DESIRE/HALVES by Jai Hamid Bashir • Book Reviews

Poetry by Jai Hamid Bashir, reviewed by Daniel Mills
DESIRE/HALVES (Nine Syllables Press)

Jai Hamid Bashir’s 2024 debut poetry collection, Desire/Halves, from Nine Syllables Press opens with the following lines from Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem, “Consciousness Self-Learns”:

World is undivided, observer and observed, as particle from its wave nature,
as prayer from compassionate outcome, when prayer is multiplied

Berssenbrugge’s meditation on connection and relationships is a fitting preamble, but even more apropos is that the Beijing-born poet settled in New Mexico in the early 1970s, befriending and working alongside the likes of Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Martin, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Like Berssenbrugge, Bashir, a South Asian poet who is the child of Pakistani-American immigrants, also “lives and works in the American West,” as she states in her bio.

The “American West” is a broad, loosely defined place, but it serves a point. It is a region formed as much by cultural imagination as by any physical borders, where traditions of artists and poets like Berssenbrugge have helped to shape the landscape that is also so closely tied to the concept of a frontier.

Bashir’s Desires/Halves is investigating, mapping, and constructing such abstracted frontiers within the American West and South Asia, where desire and longing are coordinates leading to connection and understanding.

A variety of literary texts and traditions, as well as numerous languages, fill the collection. At times, the disparate allusions muddy Bashir’s intended meaning, but by bringing our attention to these outside references, she illuminates unexpected throughlines between them.

In the opening poem, “Stringing the Bow,” the speaker begins:

Driving in the American West, reading Celan
and The Mahabarata. After the war,
Arjuna drops the bow forged by Brahma back
into the ocean, relinquishing it
back to the gods.

We are at first greeted by both the Romanian-born, German-speaking, Jewish poet Paul Celan and the ancient Sanskrit Hindu text, The Mahabrata. The two dissimilar texts placed side by side provoke the question of how they are related, if at all, other than through Bashir’s own affinity. Arjuna’s act of returning Gandiva, the divine bow forged by Brahma back into the ocean symbolizes a cyclical return, a theme that reverberates throughout the collection. Bashir continues to invoke more contemporary works before returning us to the ancient.

In Laura Gilpin’s poem, “Two-Headed Calf,” the central “freak of nature,” as Gilpin describes, enjoys one last night in the field with its mother before it is carried away by unspecified farm boys towards an uncertain end.

Bashir reimagines this story, where in her version, the calf escapes its dreaded fate of the original as an objectified museum piece, “This time, no one / lives next to the slaughterhouse,” and instead survives to spend another night staring at twice as many stars as usual, while “Someone in the farming town remarked, It looked / like a Hindu god!”

From there, the reader is taken deeper into a vast landscape, freed into possibility like the two-headed calf: “Time and love’s arrows / inevitably veer from each nock.” We move further away from common conceptions of the West towards the linguistic and culturally rich traditions of South Asia.

It is only in the final poem, “The Neighbors,” that the speaker appears back in a place of familiarity on their front porch. “A bright, common moon emerges, baying for canines / from between pines,” as if returning themselves from the myriad traditions and references in the interim of the opening and final poems.

In the second poem, “Marrow of Mercy,” after The Mahabarata’s invocation, a “halo-blonde friend touristing India” messages the speaker, “I understand why you worship them. I remind her / I’m Muslim.” The friend is politely forgiven for a mistake the reader could easily make.

At the end of the collection in the “Notes” section, Bashir provides context for a few but not all of the contained references. She also asks for similar compassion, explaining, “I am someone who is neither from here nor there. Great care and consideration were placed on honoring all theological, cosmological, and linguistic traditions present and evoked in these poems. If I have made any errors, please forgive me, reader.”

The frontier we explore is gracious. No one here has absolute authority on where they call home. The various allusions may overwhelm the reader, but not because we are expected to understand them. It is as if we are suddenly transported to a place that is both familiar and foreign, and we are taking account of our surroundings. Even Bashir enters territory that is murky and unknown, sharing in our journey: “there are no borders. In your palms softening / your name over callus in Nastaliq.”

