The debut bundle stay Van poet and psychiatrist Yasmin Namavar (1983) is full of contrasts: Dutch and Farsi, Nature and City, Love and everyday worries. Behind the cracks of what occurs naturally, a threatening world sneaks, which makes the uncontrollable tangible and puts everyday tension. Be on your guard, there is whispering between the lines.
Namavar, from Iranian-Dutch descent, uses a style that is alternately imaginative and measured. Sometimes the visual and the sober against each other are deposited. In the second poem of the moving series ‘Drought’, of which the first rule simply is ‘the VU Hospital’, a refusal to say goodbye sounds:
This is my father’s bed
This is not a funeral advertisement
This is not a manual for farewell
This is my father
These rules reflect a layered battle: a resistance to poetry and to death. The rule “This is not a manual for farewell” suggests: Do not confuse this writing with a meaningful or pretentious poem about loss – this is my father. “This is my father” can be read as a desperate denial of death: this is not death, this is my father.
The next poem, numbered with a sign that is a Persian 3, is right on the right on the page next to it, so that the poems seem to reach towards each other as hands with spread fingers. In style, the third poem strongly contrasts with the foregoing:
he sweats, sleeps a day and one night
Awake when the chalice falls on hungry sand
Termites crawl out of the flower, sticky warm
From singing spring sun drug.
Here Namavar’s descent gets a linguistic effect, in which the poet plays with what is expected from Dutch and Persian poetry. She does not brush away the supposed cultural differences, but puts them in front of each other: where Dutch poetry traditionally tends towards compaction and austerity, the Persian tradition allows more excess and baroque images. Incidentally, Namavar puts assumptions in loose screws by combining traditions in other poems freely and to handle it.
Clay and sand together
Also in the opening poem ‘fingerprints’, Namavar reflected on her origins:
I get rid of all possible ways
easy to explain
what I want to say
About the effects of the revolution on my parents’ marriage
clay and sand together, sometimes ceramics sometimes brick
The reader has been warned: there is no easy way to talk about how political revolutions penetrate a life. The poem then describes how the I-figure tries to keep disaster at a distance and how she wants to be untraceable for an unnamed body. But is that enough?
It seemed a bit too simple for me
slaughtering a sheep on an altar with a butcher’s knife
I don’t get rid of my blood vessels, lymphatic lanes
I look exactly like myself, wear my own organs
defend me against viruses, bacteria to my best abilities
My house houses DNA
In my toothbrush, in the ink of the printer
In the small bed in the front room
The rule “I look exactly like myself” is striking within the list. This suggests that it takes some effort to come up with an appearance that does not raise any questions-as if the I-figure is aware of how it is seen and how to adapt to not stand out. And: “Nevertheless, I am afraid of fingerprints, bite wounds/ on a body of a loved one, on mine.” Why it is dangerous to leave traces is not made explicit, but in the context of the aforementioned revolution arouses the fear of being able to be hunted and fear of persecution.
In another, titless poem, which appears as an underground layer of the bundle in five parts at the bottom of the page, this fear becomes even more tangible. Nightmare -like images appear here with a matter of course like old fairy tales: “The night was our first assignment. He wore a gray boy shirt, Honds with a line of long teeth. I thought seduction, killing, domesticating, you closed him in the dark, threw him in a steel cage while I was shivering.”
Seven assignments
Through seven assignments, the I-figure seems to confront itself and the other-possibly a split myself-with the tension between cultures, between adjustment and resistance: “I applied for every job and cooked bean rice sauce. In the night I went out, practiced me in echo location, I no longer sought bats for the tough”. The disposal assignment seems to suggest reconciliation, but can also mean that the I-figure has hardened itself in such a way that nothing can touch her anymore. In the collection as a whole, the poet also looks for a existence beyond vulnerability. The sunny in life is not absent in the bundle, but is actively pursued, moving enough.
In this overwhelming debut collection, Namavar literally and figuratively brings large topics such as migration, displacement and identity to the fore without capital letters. The themes are not immediately mentioned anywhere, but are sounding in questioning what occurs as a matter of course in everyday. At times of apparent peace, such as during a visit to the zoo, the threat is greatest:
waving the flexible herb, the smiling poplars
The people are away from home and the afternoon pours their drizzle or fries
They walk a death in sleep
their bed at home, the pajamas in a pile
base where they cry and cook
and everything does his best to look so normal
Even the unlikely sparkling koi carp in the pouch of the stay
swimming carelessly.
In stay Is nothing for granted. A stay, apart from a zoo loft, is a temporary accommodation. And, in the imperative wise, it can also be a call for not shooting anywhere. Danger is never far away. This bundle shows what it is like when a stay is where you are the most at home. Even if this residence is lifelong and the existence itself turns out to be.