Practicing the Work of Worms: Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look

Abstract

Practicing the Work of Worms:Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look Maria Capecchi (bio) Solmaz Sharif's poetry book, Look, is a poignant work filled with carefully crafted lyric poems as well as an important analysis of the effects of war. Her poems break new poetic ground, using erasure tactics, a complex lyric "I," and the reappropriation of terms from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (indicated by all caps in the poems)1 to adapt the lyric genre. Sharif's strong lyric voice combines the emotional intimacy of the confessional lyric with the intense call-to-action of the political lyric. Her voice is commanding: exposing her reader to a lyric world where the very language that makes up her poetry is undermined by multiple interpretations and meanings. Sharif demands that her Western reader unflinchingly view the costs of war in the Middle East and experience the shifting realities of a society where categorization defines an individual's worth. The poems are filled with startling images of violence juxtaposed with moments of intimacy and reflection. By replicating the immigrant experience through her lyric voice, she exposes her Western readers to the experiences of exile. Sharif's text explores what it means to truly look, to take in a life in its grievable2 state, to see the other and recognize ourselves. This recognition creates intimacy and [End Page 117] connection; her poem "Look" becomes a rallying cry, an invitation to the exilic state. Rather than asking us to leap into action, Sharif encourages us to pause, to consider, to see the "exquisite face" of the subaltern:3 Let it matter what we call a thing.Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.Let me look4 at you.Let me look at you in a light that takes years to get here. (4–5) Rather than insisting on one sanctioned meaning, one voice, Look shares multiple and often contradictory voices. Through these lyric voicings, Sharif asks her Western reader to reflect on the wars in the Middle East and experience multiple perspectives within the conflict, including those of her family in Iran; her immigrant parents; US soldiers; and Iranian, Iraqi, and US citizens. Sharif's title alone, based on the military term "look," indicates the importance of being receptive, looking at something, taking it in (Department of Defense 318). The title exemplifies this process: to look indicates an ability to receive from someone else (a state Sharif asks the reader to inhabit). Mines, when influenced, explode, referencing the real use of mines in warfare and the cultural and political metaphorical minefields addressed in the text; and Sharif metaphorically "explodes" the Western concept (or frame) of the Iraq War. Sharif's claiming of words used to objectify Western targets gives a new voice to the concepts and people who are overlooked in the war on terror. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's work on the subaltern is an important theory underlying my understanding of the other and grievability as they relate to Sharif's lyric. Within the frame of the US war on terror, the Iraqi and Iranian people Sharif voices in her poems are classified as "deviations" and "differences" from the Western ideal. While some individuals Sharif voices, such as her uncle, do not completely fit Spivak's definition of subaltern, I find it helpful to use this term in order to interrogate the United States' political rhetoric that focuses on "deviations" and "differences." While these Iraqi and Iranian individuals may not fit the subaltern category in terms of social status within their own countries, the United States effectively treats them [End Page 118] as subaltern. To complicate the issue of voice further, Spivak identifies attempts at speaking for subaltern communities as emanating "from the self-diagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual" (80), which disguises the Western speaker's imperialist and capitalist motivations. This perceived transparency masks the problematic nature of an outsider, including the subaltern elite, speaking for any people. Sharif's voicing of Iraqi and Iranian people is complicated within this construct as she is speaking for the subaltern from a perceived authority as...