"The smell of ash in wind": summonings by Raena Shirali
Reviewed by Benjamin Grimes
Raena Shirali is not afraid of persona. Whereas some poets might renounce the form due to its inherent challenges, ethical concerns, risks of appropriation — not wanting to embarrass, let alone implicate, themselves — Shirali embraces what she calls “the inevitable failure to embody the Other.” Putting one’s failure on display would be bold in any context, but here especially the stakes are high: Shirali’s subject is the ongoing practice of witch-hunting in India, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of women in the migrant communities of tea plantations. Armed with an unambiguous courage and her conviction that there is meaning in the attempt, Shirali invites her readers to “feel the nuances and disappointments of those failures, and find in them some ineffable truth.” The result, her second collection summonings, is urgent, uncanny, searching — and an absolute success.
From the start it is clear that summonings is unlike other poetry books: a foreword written by the poet herself introduces readers to her subject as well as her methodological approach — the latter “[i]ndebted to the docupoetics tradition” and based on years of research. Direct quotations from the accused and the accusers, as well as language from anthropological sources, are included in brackets within the poems themselves and featured in the section breaks. And yet, never does the collection strain beneath the weight of too much real-world information — indeed, it is through her skill as a poet, imagining into the stories and questions, into the record and its silences, that Shirali makes this world real.
The opening poem, “daayan looks to the earth,” serves as initiation into this world. Shifting nimbly from singular speaker to group, it is the first in a series of what Shirali calls “far persona” — poems from the perspective of daayans, unnamed women accused of being witches. “sisters, when will we braid / our hair despite their songs?” the speaker asks, denying the accusation even as she makes a spell of “tamarind peels & / pepper stems & cardamom pods” to “ward off or invoke.” With its rich, mystical language, the poem seems to redefine — or perhaps reclaim — the power of the supernatural as a distinctly feminine wisdom:
come with me to these central rooms,
our lineage—flowering harvest & the machine we built
to feast through monsoons. smell that raindark,
that incense rimmed with milk? that’s us.
Adding to the sense of spellcasting is Shirali’s expert ear: the echo of “rooms” in “monsoons,” the accumulation of short “i” sounds (“lineage,” “built,” “incense,” “milk”), or the way that placing “milk” at the end of the phrase following “raindark” and “built” provides a sonic and rhythmic closure to the preceding lines.
The sonics are lively throughout the collection. In particular, Shirali has a skillful penchant for unexpected consonance, often directly in service to her content. The accumulation of “st” sounds in the middle of “to curse or to pray,” for example, suggests a speaker salivating in awe of an imagined witch’s power: “because she is violent we call her / lust : we mean what must it feel like : to taste your kill : / to move : possessed : by one’s own black tongue.” In “daayan conjures up a forest,” the reader can hear the hissing, still-lit embers: “forget parvati, sati, / any mysticism making us smolder.” Meanwhile, the poet’s combined sense of rhythm and word placement frequently produces a powerful resolution to line, stanza — even entire poem, as in “daayan after a village feast.” First, the poet sets the scene with a procession of long “e” sounds:
any way to the bottom of a bottle is one the men
will pioneer. moonlit paths through the pale green
growth. they trade tea leaves, tobacco, ghee. they trade
what we women toiled. naturally, we sneak sips…
The tercets keep a steady pace, fitting the quiet images of a night scene where “skin / glows amber,” “teeth slump against gums,” “feet slur the dirt.” The women await their chance to steal away to the forest with the men’s liquor, to claim a moment and a space for themselves. The quiet continues through the ending — it is a successful raid:
it must be intoxicating
to survive. they pass out unarmed, sloughed against fences,
so we slip bottles from loose fists, tuck them into our
baskets. we become mist, shift groveward, flee.
The structure of the final sentence is masterful, the length of the phrases counting down to the final, solitary word. Not only does “flee” conclude the accumulation of “f” sounds in the stanza, it recalls — both aurally and visually — the singular thud of “ghee” in the opening lines. The poem loops back in closure, even as the ending opens and the women make their soft escape beyond the final word.
