By Naomi Thiers, written March 2024
Rooja Mohassessy’s book of poems, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Elixir Press, 2023), is extraordinary—and not just because of its extraordinary content. Many poems describe living as a female child in Iran under the Islamic Republic government in the 1980s, witnessing the growing repression and the deprivation people endured during the Iran–Iraq war, and Mohassessy’s later experiences as a very young immigrant. When she was 12—for her own safety, as the war dragged on—her parents sent her to live with her uncle, a successful artist in Europe. Mohassessy’s description of these experiences is arresting, but her poems are intoxicating more because of the splendid and varied ways they use language: exceptionally long, flowing lines thick with war imagery, solemn poems that weave in Arabic words or Islamic prayers, or terse lines evoking the numbness of wartime:
Chemical warfare is child friendly
smelling of sweet apples,
geraniums,
fresh mustard fields mode at blooming stage.
“They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing. There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People”
There are also polished stanzaic forms, highly experimental structures, and plain language vignettes of daily life:
It’s autumn of 1981. Radiators in the hall
clang in time for a new uniform.
Her mother hands the shop lady a list.
There’s no need to undress, she says.
Shaking out a full-length overcoat
she slides the schoolgirl’s arms
through both sleeves. Wide hems overhang
the shirred cuffs of her peacock-green peacoat.
“Hijab in Third Grade”
Mohassessy is a masterful poet with many styles—yet her book coheres. The first section shows through a child’s eyes how the constriction of females’ freedom draws tighter, and cruelty increases as the Islamic Republic government led by Khomeini solidifies their power. She doesn’t soft pedal the pain of this, but describes it sort of from the side, focusing on small details and sensations a child would notice, as in “Hijab in Third Grade”:
An opaque cutout of a cloud is folded
into a triangle and cast over her head.
Fingers wedge her bangs under repeatedly,
pleading stars to retreat and keep
out of sight.
Or this stanza from “Before and After the Revolution”:
By the late 80s, the definition of Dirty Dancing grows
so broad as to embrace lashes, lips,
and other indecencies, young women are urged
to keep still, not fiddle with their faces. Then stoning
comes in vogue. Most, me included, miss out
entirely on Swazey’s steps. Some friends of friends
get 99 lashes for playing
the clandestine soundtrack . . .
In later poems that show the precarious life of people in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq war, the syntax becomes looser, and surreal imagery appears, as if the poems, like Iran’s citizens, are unraveling. A favorite of mine is “War,” a portrait of how Mohassessy’s parents, who both are deaf and nonspeaking, somehow regularly created a party at their house during those bleak days—“tucking/ the good-sized deaf and dumb society of Tehran/ into our three bedroom flat she’d decked/ into a close semblance of a French brothel.”
The second section helps the reader see through the speaker’s eyes as she emigrates to live with her uncle who lives a sophisticated life in Europe. Poems like “The Immigrant Leaving Home And Guilt,” “The Immigrant and Skin,” and “The Immigrant and Lament” express the slippery cultural shock of coming from a repressive country to a place with freedom and safety—but also the pain of leaving a warm, entangled family to move in with a reserved relative, the burden of “survivor guilt,” and the confusion of figuring out adolescence and desire in a strange land. Several poems imagine what the speaker’s left-behind parents are going through and even what this experience is like for her uncle: there are two impressive poems in his voice reflecting on the challenge of connecting with a shy teenage girl.
The stunning poem “All About Me” lays bare how the immigrant experience can strip a young person of any sense of solidity or self-knowledge, how a child dropped into a culture vastly different from “home” (even if living with a kind relative) can feel desperately cut off from herself—and silenced. There isn’t even an “I” telling about this feeling in the poem: the speaker addresses her soul and refers to her young self as “the child in the front row” in French class. When the French teacher asks the child to tell “all about herself,”
She drew a blank, although she could’ve told him
he was her favorite, and les nommes de toutes les fleurs,
colors and every disparate part
of her body she knew to name without checking, the way she knew
her country, the cat hunched unwell on the world map—
Instead of answering, the child freezes, and feels her soul has let her down:
Had you shown as from a plastic tiara
on her brow, steadied her hand, though she slouched
homesick at her desk, she would’ve scribed then with the flourish
of a Persian calligrapher, a catalogue of herself, warriorlike . . .
she would’ve spun in her Baluchi skirt stitched
with mirrors and demi-moons, to show
and tell
Because her soul “forgot your song, your tongue,” the child stays silent, and scribbles in her notebook “Je ne sais pas qui je suis.”
In the last sections, the voice is that of an adult, traveling or living in several countries—and she clearly knows who she is. These poems deal again with the immigrant experience (including applying for asylum), but also with trying to find a healthy sexuality and a way to live in a country (the U.S.) that is often suspicious or hostile to Muslims. There’s much toughness and tenderness in these poems, especially several to the speaker’s parents and about a lover who died. The poems never take a shortcut and never settle into a predictable style. That’s a good thing! I suggest you find this book and enter Mohassessy’s layered experiences.
You can find Rooja Mohassessy’s book When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (2023) at Elixir Press: elixirpress.com/when-your-sky-runs-into-mine.
Naomi Thiers (naomihope@comcast.net) grew up in California and Pittsburgh, but her chosen home is Washington D.C./northern Virginia. She is the author of four poetry collections: Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, In Yolo County, She Was a Cathedral, and Made of Air. Her poems, book reviews, and essays have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Grist, Sojourners, and other magazines. Former editor of the journal Phoebe, she works as an editor for Educational Leadership magazine and lives on the banks of Four Mile Run in Arlington, Virginia.
*****
Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we AMPLIFY women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or subscribing to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.