Exiles of Eden

by Ladan Osman

Exiles of Eden looks at the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present. Steeped in Somali narrative tradition yet formally experimental, Osman's poems give voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations. The characters in these poems encounter exile's strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that that once you are sent out of Eden, you can't go back.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2019

About the author

Ladan Osman (Somali: Laadan Cismaan, Arabic: لادان عثمان‎) is a Somali-American poet and teacher. She was born in Mogadishu. Her poetry is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.

Osman earned a BA from Otterbein University. She subsequently studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she earned an MFA. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers.

Osman lives in Chicago.

Reviews

[Leslie]

"All Bite the Bitten Dog"
by Ladan Osman

I held a mirror under my nose,
walked on the ceiling, hopped onto light covers,
stepped over doorframes, all rooms made new.
I'd wait when my breath fogged glass,
careful not to tilt the handle, glimpse my face.
I'd check my hair in glances, in the metal strip
at the side of the fridge.

I used my fingers to see the welts
from young, tender sticks, small rocks,
"Bleed!" a boy yelled but didn't wait
for the slow zipper of my flesh
to travel down my T-shirt.
"Look at all this sand! This paper!
These dead leaves!" my mother would say.
The water from my hair was often brown.
"I was playing. We were all playing."

An older boy raised a block of snow,
brought it down on my temple.
I could see my back door.
The frozen pavement showed sky,
and my eyes like raw chicken,
too pink from not crying.
There were friendly blue orbs, then nothing.
Then adults showing but not stopping their cars,
though I'd have crawled to the road if they'd called me.
Then all the pink mouths. Fruit-punch mouths
showing evidence of every drink and sauce.

He left a little volcano near my eye,
clotted with aspen blood. So similar
to smoke-plant pods found in the burrs.
I covered it with my hair, pressed it away
with cold-water toilet paper.
These people can do whatever they want.
How long have they been doing whatever,
like I'm a hated dish towel, mildewed and carried in pinches.
They want to set me by the burner while they stand at the sink.

"Hey Niggerface, come here with that big forehead.
Let us rest our candle on it," the night the block's lights
went out. "Let us burn you. How long would it take
to burn you?" Their spit from behind fences when I passed:
it hung on chain links, thick and white
and full of the same something
that kept me from looking at my entire face at once.
They displayed dogs with bared teeth:
"Big Red busts basketballs."
A demonstration. The dog sent after me,
they screaming hysterically
when the animal stopped short.
The dog might snap its teeth for show.
What restrains it, what propels its owners.

from pages 28-29 of Exiles of Eden

[Lauren]

Osman opens the collection with some stunner poems in "Half-Life" (immediately getting my attention as she quotes Stanislaw Lem's Solaris), and "You Return With the Water: Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004".

Quiet intensity maintained through the poems, and the great use of photographs and cartoons to supplement her words.

Several pieces will stay with me, but I think "Practice with Yearning Theorem: Loci" is the standout. Grief processing and observation through Google Earth aerial photography:
I visit countries in trouble. If there's water, I go there first. I look for green. Last, I look for airports, other infrastructure. Mogadishu, Aleppo, Baghdad.

[Courtney LeBlanc]

Unfortunately I had a hard time connecting with or being pulled into these poems. While they cover important topics (race, identity, discrimination, racism), I wanted most to be more poetic. There were a few I liked though.

from Autocorrect: "Lynch whenever works best for you." / I mean, "Lunch." It's too late. So come / archived images of black bodies, hot. / I can tell they're hot, despite death, / by their skin.

from NSFW: I want to recite your lineage. / Let us make formal prayers for the names we forget, / for the ones that history took. / Let us pray from the heart for the blood they took from us.

[أحمد ناجي]

Definitely one of my favorite poetes ever..
وحشي، مفترس، ذكى، قبضة مخملية باردة في القلب
القصائد التى تحتوى على مزيج من الكلمات والصور من اجمل وأذكى ما يكون
توظيف الوسائط المتعددة مثل صور خرائط جوجل عبقري ومتناغم وحسدتها على قدرتها على مزج الوسائط بالرقة والنعومة دى
وفي كل القصائد في شهوة بتبث طاقة سرية عبر الكلمات

[zaki]

this collection is so surreal and prescient. i want to keep a lot of lines with me forever but especially this one: "i kill yet another moth and consider leaving its body, marker for cousins eating uneven holes in the blooms of my favourite shawl. i call it favourite after ruin." like AH so sharp and dreamlike

[judy-b. judy-b.]

