questions or provide solutions to the very real problems that many of his poems illuminate; he offers a human response, with all the liability and fragility that entails. He moves toward repair not with the showmanship of a magician, but with the subtle turns of logic and perception of the trickster; for instance in the “knowing a growl / can be music / out of order yearning to know / the bare neck is the safest place” (from walk slow).
The figure of the trickster in fact, serves as a mythic bridge for the poet trying to find his voice in a strange land, a parallel to Adrienne Rich’s line, “the meaning searching for the word.” Hari explains, “Jackal is an ancient trickster figure I first encountered as a child in the Panchatantra stories — a series of primarily animist embedded myths that originate between Persian and South Asian Cultures. After immigration they lived in my bedroom closet behind the super hero comics I started collecting…Jackal found his way into my manuscript almost by accident. I was doing a week-long intensive / intent sieve with Sevé Torres. We had exchanged lists of images based on a sensory exercise designed to bring the conceptual into the sensory. When I sat down to work on the list Sevé gave me, I needed a way to move from his voice and experience into mine. Jackal provided that pathway.”
Something which remains un-mapped in the craft of writing, is how to navigate the multiple voices that inhabit writers like us – writers who are not descendants of immigrants, but are immigrants and who spent more than a decade of our formative years in countries of the global South (Nigeria and Indonesia, respectively). There are actually different versions of ourselves living and growing simultaneously, and our minds and languages often fail to align them with each other. We often feel at once overflowing and incomplete. Hari captures this tension in the huge range of aesthetics that compose this collection, bringing together a brilliant amalgam of forms – short, severe, long, sprawling, compact, unraveled – and vernaculars – slang, pidgin, Tagalog, Hindi, lofty, bare – I love how he honors each poem with its own special, unmistakable body.
With the figure of the Jackal, Hari offers us one strategy for integrating this multiplicity in our poetry while bringing it into conversation with the soulful figures of the places we’ve ended up in, so that they can continue to live and converse, instead of being banished into a box in the recesses of our consciousness. He says, ”One of the things that became interesting to think about for me was, what happens when we as migrants bring mythic figures to a land so wonderfully steeped in similar figures, for example, coyote has some resonances with jackal. And on Coast Salish territory where we both resided and in the neighboring territories, raven is so important. Jackal really gave shape to my project and, as a man who constantly talks shit at himself, jackal became a sort of wiser voice to talk shit at myself through, relentless, merciless and generous.”
Through the eyes of Jackal, Hari both affirms and critiques subtle moments of masculinity that rarely appear in popularized versions of brown-maleness as thug, terrorist, disposable good. Poems like director’s notes for memory block script, which through the perspective of a camera illuminates police brutality against young brown men; open at the shallow end, a snapshot of irreverence against the gods (or fate, between the lines); and on the job worker’s manual, which pays homage to the brotherhood and solidarity that makes even backbreaking labor a source of grace, deliver neither postures of masculine bravado or victimization, but the vulnerability, tenderness and fierce longing to see their own light, beneath: “instead of the barrel on K-KATT’s tongue shaped like pain SKINNY will / always see his jaw shake salty metallic taste disdain / wishing he brought a knife to a gunfight” (from director’s notes).
In other poems that address relationships with women, however, such as insinuate and how to thank the poetess on stage for irrupting the world into your body, Hari gives image to the slippages and debts that we incur in intimate relationships constrained by hetero-patriarchal norms; gives voice to the ways we are ruptured within and from each other because those norms are the only way we know to give form to ourselves. But the groundbreaking moment comes in these lines about his grandmother: “i love you, / lola. there is so much / i wanted you to teach me. / the journal contains / no entry / about the relief he felt / when she turned away / embarrassed, / let up her grip, and / his cousin insisted on / being the one to wipe her.” (from time: jackal’s labyrinth). ”I’m starting, “Hari says, “from the broken-ness of masculinity, gesturing towards moments in which there might even be a beauty that happens. I hope there’s a movement inside the poems toward some form of reckoning that takes personal stories and moves them beyond autobiography into intervention.”
Among his major influences for this book, Hari cites Yusef Komunyakaa, Matthew Shenoda, Chris Abani, Wayde Compton and Ross Laird; but he credits Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield and “the LONG list of hip hop artists I grew up on, the ancient myths of my ancestors and the land I grew up on (Nigeria), and the VOICES of growing up, that is, Nigerian, South Asian, Filipino, South Vancouver,” as the reasons he started writing. ”On my 33rd birthday,” he tells me, “I was turning to page 33 in all the poetry books on my shelf looking for the theme for that year of my life. I wrote down quite a few, from those mentioned above, from Mahmoud Darwish, from folk Vietnamese poems, Spanish poems my room-mate had, Rumi too. And my co-worker had a different Rumi book…so i asked for what was on page 33 and BOOM. Inside this new love, die. That became the foundation for the process and for Carving Ashes. So, when I look at Carving Ashes now, and how I looked at it throughout was, am I doing this? and wherever I fail in the book is probably where I allowed myself to live and where I succeed is where I died.”
To read Carving Ashes is take off your shoes and kneel in the most profaned spaces of your life, with your only lifeline the belief that what is there, if you dare to look without turning away, will sanctify you. If you do not believe in repair, in forgiveness, in confronting what would otherwise cause your disappearance, this book is not for you. If you do not believe that you can break and live, that light falls through fracture, this book is not for you. If you do not believe “a mirror is the same as the forge” (from pickled roots the night before the fire), this book is not for you. If you, like me, believe, then get a copy to ride with you on the bus, shit-talk with you on the corner, bless your eyes with a deeper, kinder vision of the places within you that have never been home, that are home.
To order your copy of Carving Ashes, go to http://harialluri.wordpress.com

