{"id":7407,"date":"2022-03-15T08:27:38","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T06:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=7407"},"modified":"2023-09-02T08:27:39","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T06:27:39","slug":"the-art-of-remembrance-in-abacus-of-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/the-art-of-remembrance-in-abacus-of-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Remembrance in Abacus of Loss<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abacus of Loss, A Memoir in Verse <\/em>by Sholeh Wolp\u00e9
\nUniversity of Arkansas Press<\/a> 2022
\nISBN 9781682261989<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sherine Elbanhawy<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Abacus of Loss<\/em> by Sholeh Wolp\u00e9 is a vivid memoir in verse that unpacks individual memories in a series of thematic strings\u2014the wires of the abacus\u2014each with a different number of beads, from three to thirteen. Their enumeration has a compound emotional effect on the reader and shows how the malleability of time influences memories as they expand and contract, lengthy and detailed discourses, or short, punchy bursts of emotion. Yet every memory counts, every memory adds to the layers of loss that shape life. At times, the narrator\u2019s perspective and her evocative lyricism together with the counting and repetition remind the reader of prayer beads, especially when they include pleas and entreaties.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Abacus of Loss<\/em> is available from University of Arkansas Press<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wolp\u00e9 evokes the struggles of living a life of in-betweenness by choosing to combine numbers in Arabic with English letters in the chapter names, which in turn represent the rows of the abacus. Each chapter explores loss from a different angle, both literal and metaphoric. The first piece, for example, presents repeated Persian words fading into the bottom of the page, capturing the multitudes of loss\u2014of language, home, heritage, and even of self.<\/p>\n

\u201cthat we choose the color
\nof our loss, like a blue
\nsash draped across
\nmourners\u2019 black.\u201d<\/p>\n

Language is both a vehicle of communication and a representation of her uprootedness,\u201cmy mother tongue ripped blue from my throat.\u201d It distinguishes her otherness: \u201cI wish I could iron my tongue, crease it sharp so I could belong,\u201d not only in her youth but even later; it continues to remind her how she is perceived in America, \u201cSitting with three open books black with the meandering calligraphy of a \u2018terrorist language\u2019 at an American airport is a terrible idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

By exploring loss, exile becomes a cornerstone of the memoir, vividly depicted: \u201cExile is a suitcase with a broken strap.\u201d The loss is perpetual and alters not just the narrator, her family, her neighbors, her world but her whole being, even her subconscious, \u201cI lose the way to my next dream. Like a candle in a paper boat Daddy offers me to the sea.\u201d The short, forceful sentences capture the displacement of values, \u201cIt\u2019s exhausting to protect a girl in a place like America\u201d; the dissolution of professional identities, \u201cDr. so-and-so is now a dishwasher at a diner in DC\u201d; and the aching vacuum of place.<\/p>\n

\u201cRefugees trail the narrow roads
\nlike sheep wandering edges
\nof hallucination.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a universality of experience for any immigrant who has experienced the turmoil of reconciling the culture at home with the lived external one; the culture dreamt and imagined with the reality of life in America. In a verse entitled “Dear America” Wolp\u00e9 writes<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought you were azure, America,
\nAnd orange, sky and poppies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The disappointment of America ends up becoming a lifelong search for home, in both the obvious and the unexpected, \u201cI look for home under every rock, inside every shirt, between pistachio shells, even in the smoky cloud rising from kebabs cooking over hot coals.\u201d<\/p>\n

We embark with the narrator on her relentless interrogation of the meaning of home: \u201cI left home at thirteen.\u201d And whether it\u2019s the loss of the childhood home, \u201cThere is my childhood house becoming smoke.\u201d Is it where we keep our things? \u201cIs home my ghost? \/ Does it wear my underwear \/ Folded neatly in the antique chest \/ of drawers I bought twenty years ago?\u201d Is it the homeland, where we are born? \u201cHome was the Caspian Sea, the busy bazaars, the aroma of kebab and rice, Friday lunches, picnics by mountain streams.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are submerged in the narrator\u2019s world, following her from school, \u201cMama talks as if she\u2019s swallowed the school principal\u2019s loudspeaker,\u201d to marriage, \u201cTo escape Daddy\u2019s rules, I get married. He is relieved,\u201d then motherhood \u2014 \u201cSo I have children. They teach me everything except the meaning of home\u201d and divorce \u2014 \u201cI divorce and marry again.\u201d She explores the meaning of identity: \u201cI am sitting where I must not, a blasphemy in red, – the wild-horse woman I strain to keep under check,\u201d discovers sex, \u201cthe only way to have sex is to get married,\u201d and finds out what it means to be a woman as she transforms from innocent, \u201cI am so na\u00efve,\u201d to sensual \u201cmy last lover left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

She explores the suffocation of the male gaze:<\/p>\n

“I close my eyes, pretend the man is a cockroach, but his stare laser-burns my nipples, sets fire to the twin cities under this thin purple blouse.”<\/p>\n