I appreciate when poetry pushes me to interrogate myself, and these poems do that. They also contain moments of wild, transportive beauty, and I appreciate that too.

[Chase!]

Highly recommended. Controlled, associative; a microscopic image and satellite photo in the same instant. Check out "Sympathy for Eve."

[F]

It was like a series of dreams! Not what I was expecting. The last poem, Refusing Eurydice, slaps.

[Sonja]

A great book of poems almost like an epic poem. Somalia. A poet to watch for Ladan Osman.
The reading of this book overlaps 2020 and 2021. Here is my reading blog for 2020.

https://www.sfraneta.com/single-post/...

[leynes]

Well, this didn't quite work out as planned. I thought I would absolutely adore Exiles of Eden but overall felt rather lukewarm about it. In 2019, I wanted to check out more poetry written by African authors. When researching what might interest me, I stumbled upon the work of Ladan Osman. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony. Her newest collection was just released this may and has gotten raving reviews from Danez Smith and Safia Elhillo. Two of my absolute favorite poets.

Exiles of Eden is marketed as a look on the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, "exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present." Unfortunately, I can't quite agree with that. Apart from the last poem in the collection and a few references here and there, the story of Adam and Eve isn't elaborated upon in Ladan's poetry. I was very disappointed by that since it was one of my main incentives for picking up this collection.

Overall, I just didn't connect to Ladan's words. A lot of her poems focused on her sexual encounters and her relationship to her ex-husband. These poems did absolutely nothing for me. On top of that, I don't think that her writing style is quite lyrical. Her poems feel more like regular sentences. Don't get me wrong, her poetry is not in the slightest like your typical Rupi Kaur "let's just type a sentence and hit the space bar too often", Ladan's poems are long and of the narrative type. She tries to tell a full story with them. Nonetheless, I cannot help wondering if regular prose would've been more fitting for what Ladan tried to achieve.

You begged me to finally fart for you.
We joked about sending me to Iraq,
to sit on the chests of enemies, gas their faces,
Enemies who dressed like my parents.

Woah, there's a lot to unpack here. This was actually one of my favorite passages from her poem "You Return with the Water: Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004", in which she deals with the tension between her and her husband who serves in the army. Her writing is a little un-elegant (and no, not just because she uses the word "fart") and whilst I can see what she did there (to show the paradox of how the war her husband is fighting in is a very personal thing for her, too) I cannot help but still feel a disconnect.

What I found interesting about this poetry collection is the incorporation of photographs, some of which were taken by the author herself and some of which are from other sources. I wouldn't say that the photographs always complemented her words but I cannot deny that some of the photographs by themselves were poems in themselves, especially "Rebound Rapt, 2016" was absolutely mesmerising. It's a photo of a group of Black men looking enraptured upwards at a basketball which is out of the picture.

I'd like to call myself a --- of ferns
but I've had difficulty with vocabulary
for living things --- thriving.

Some of her verses were absolutely brilliant though. Ladan is able to put her heartbreak, her inability to love herself into such simple words. Her disgust, her fears, her disappointment ("I'm the most romantic man that I know") are often aptly described. Now that's what I call poetry. However, those moments of brilliance were rather sparse in this collection.

I also found it interesting that some of her poems dealt with the history of Black people in America, specifically "After the Photograph of Emmett Till's Open Casket, 1955" ("think, maybe it wouldn't be so bad / if Emmett / appeared in his white shirt / and explained / some things. Mainly, / if it's as bad / as I think it is / when they finally get their hands on you.") and "NSFW" ("I want you to recite your lineage. / Let us make formal prayers for the names we forget, / for the ones that history took.") and "Think of Me as Your Mother", a poem written for young men being held in prison ("I wish I could take you into my belly. I think it's the only safe place for you.")

I doubt any of our thoughts converge.
What is it like to be so free?
To drift in water in a country you call
Your own. Unprepared because you can laugh
Into an official's face. Explain, offer no apology.

So, there are definitely certain lines in her poems that are extremely hard-hitting and well-executed. In general, I would say that Ladan's strong point are her political poems. I like how she explores her own identity being trapped between her place of birth, Somalia, and the place where she grew up, the U.S., how she wants to (but can't quite) reconcile the two. You get a sense that she sometimes even feels guilty that she was able to leave Somalia behind and lead a comparatively easy life in the U.S. ("Get up, an African witch from Atlanta says. / There is no Hades. You don't get to choose death. / You're an immigrant, not a refugee. / You've flown to and fro the ocean in peace since birth.) and I found that quite relatable, since those are thoughts that many people with a history of migration face.

