Review of My Body Can House Two Hearts, by Hanan Issa, pub. Burning Eye, 2024
I am a woman of neither here nor there (“Lands of Mine”)
This is a first collection of 20 poems by a poet of mixed heritage from Wales. I was attracted to it partly because I lived many years in Cardiff and partly because I have a weakness for poets who don’t quite come from any one place, either because they are deracinated or because their roots are various - “lands of mine”, rather than the singular “land”, to quote the first poem’s title - and who, as a result, often don’t have a comfort zone.
The poems reflect the problematic elements in both sides of her ancestry. Her Welsh “nan” is the archetypal supportive Valleys grandmother, but Wales is also where, during the poet’s childhood, she has been racially insulted and regarded as “different”. This can lead to embracing more fervently the other half of one’s identity, but that too is not so simple, perhaps especially for a woman who has grown up in a culture that pays at least lip service to female equality:
‘Please, sister, stand on this pedestal just below me.’
‘But brother, paradise lies at my mother’s feet, not yours.’ (“Qawwam”)
Rather than choose one over the other, she decides that “finding the space in between/was the goal” (“I Don’t See Colour”) and several poems do in fact focus on connexions, likenesses between her “two lands”, which are not hard to find. In “Beauty and Blood” she likens Capel Celyn, flooded for a reservoir to send water to Liverpool, to the Hammar Marshes, drained by Saddam in his war with the Marsh Arabs:
Imagine they drained the Hammar
to flood Capel Celyn: an exchange of tears
displacing people like chessboard pawns.
Part the whispering reeds’ soft curls
and watch smatterings of life drift lost.
As the little Welsh town fills with water,
hear the pained goodbyes of women
who tattoo each other’s stories in secret.
This does a good job of reminding the reader that the terms “us” and “them” properly apply to ordinary folk all over the world (“us”) and those in power (“them”) who regularly mess up our lives. Sometimes her language is less powerful, because in her drive to convince, she forsakes the poetic for the didactic. For me at least, “Croesawgar”, though it has its moments, is more of a political lecture than a poem, all rhetoric and no music. This urge to convince is something most poets need time and a lot of practice to learn to control; it comes with increasing confidence in one’s own voice, so that the words on the page no longer feel they have to shout to get their point across.
This is a lively, promising collection, mostly in free verse but with some experiments in shape and a couple of rhyme poems, of which the ghazal “Paradise for Poets” is handled so well that I hope she will experiment with more of them. The final poem “Watching him eat strawberries”, about her small son, ends with a verse that repeats a significant phrase:
But I want to stay here,
with his dirt-filled fingernails,
juice trickling down that little chin.
Wallahi, I want to stay here.
Clearly in this context, “here” is not a place but a situation, a way of being; she wants to stay in the moment. And she knows, of course, that this is impossible; there is no staying anywhere or anywhen. But then if there were, we would have far fewer poems.