Languages slide over one another; Nastaliq, the calligraphic script of Persian, Urdu, and other South Asian languages permeate throughout. Spanish offers the reader a Western orientation among the non-Roman script, even as it carries its Arabic influence.

The etymology of fruits are turned over and inspected. “The fruit that taught us how to slice / our world. Naranja or Naarangi is a tart tautology / Rhyming with nothing in America, a vibrating echo / in both Spanish and Hindi,” we are told in the poem, “In Dead Horse Point, We Are Alone.”

“A vibrating echo” encapsulates a central point here. Bashir is tracing fleeting echoes across geographies and time – between the West and South Asia – just as, “The echo of the escaped two-headed / calf rotates around a truck that hasn’t had a passenger in / decades.” .

In “Still, Life With Fruit,” the pomegranate speaks, “Anar: Granata! If only the pin were just the thick star of a pomegranate. انار.” We may slice its roots in a number of ways – the French grenade, weapon of destruction the poem invokes, the seeded (grānātum) apple (pōmum) of medieval Latin, or the folk etymology of pomme-grenade, the “apple of Granada”, of the Spanish city, which the fruit came to symbolize.

Spanish and Hindi might be an unexpected pairing, but their proximity in the American West is less distanced when viewed within a pomegranate. From Afghanistan and Persia, the fruit threaded its way across continents and cultures, notably in India, millenia before arriving in Central America, where it traveled North to the U.S. Southwest. In chile en nogada, the national dish of Mexico eaten in September, el mes patrio, pomegranate seeds symbolize one third of their flag’s color.

“Everything is more beautiful in Urdu / and Spanish,” we are told in Marrow of Mercy, which continues:

I have a book report:
I looked for the lovers. I looked far

into canine’s pupils, and no dog
I know is blue; they all seemed happy.
My sky-eyed Husky killed everything.

Bashir references Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “Eyes of the Blue Dog,” where the two central characters seek connection and meaning in a liminal dream world of abstract symbols. “Then, repeat a solemn refrain: / ojos de perro azul. Last night, I dreamt / of my old beloveds. I begged them / to stay and repeat: eyes of a blue goat / in Urdu. یلی بکری کی آنکھ.”

The speaker desires and speaks of lovers, or the beloved, the “arrowy one,” often: “The beloved is a sharpness / The beloved has an arc.” The dedication page reads, “For the Beloveds.” They appear in serendipitous encounters with the speaker, charged and fleeting, in parking lots, in anonymity, in “my dirty, aging apartment. I live / alone— letting out each dove / from a ruined cathedral.”

“In bed, a stranger asks — / what is your relationship / to politics?” the narrator reveals in “On Borrowing Noam Chomsky.” The question is so intimate it only feels appropriate here with the stranger, like the unnamed figures of Ojos de perro azul. A bedroom is expansive in its privacy, much like the West, with enough room to breathe. “Politics” necessitates a multitude, it is not singular; “he untangles the long, black braid / of my hair.”

Of all the beloveds, one name repeats, – Chandini چاندنی. There is a difference in kind here, Chandini is the moonlight, soft and light-handed, even when in full form. Chandini speaks only to say Hello and Salam. سلا. When the speaker says,

I only know one thing:
the most beautiful word
in any language
is the name of your beloved,

Perhaps it is Chandini, the unseen pulsating memory that carries us over land and time, a grandmother “across latitudes who once ate orange out of oranges, / down to smiles / of slithering pulp and rind.”

On the porch of the final poem, the narrator observes a “bright, common moon” who is “desperate for devotion” as a nearby neighbor “waves / hello —as if I am an old friend. I mouth / a muted salam. سلام. Hello, stranger. / We have never spoken.”

Desire/Halves is a rich exploration brimming with yearning and the experience of being Pakistani-American within a backdrop of the American West. Bashir’s allusive poetry traces the perimeters and confines of language to reveal the malleable contours of both the West and South Asia – where commonalities emerge and where we can reimagine ourselves.

Daniel Mills is a writer and poet living in Phoenix, AZ. He works as a wine professional and sommelier by trade and frequently writes about food and wine. He has received recognition from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He is a poetry reader for the literary and arts journal Passengers (passengersjournal.com).