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To Afar From Afar
This collection hinges on the image of a globe. Composed as three long poems in the second person interrupted by a visual fragmented movement. The modes address (to afar/from afar) are informed by distances made by war and globalization. With collage, maps, lyric nonfictions, storytelling, chants, sonnets, treated screenshots, a sestina, and new family pictures of old places - this book addresses displacement, memory and the darkness and light they bring.
- GenresPoetry
98 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2018
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February 17, 2021 Soham Patel’s first full-length book of poetry, To Afar From Afar, explores the beautifully heartbreaking ways in which longing and memory bind those separated by migration, globalization, and political upheaval – the legacy of colonialism. The first long poem, “This is to inform you:” begins with the poem within a poem, [Where you are going…], in which the speaker reflects on the “push and pull” of time and distance that keeps people apart. But, within the span of a few lines, Patel telescopes from the vastness of the world to deep inside the speaker’s very heart. She writes, “You carry a globe around:/ furniture. Used to reference, instruct, daydream,/ decorate. Ecliptic obliquities solve some loss.” This deft shifting in focalization –from musings that encompass the very “path the sun makes in the sky” to a deep interiority – reveals a speaker with an expansive vision of home that exists in love.
To Afar From Afar, then, is about what holds family close rather than what keeps them apart. In “This is to inform you:” [Sunlight on any piece of concrete], the speaker notes:
On roadsides some mother
voices say—none of this can bear
beginning. The sunlight down
on any piece of ground is hope fathers
keep when they have to leave home.
Yes, Patel’s work is imbued with a hopefulness in and of love. But, she does not minimize the tyranny and violence that test the limits of hope. And, at the center of the violence is the destructive force of colonial ideology. The thread of hope and love weaved into the collection are thus twined with a narrative of the violence and displacement.
In 1972 –only ten years after Uganda gained independence from the British – Idi Amin, the self-titled, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada… Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, enacted a series of policies for the expropriation of property and the ultimate expulsion of Asians in Uganda, most of whom were descendants of Indians fleeing British colonialism. Patel’s family were among the 60,000 Asian people who were given just 90 days to leave the country, losing their homes and livelihoods and any semblance of security or safety. In “This is to inform you:” [Because you stomach the push…] Patel writes:
Who has a dream. Who wants you out. Who wants a
knife at father’s head
Before the auspicious event is to be announced? You are
On your way. Out.
The speaker challenges the xenophobia that turns neighbor against neighbor; challenges those who scapegoat immigrants and refugees; those who refuse to historicize colonialism, war, and political upheaval; or those who remain silent when bearing witness to these terrors. She continues:
Soldiers sing and laugh and load you on a bus. The end of a gun
Or a penis pushes up against the small of your back. You
leave each brother behind.
Some of the most compelling imagery in this collection details moments of breath and air and smoke –as if breathing were a form of remembering and remembering is a form of resistance. For it is memory and longing tether the inhabitants of Patel’s world to one another. In the second poem, “On another note:” [A familiar smell hit…] she writes:
A familiar smell hit. You lit a cigarette. Lungs ache.
Exhale and the smell becomes a memory of a cousin who
stole bidis one by one, then two by two, then pack by
pack from an uncle’s cabinet. You both smoked in the
summers on the roof where yellow-green lizards and roti-
thief monkeys live.
Patel juxtaposes the materiality of a globe, a city, a home, with the ephemeral smoke and air: “remembrance and lung sacs.”
But, in [City walls…] she notes the slippery imperfection of language in holding us together:
…We’d give this language a heart if we
could only minimize the egg, eliminate the skin, distance
the thought of grammar from dust.
Arranged throughout the collection are images – maps, screenshots, and family photos –manipulated to reveal layers of meaning that our imperfect language and distant memories cannot. In one photo, taken during her family’s return to Uganda in 2016, two men walk casually past a building once owned by her family, now the “Oasis Lounge.” In the top corner, a billboard sign is cut off so that it reads, “Regal Pain.” Listen, look closer, Patel implores when, juxtaposed next to this image, on the last line of the page she writes “I have so much to tell you.” And she does. In her deft hands, a map of the Midwest is a visceral reminder that “contingency is a good tool for survival. An old postcard with the image of a U.S. biplane taking off to scout the Mexican border accrues greater meaning when in the last section, “Mixed with always” [Mailman’s been reading our postcards again…] she writes:
I point my heart straight at your eye. You study a globe. You draw
maps. What travels at the speed of 39 cents per stamp?