In general, the last poem of the collection "Refusing Eurydice" was pretty damn solid and I would recommend checking it out: "We refuse the spirits that attempt oppression, / and we refuse the spirits that attempt possession. / [...] We are looking for a better myth. / We've been looking since Eve."

And just in case you're interested, I changed my rating after writing this review and going through some of her poems again. That makes me wonder whether this collection will improve upon a reread. I often fear that I'm rushing through poetry collections without giving then the time to breath. We'll see. For now, I am happy that I checked out Ladan's work but will probably wait a bit before reading her debut collection.

[Corey]

TBR-ed after I heard this wonderful interview on VS.

[Asiya (lavenderdecaflatte)]

2.5 ⭐️ I guess I’m glad I stuck around

The second half was definitely more enjoyable and relatable to me than the first. I thought I was picking up a book by a Somali American poet so I would relate so much.. that was not really the case. I related more when she mentioned American historical/political events than with anything else.. it didn’t help that her ex was a solider in Iraq??
I definitely have a bone to pick with calling this a poem book (did I make that up?) really it was more so a mixed medium work.
The anglicized Islamic and/ or Somali terms made this feel so much less authentic- like it was written for the “other” not for people like me.

[J]

More a 3.75, I think.

A quiet, almost dreamlike collection of poems that reflect on an array of themes that are as broad as thinking about loss and longing, and as specific as Osman’s own identity and life experiences. I wasn’t quite sure what particular direction she wanted to take these poems, which sort of took away from the flow. However, there was a lot to think about in each poem, especially the last one, “Refusing Eurydice.”

Some favorites: “Catastrophic Breakdown,” “NSFW,” and “Refusing Eurydice”

Read for the Sealey Challenge.

[birdmaddgirl]

4-4.5

[Shannon]

Challenging, graphic, not to be read when tired. “I possess one compass, which is my soul, and it shall never err.”

[Tram]

Exiles of Eden by Ladan Osman is a loose take on the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, "exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present."

The collection doesn’t make overt biblical references to the origin story. Instead, Osman does allude to feelings of exile, alienation, and the pressures of human consciousness. She covers the many shades of longing: a longing for family, a better lover than who you have, a better love than what you have, belonging, validation, and a sense of self.

My two favorite poems from this collection were “Half-Life” and “Refusing Eurydice,” which bookend the collection.

In “Half-Life,” Osman ponders what it means to lose yourself and be aware of the process as it happens. The poem starts with a brilliant reference to the movie Solaris and evokes the conversation of what we love and value and identify with in this world. Do we love the people around us or is it the idea of them and the potential of what they can provide to us that we love? Do we love the tangible or the simulated? These questions apply universally. What do we want from ourselves and our relationships? For someone to truly see us the way we are or of who we could be? Is it enough to want? As long as we believe in the idea of something, maybe it doesn’t matter how real or connected or tangible something is.

In “Refusing Eurydice,” Osman invites you “Go to the place between dreams, where all the light is yours.” “This is a congregation refusing Eurydice,” Osman writes. "We refuse the spirits that attempt oppression, / and we refuse the spirits that attempt possession. / [...] We are looking for a better myth. / We've been looking since Eve." This poem touches on our dissatisfaction with the myths told to us. It’s an oppressive network of burdensome expectations that has us avoiding life because we are looking for something to fill a void that we are told we have. There are no winners or triumphs in this system.

This collection is vividly presented to us with universal themes of exile and loneliness, but the prose shines when Osman tethers her lines to experiences of being a black woman in America, trying to explore the space between being an immigrant and a refugee, and what it means “to be ejected from paradise.”

Other standouts from this collection: “NSFW” (for its humor, intimacy, obtrusive thoughts of violence); "Think of Me as Your Mother" (written for young men being held in prison); “The sea fell on my house” (for exploring the source of her pain); and “Practice With Yearning Theorem: Tangents (for being comfortable with loss).

[josé miguel]

I want to walk into a field at night, close our eyes
and mouths so the searchlights can't find us.
I want you to hold me in the grass, and later,
point at the drowned ants, our hides raw from mosquito bites.

—Ladan Osman. NSFW

We are looking for a better myth.
We’ve only been looking since Eve.

—Ladan Osman. Refusing Eurydice