As the collection progresses, Shirali expands her world to include several other voices, exposing the systems of oppression and fear driving the witch-hunts. The manipulation of the plantation owners is laid bare in “the village men find some [fellowship], [hunt],” the speaker declaring “[the brits] sell us, [lipton] sells us, [tata] / sells us” while children are “hungry as ever in streets.” A series about “the village goddess” reveals how some women escape accusation by claiming fellowship with the village goddess (a foil to the daayan), and are seduced by the power of rumor: “other women will talk : but i felt my throat / unshut : heard : my own voice : ooze with gold : & before / i knew it : i was singing” (“the village goddess talks to herself while applying kohl”). Even the natural world is given voice in “the mountains recall the village’s myth,” a condemnation of the human behavior below:
mortals, you said
they tricked the wisdom from you, said when the river
rose they drowned, but i saw their bodies in the reeds, saw
your bodies glistening with what you called
holy.
Here and elsewhere, the mountains serve as a sort of omniscient observer, a device that allows Shirali to explore her subject from a metaphysical remove.
Concentrated in the first three sections, these “far persona” poems explore the power and the possibilities of the form. The poems in the last two sections (as well as others sprinkled throughout) provide a counterpoint, a space for the author to grapple with persona’s limitations, implications, failures. These attempts to understand the subject from the outside feel more accessible, perhaps, to a western reader, and they make clear that the misogyny and violence fueling witch-hunts in India have their many parallels in America — as Shirali states plainly in the foreword: “my unifying experience of both of my cultures is that in neither am I safe—that is, neither one is safe for women.” The speaker of “god of new beginnings, i celebrate you poorly” puts it another way:
no woman in no country
is not fielding some nonsense
she didn’t ask for. & without
my summoning, nonetheless, here
it is, invoked : the question
of asking. who gets to. who answers.
In these poems, including the “summoning” series that gives the book its title, the speaker documents her fear, her shame, her privilege, never failing to implicate herself in the systems perpetuating the violence she’s trying to make sense of. “i’m just camera,” she admits in “on projection,” “i’m shutter, closed, i’m protected / from light, i’m just telling a story / to which i’ll never know an end.”
summonings holds at its center a not-knowing, a series of questions without answer, impossible attempts to embody the Other. A wondering and wandering into silences not our own. The faith that even in failure, the act of summoning can reveal a shared truth. “The smell of ash in wind—I follow it,” the poet declares. Reader, come see where it leads.
From the start it is clear that summonings is unlike other poetry books: a foreword written by the poet herself introduces readers to her subject as well as her methodological approach — the latter “[i]ndebted to the docupoetics tradition” and based on years of research. Direct quotations from the accused and the accusers, as well as language from anthropological sources, are included in brackets within the poems themselves and featured in the section breaks. And yet, never does the collection strain beneath the weight of too much real-world information — indeed, it is through her skill as a poet, imagining into the stories and questions, into the record and its silences, that Shirali makes this world real.
The opening poem, “daayan looks to the earth,” serves as initiation into this world. Shifting nimbly from singular speaker to group, it is the first in a series of what Shirali calls “far persona” — poems from the perspective of daayans, unnamed women accused of being witches. “sisters, when will we braid / our hair despite their songs?” the speaker asks, denying the accusation even as she makes a spell of “tamarind peels & / pepper stems & cardamom pods” to “ward off or invoke.” With its rich, mystical language, the poem seems to redefine — or perhaps reclaim — the power of the supernatural as a distinctly feminine wisdom:
come with me to these central rooms,
our lineage—flowering harvest & the machine we built
to feast through monsoons. smell that raindark,
that incense rimmed with milk? that’s us.
Adding to the sense of spellcasting is Shirali’s expert ear: the echo of “rooms” in “monsoons,” the accumulation of short “i” sounds (“lineage,” “built,” “incense,” “milk”), or the way that placing “milk” at the end of the phrase following “raindark” and “built” provides a sonic and rhythmic closure to the preceding lines.
