Managing Our Fears: On Four Poems by Jaswinder Bolina

Abstract

Managing Our Fears:On Four Poems by Jaswinder Bolina Mark Halliday The 44th of July, by Jaswinder Bolina (Omnidawn, 2019), 88 pp. Jaswinder Bolina's poems in The 44th of July worry constantly about power relations—between rich and poor, native and immigrant, soldier and citizen; between races, between cultures. This kind of focus produces poetry from which I often recoil, since I don't want poems that presume to inform me of obvious inequities in society, or that nag me moralistically about my privileged cooperation in an unfair society. (Everyone who is at all likely to read poetry or an essay on poetry engages in such cooperation.) Those reminders come plentifully every day from the news, which is interesting in its way but not in the emotionally layered, psychologically probing way of poetry. With this view I might not be expected to think highly of The 44th of July (even taking into account that Jaswinder Bolina was one of my doctoral students more than a decade ago), yet I admire the book, and I will try to show how Bolina can make political poems—poems aware of political evils—that are not arrogantly didactic but helpful to all of us who need strategies for managing our fears. The presence of fear underlying each poem about dangerous power is crucial to the success of these poems. Bolina's style—verbose, argumentative, cornucopic with details—expresses the anxiety and resentment a speaker who hopes to control a scary subject may feel by addressing it so abundantly. Bolina as poet is tuned in to the bitterness of anyone robbed or manipulated or ignored by capitalist culture; he knows that outsiders suffer invisibly—someone seethes beneath the exit music at the end of each mainstream cultural narrative of victory and fulfillment. In some poems Bolina finds himself also revealing his own attraction to the kinds of power he critiques or laments, creating a sense of the poem's speaker being more honest than at first he meant to be. One provisional strategy for managing fear is to imagine a world from which it has disappeared. Bolina tries this experiment in "New Adventures in Sci-Fi." The poem's title promises a set of improbable or impossible events or conditions. The speaker summarizes with cheerful complacency the safe life of inhabitants of "a bland planet" where the problems of earthly life have been solved or have never arisen. The poem's critique of earthly follies [End Page 199] comes across through a series of negations—for instance, law enforcement is nonviolent and benign (if necessary at all) on the bland planet: Everybody has a porch swing the beat cops wave to when they pass. They don't protect us bloody.They don't police the teeth out of our heads or thump us as if they are monsters afraidof the dark. A poem proceeding this way could become cheaply polemical; but Bolina avoids that playfully, not advocating changes but assuming the reader shares his sense that the desirable changes have sci-fi unlikeliness. No jingo caucusgums up our galactic congress. No bigot polemic commandeers our election cycle. Our super pacsprotect us, our lobbyists defend us, even our Republicans consider our expertise. The sharing of outlook between poet and expected reader is enjoyable, but the amusement has anxiety behind it, as in the context of The 44th of July we realize that the poem's sci-fi gambit is one strategy for finding fortitude amid dangers; poet and reader share in imagining a better world. The better world is not plagued by repressive divisions between groups of people, such as are caused on earth by nationalism or religion: There's no such thing as Americans. There are only bisexuals,all forty-six of our black presidents, all thirty-seven of them women, all of us infatuatedwith each other, and all our caliphs desire is a pride parade. All our Zions require mutual [End Page 200] consent there is no God, and there is no God so we get on with our hydroponics and barbecueso when the aliens come, they come for our cuisine. The jump from "forty-six...