Dhaka Dust
BY Dilruba Ahmed
(Graywolf Press, 2011)

In an essay opposed to writing from a static identity, “The Other’s Other: Against Identity Poetry, for Possibility,” the late Reginald Shepherd writes “[Poetry] offers a combination of otherness and brotherhood, the opportunity to find the otherness in the familiar, to find the familiar in the other.”^[1] Identity poetry, Shepherd argues, diminishes poetry’s possibility of allowing the writer to exist in a different way. Dilruba Ahmed’s Dhaka Dust, winner of the Bakeless Prize, is poetry of identity, though it enjoyably speaks to multiple selves — daughter, mother, foreigner, tourist.

Travel is essential to Dhaka Dust. Often, Ahmed’s Bengladeshi-American speaker revisits the country of her origins. The book’s eponymous first poem begins before the book’s three sections, and so casts its shadow over the collection. In the poem, action is set in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, and begins with the familiar phrase from physics, but with the subject clipped:

Abridging the subject from the opening line allows, first, the reader to read the title of the poem as the subject the sentence: “Dhaka Dust // Can’t occupy…” It can also be read as an imperative, which creates an intimacy and authority over the reader. Most importantly, though, it seems to energize the poem as the reader careens through images of globalization in a large, developing city that does exist in more than one place: Dutch beer, clothing from an American store, the falsely blue eyes of the celebrity. The images’ rapidity mimics the hustle of the city, and phrases like “Allah takes and Allah / gives” reveal the culture and people in a subtle way that is neither overly expository nor didactic. The poem is spoken in second-person point of view, though this only becomes evident in the second half of the piece, when the frenetic urban scene dissolves and the speaker begins addressing herself:

In this poem, like many in Dhaka Dust, images of place accrue until they drive the speaker to new emotional terrain, but in the third section, which is dominated by western European travel, some of the poems lack the emotional connection. “Venice during an Election Year in the US” itemizes impressions of Venice, ostensibly comparing the “half-sunk” city to the American political climate, but the setting does not conjure the various emotional ties that the aforementioned “Dhaka Dust” does. Poems such as “Limoni,” however, remain appealing through their sensuous imagery: “we’ll desert history / to study our own lives // through sea salt, lemons, anchovies” (p. 78). And perhaps the lack of the others is symptomatic of their placement at the end of the collection, after the reader has already been exposed to the depth of pieces like “Dhaka Dust.”

Often, Ahmed presents us with the opposite of “Dhaka Dust”: the American poem in which the speaker’s otherness is underscored. Opposed to the hyperactivity of Dhaka, there is “Southeastern Ohio,” in which the speaker reflects upon her cultural hybridity in the U.S. In this particular piece, she is a child reciting prayers by rote until the poem takes an unexpected turn:

Ahmed’s humor and warmth make the experience of reading the poem satisfying. The dissonance of reading George Michael’s lyrics juxtaposed with Islamic prayer is pleasurable because in a setting of makeshift houses of prayer, it feels honest, real, allowing the reader to connect with the subject of the poem.

Another way in which this plurality is manifested in this collection is through the use of foreign language. Naturally, many of the phrases come from Bengali and are part of the speaker’s tie with her ethnicity — phrases that appear, for example, in the aforementioned “Dhaka Dust.” Language, though, serves to underscore the speaker’s plurality, judging by the frequency with which she uses those other than English. Italicizing the foreign phrases emphasizes their otherness and their quality as objects, items apart from the rest of the narrative, particularly in a time when many poets are choosing to forego the convention of italicizing foreign language, allowing the other languages to more greatly commingle with English. The reader encounters Italian words in Italy and French in Belgium, but Spanish appears apropos of nothing in the seventh couplet of “Ghazal”: “Me encanta cantar, cuando estoy sola, en el carro. / My mother tongue dissolves. I speak in another” (p. 39). Though the ghazal is by nature disjunctive, the Spanish phrase (“I love to sing when I’m alone in the car,” in an approximate translation) is truly surprising and refreshing in its oddness and simplicity. In the overall volume, such instances gain resonance when coupled with the Bengali phrases. They emphasize the plural experience of our culture by placing the speaker’s multilingual experience in context with others.

Choosing these instances for discussion feels reductive in a collection that addresses multiple aspects of our American and global culture in many different ways. Ahmed’s great talent for description — what Asian-American poet Arthur Sze calls “sensuous” in his introduction — is original and emotionally engaging. Ahmed holds place before her like a mirror in this strong first collection, always glimpsing a different self.