The sonics are lively throughout the collection. In particular, Shirali has a skillful penchant for unexpected consonance, often directly in service to her content. The accumulation of “st” sounds in the middle of “to curse or to pray,” for example, suggests a speaker salivating in awe of an imagined witch’s power: “because she is violent we call her / lust : we mean what must it feel like : to taste your kill : / to move : possessed : by one’s own black tongue.” In “daayan conjures up a forest,” the reader can hear the hissing, still-lit embers: “forget parvati, sati, / any mysticism making us smolder.” Meanwhile, the poet’s combined sense of rhythm and word placement frequently produces a powerful resolution to line, stanza — even entire poem, as in “daayan after a village feast.” First, the poet sets the scene with a procession of long “e” sounds:
any way to the bottom of a bottle is one the men
will pioneer. moonlit paths through the pale green
growth. they trade tea leaves, tobacco, ghee. they trade
what we women toiled. naturally, we sneak sips…
The tercets keep a steady pace, fitting the quiet images of a night scene where “skin / glows amber,” “teeth slump against gums,” “feet slur the dirt.” The women await their chance to steal away to the forest with the men’s liquor, to claim a moment and a space for themselves. The quiet continues through the ending — it is a successful raid:
it must be intoxicating
to survive. they pass out unarmed, sloughed against fences,
so we slip bottles from loose fists, tuck them into our
baskets. we become mist, shift groveward, flee.
The structure of the final sentence is masterful, the length of the phrases counting down to the final, solitary word. Not only does “flee” conclude the accumulation of “f” sounds in the stanza, it recalls — both aurally and visually — the singular thud of “ghee” in the opening lines. The poem loops back in closure, even as the ending opens and the women make their soft escape beyond the final word.
As the collection progresses, Shirali expands her world to include several other voices, exposing the systems of oppression and fear driving the witch-hunts. The manipulation of the plantation owners is laid bare in “the village men find some [fellowship], [hunt],” the speaker declaring “[the brits] sell us, [lipton] sells us, [tata] / sells us” while children are “hungry as ever in streets.” A series about “the village goddess” reveals how some women escape accusation by claiming fellowship with the village goddess (a foil to the daayan), and are seduced by the power of rumor: “other women will talk : but i felt my throat / unshut : heard : my own voice : ooze with gold : & before / i knew it : i was singing” (“the village goddess talks to herself while applying kohl”). Even the natural world is given voice in “the mountains recall the village’s myth,” a condemnation of the human behavior below:
mortals, you said
they tricked the wisdom from you, said when the river
rose they drowned, but i saw their bodies in the reeds, saw
your bodies glistening with what you called
holy.
Here and elsewhere, the mountains serve as a sort of omniscient observer, a device that allows Shirali to explore her subject from a metaphysical remove.
Concentrated in the first three sections, these “far persona” poems explore the power and the possibilities of the form. The poems in the last two sections (as well as others sprinkled throughout) provide a counterpoint, a space for the author to grapple with persona’s limitations, implications, failures. These attempts to understand the subject from the outside feel more accessible, perhaps, to a western reader, and they make clear that the misogyny and violence fueling witch-hunts in India have their many parallels in America — as Shirali states plainly in the foreword: “my unifying experience of both of my cultures is that in neither am I safe—that is, neither one is safe for women.” The speaker of “god of new beginnings, i celebrate you poorly” puts it another way:
no woman in no country
is not fielding some nonsense
she didn’t ask for. & without
my summoning, nonetheless, here
it is, invoked : the question
of asking. who gets to. who answers.
In these poems, including the “summoning” series that gives the book its title, the speaker documents her fear, her shame, her privilege, never failing to implicate herself in the systems perpetuating the violence she’s trying to make sense of. “i’m just camera,” she admits in “on projection,” “i’m shutter, closed, i’m protected / from light, i’m just telling a story / to which i’ll never know an end.”
summonings holds at its center a not-knowing, a series of questions without answer, impossible attempts to embody the Other. A wondering and wandering into silences not our own. The faith that even in failure, the act of summoning can reveal a shared truth. “The smell of ash in wind—I follow it,” the poet declares. Reader, come see where it leads.
Benjamin Grimes earned his MFA from Randolph College, where he worked on the literary magazine Revolute. He writes poems and letters from his home in western Massachusetts. His work is published in New Ohio Review and Sycamore Review, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.