By defining the essence of beauty, \u201cBeauty opens its eyes and greets us with its sky,\u201d and rejecting the need to become what she is not, \u201cMy skin isn\u2019t dark enough. (\u2026) My hair doesn\u2019t curl tight nor does it drop straight like a waterfall.\u201d She examines acts of transgression on the body in \u201cPlease Stop\u201d in Chapter Four, \u201cThe day a lover shoved me hard against the bedroom wall and bruised my wrists, I said, please, stop<\/em>.\u201d The illustration at the beginning of the chapter is of a bird attempting to escape a boiling kettle. In the poem in the last bead, we hear how the kettle begins to \u201cwhimper like an injured bird,\u201d and understand that “that whimper was yours all along.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chapter Six is one of the longest chapters. Entitled \u201cPink\u201d with twelve beads, it lays out the narrator\u2019s feelings of anger and betrayal over the forced abortion that her best friend undergoes, the \u201cgirl who was once the jewel of Tehran,\u201d their \u201cfriendship like a two-paper origami.\u201d She expresses her disdain for her friend\u2019s Persian lover, \u201cThey were once in love or lust,\u201d and describes how \u201chis leather shoes suction the linoleum floor,\u201d and how he brought her friend, \u201ctuberoses wrapped in golden cellophane.\u201d His insistence that he loved her friend faces the narrator\u2019s unvocalized contempt coupled with her friend\u2019s agony:<\/p>\n

“How is she? <\/em>he asks. I shrug.
\nHe drops his head, shakes it east to west, west to east.
\nI do love her<\/em>, he says.
\nHis eyes are the color of burnt toast.
\nI rub the pain between my eyebrows, tell him, She doesn\u2019t want to <\/em>see you. <\/em>He nods, turns to leave then stops. Tell her I\u2019m sorry. For <\/em>this. For everything.
\n<\/em>I want to say, Tell her yourself, jellyfish. <\/em>But my tongue is suddenly stone.”<\/p>\n

Her friend\u2019s relationship with God contrasts with her own, \u201cI tell Mama I am leaving religion and its foggy tales. She points at the wall of books in my room, says, It\u2019s their fault.\u201d<\/em> She explores the tension of religion throughout the memoir yet dives deep in Chapter Seven, entitled \u201cFaith,\u201d where Bead 8 entwines translations of Rumi poems with the narrator\u2019s own words, \u201cGod weeps behind the mask tattooed on its face.\u201d<\/p>\n

The push and pull between the narrator\u2019s different family relationships add layers of strain and complication. The complexity of love, the tensions, the regrets all intermingle with memories, so that by the end, the narrator feels a sense of gratitude for all the moments she has lived, even if painful and replete with suffering. She attends the \u201cCircus in Tehran with tigers, elephants, horses, and shirtless men in glittering tights\u201d with her grandfather; watches while her \u201cgrandmother cooks and gives plenty of advice\u201d; rolls her eyes when her \u201caunt calls on the phone and monologues for hours\u201d; recoils when her \u201cbrother kicked with his words, called me whore because I live with a man out of wedlock\u201d; and despairs, \u201cDaddy says he\u2019ll never speak to me again.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is overwhelmed, \u201cI tell Mama, Look, I\u2019m bathed in light<\/em>. She says, No, child, it\u2019s the Beloved leaving your soul.\u201d <\/em>The intensity of emotions felt for each family member is how the narrator explores devotion, sacrifice, anguish, and the ability to continue to love those who inflict pain on us, \u201cThe house is corpses of women, cooking meal after meal,\u201d yet these \u201cWomen sing absence like opera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certain images recur throughout the memoir and linger with the reader. Pistachios are associated with different men, both close, \u201cDaddy empties his plate of pistachio shells into the trash,\u201d and distant, \u201cI\u2019ve never had a pistachio, says the bartender. (\u2026) I crack the shell like a vow.\u201d The color blue evokes the promise of America but also unrequited love and lies, \u201cWhere blue is light\u2019s repeating lie.\u201d Red is lust, \u201cHe runs his broom to and fro, moving dust closer and closer to my ridiculously high-heeled red shoes, then stops\u201d; sin, \u201cThere are pieces still clinging to her womb like strands of red algae\u201d; and the powerful refusal to live within limitations, \u201cthe color that refuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

I never wanted this memoir to end; each time I reread the words, they felt more heart wrenching, laying bare what is unexplainable with evocative, visceral lyricism:<\/p>\n

\u201cDarkness bends over itself to devour
\nWhat it will not hold\u201d<\/p>\n

I am immersed in the narrator\u2019s world, unwilling to leave. I listen to her conversations with her aging parents:<\/p>\n

“The baritone-roar of hairdryer stops like the engine of a plane that has just arrived. Mama descends the narrow stairs like a queen in a fluffy blue robe. She says, What are you two whispering <\/em>about?<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a question. She doesn\u2019t wait for an answer because she imagines there is nothing about Daddy she does not know. Not after fifty-five years. She shuffles in her slippers into the kitchen to make the evening\u2019s meal of rice and stew.<\/p>\n

Mama is frying onions now. The sweet smell permeates the room with nostalgia. She hums to a tune in her head and I think: Mistakes are the sinews that hold our bones.”<\/p>\n

The last wire of the abacus has three beads; the first talks of exile, \u201cMoon drove us into dizzy exile, Language became a desert with no name,\u201d the second, of acceptance that life goes on as the narrator attends a funeral with her parents \u201cin the same cemetery where our parents have bought their burial plots, (\u2026) Mama and Daddy practicing their own absence,\u201d and the final one, of gratitude \u201cListen, nothing\u2019s too small for gratitude.\u201d By the end, gratitude is my dominating emotion, gratitude for Sholeh Wolp\u00e9\u2019s memoir, for every thought-provoking word, for her raw honesty, for how she unpacks the complexities of exile, home, family, love, and everything in between. I am extremely grateful, thank you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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