Mom! This World Lies to Us! (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781503364813)

Awareness of Afeif Ismail's coming to Australia as a refugee from the murderous regime in Sudan would lead any reader to expect a book titled "Mum, This World Lies to Us!" to provide political poems grounded in harsh realism. However, surprises await you: the book provides no poems of this kind at all. Rather, Ismail reaches back to older elements in his intellectual and cultural tradition, so that the only expectation in the title that is fulfilled is the faux-naif one of the appeal to "Mum". That wise naivety is used in the poems to pose existential questions about the nature of human existence, rather than political or social questions about particular governments in particular places. The poet's questions, sometimes explicit but more often implicit, apply everywhere, and many of them perhaps at all times, even when the Nile River, jangling anklets, prayer beads or even emus are referred to. This is the work of a philosophical poet who sees "the cosmos" as "a great carnival" ("Drums"), dust as "an always renewing phoenix" ("Blight"), and memory as a "shelf" onto which "loyalty/and faithfulness "might be thrown like old coins ("Travel"). The imaging of dust as a phoenix shows that Ismail's approach can be wryly comic while being astutely philosophical, as he, and we, seek "directions" ("Travel") among mysterious possibilities of meaning. He is a philosophical poet, not a philosopher in the strict sense, so his philosophizing is cast in images (often archetypal images), dream, and the language of parable. In "Beyond Memory", the first section of a poem titled "The Tunnel", the speaker discovers: I wear my grandfather's dust and return as the beak of a dove carrying greenwood from dry land. Even when the poems are not imagistic, they can be intriguing in their brevity and thoughtfulness. For example, the poem "Onerous" speaks of years, Burdensomely shepherding my sadness in front of me. Still I have not found the edge of an abyss. This is suggestive but mysterious, especially when its title is considered. We are forever at the edge of the meaning of such poems, just as the poet seems to feel in the world of the self or the world at large. In this sense the world, not just Ismail's new country, Australia, is intrinsically foreign, and he feels a child's wonder at its perpetual newness. Thus, "mud houses never trust the rain", stations are "waiting for who never comes", and the "habit" of "blankness" is "to never stay in his proper place" ("Unsuitable Hats"). While in English we do have poets of parable, such as William Blake (and Ismail's "Premeditated Murder" is very reminiscent of Blake's "The Sick Rose"), they are unusual, and they are even more unusual in Australian poetry. Afeif Ismail's different cultural background is not there in an obvious North Africanness, but in its enabling him to bring this new, existential note to Australian poetry. Titles sit at interesting angles to their poems, interesting personifications abound, and a sense of a spiritual self and of the need for responses to complex moral questions pervades his writing. Interestingly, the poems have much more recourse to women than to men in this search for directions. "Mum! / This world lies to us" if we take it too simply. In the end, even our naming is a process of trying to grasp shadows: We give names to things to know them but we are surrounded by things that know us better than we do. ("Names") Afeif Ismail's poems jolt us into thinking about the world anew, even - perhaps especially - those aspects of it we thought we knew already. Professor Dennis Haskell The University of Western Australia

Author: Professor Dennis Haskell
ISBN-10: 150336481X
ISBN-13: 9781503364813
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Language: English
Published: 09/15/2009
Pages: 84
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.27lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.17d