Title: Un-American
Author: Hafizah Geter
Themes: Self-Identity, Faith, Racism, Cultural Identity, Trauma, Family, Immigration, Queerness, Loss, Loneliness, Police Brutality
Three Words to Describe the Poems: Deep, Multicontinental, Traumatic
Blurb from Back of Book: ‘Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes―linguistic, cultural, racial, familial―of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.’
Summary and Comments: This book is soaked in trauma: familial, cultural, generational, faith-based, and race-related. It urges its readers to consider what life may be like for a person growing up in today’s America who is different from you, who is torn between two different heritages and cultural backgrounds, who loves a country who does not love him or her back. Have you ever considered that before? Have you ever thought about what it has to be like for the millions of American immigrants who face such traumas every day, wondering if they should give up their home culture to assimilate fully into a country that forces such a thing to occur, or should they try, despite everything going against them, to live with both cultures intertwined, something that the country, on its face, says it allows, but something that it doesn’t practice in reality?
Such are the questions that Geter asks in her debut collection, and it is absolutely stunning. Using her backstory (a Nigerian-American citizen who was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian Muslim woman and a black American father who came of age in the Jim Crow South), she explores themes that are deep, controversial, and will make white readers uncomfortable. Through sheer force of will, and a mastery of language that is so subtle in its simplicity that it’s astounding when looked at from afar, Geter provides readers with a collection dripping with loss and melancholy, while also ringing a hopeful note for the future.
Although she writes about instances in her past that have broken her and her family members time and time again, especially in poems where she reveals her great-grandfather sexually assaulted just about every woman in her family, she also doesn’t give in to despair—some of the poems end on high notes of hope, with Geter plowing ahead and believing in the power of goodwill and the sheer strength of possibility to forge her own future.
Also, her poems that touch on police brutality are both extremely well-timed and soul-searching, and they require readers to look at names ripped out of the headlines (Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, & Michael Brown) not as historical figures lost in the fog of police brutality, but as human beings who deserve to be remembered as such.
What a powerful, moving collection. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Where to Find It: Library Catalog, Amazon, Boswell Books
Favorite Poem: ‘Testimony (for Sandra Bland, 1987-2015)’
After the miscarriage, she moved to Waller County wearing the ghost of motherhood and wanting to make old wounds foreign. In my bedroom, I read aloud the list of her contusions, watched an officer
drag her from her car over and over again. As if the humiliation would never be done, there were typos in her autopsy report. The words: no signs of struggle. I thought, her body is my body, is a church
set fire, is the toil that makes the land,
a jail cell, is light as a paper bag, the sound my father makes when, after so many years, he says my mother’s name.
Twenty-eight,
they split her open where slaves grew
cotton at the banks of the Brazos and students at Prairie View A&M can barely vote and laid her bare—a coroner's wishbone carved in your chest.
In Waller County, they still segregate
their cemeteries, name
some murders suicide.
They fire their police chief,
vote him Sheriff.
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