The joy and beauty of love? The bonds made in family and history? The need for self-assertion? Reminders of the “distances the heart globes over.”
To Afar From Afar, then, is about what holds family close rather than what keeps them apart. In “This is to inform you:” [Sunlight on any piece of concrete], the speaker notes:
On roadsides some mother
voices say—none of this can bear
beginning. The sunlight down
on any piece of ground is hope fathers
keep when they have to leave home.
Yes, Patel’s work is imbued with a hopefulness in and of love. But, she does not minimize the tyranny and violence that test the limits of hope. And, at the center of the violence is the destructive force of colonial ideology. The thread of hope and love weaved into the collection are thus twined with a narrative of the violence and displacement.
In 1972 –only ten years after Uganda gained independence from the British – Idi Amin, the self-titled, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada… Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, enacted a series of policies for the expropriation of property and the ultimate expulsion of Asians in Uganda, most of whom were descendants of Indians fleeing British colonialism. Patel’s family were among the 60,000 Asian people who were given just 90 days to leave the country, losing their homes and livelihoods and any semblance of security or safety. In “This is to inform you:” [Because you stomach the push…] Patel writes:
Who has a dream. Who wants you out. Who wants a
knife at father’s head
Before the auspicious event is to be announced? You are
On your way. Out.
The speaker challenges the xenophobia that turns neighbor against neighbor; challenges those who scapegoat immigrants and refugees; those who refuse to historicize colonialism, war, and political upheaval; or those who remain silent when bearing witness to these terrors. She continues:
Soldiers sing and laugh and load you on a bus. The end of a gun
Or a penis pushes up against the small of your back. You
leave each brother behind.
Some of the most compelling imagery in this collection details moments of breath and air and smoke –as if breathing were a form of remembering and remembering is a form of resistance. For it is memory and longing tether the inhabitants of Patel’s world to one another. In the second poem, “On another note:” [A familiar smell hit…] she writes:
A familiar smell hit. You lit a cigarette. Lungs ache.
Exhale and the smell becomes a memory of a cousin who
stole bidis one by one, then two by two, then pack by
pack from an uncle’s cabinet. You both smoked in the
summers on the roof where yellow-green lizards and roti-
thief monkeys live.
Patel juxtaposes the materiality of a globe, a city, a home, with the ephemeral smoke and air: “remembrance and lung sacs.”
But, in [City walls…] she notes the slippery imperfection of language in holding us together:
…We’d give this language a heart if we
could only minimize the egg, eliminate the skin, distance
the thought of grammar from dust.
Arranged throughout the collection are images – maps, screenshots, and family photos –manipulated to reveal layers of meaning that our imperfect language and distant memories cannot. In one photo, taken during her family’s return to Uganda in 2016, two men walk casually past a building once owned by her family, now the “Oasis Lounge.” In the top corner, a billboard sign is cut off so that it reads, “Regal Pain.” Listen, look closer, Patel implores when, juxtaposed next to this image, on the last line of the page she writes “I have so much to tell you.” And she does. In her deft hands, a map of the Midwest is a visceral reminder that “contingency is a good tool for survival. An old postcard with the image of a U.S. biplane taking off to scout the Mexican border accrues greater meaning when in the last section, “Mixed with always” [Mailman’s been reading our postcards again…] she writes:
I point my heart straight at your eye. You study a globe. You draw
maps. What travels at the speed of 39 cents per stamp?
The joy and beauty of love? The bonds made in family and history? The need for self-assertion? Reminders of the “distances the heart globes over.”
August 3, 2023
I read her newest book but that doesn’t come out until like October so I couldn’t mark it on goodreads, but I really liked it so then I bought this one and read it and now I can mark it on goodreads and it’s good but not as good as her newest one so if you’re reading this, you should read all one in the end—/water, it’s really good and I would give it 5 stars if it had a page on goodreads
August 1, 2019
You can really feel the influence of Mahmoud Darwish.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews