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mybukz · 5 years

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Review: At Night We Come Out by Yanna Hashri

Title: At Night We Come Out Author : Yanna Hashri Genre: Poetry Format: Paperback, 24 pages Price: RM10 Released: August 20, 2018 Reviewer: Jeremy Chin

First, a disclaimer from me. In her poem, Wondering, You Wander, Yanna Hashri speaks of “the soul, looking for/whichever god will/house its needs”. Reality bends itself to our biases, and we all have a mesh over our eyes that lets through only that which we want to see. What follows is my take on Yanna Hashri’s collection of nineteen poems, through a lens that is entirely my own. A fair bit, I reckon, I’ve interpreted differently from was intended, but poetry is beautiful in that way; its cryptic nature leaves it open, invites you to give meaning to it, to make of it what you need it most to be.

A 26-page chapbook, At Night We Come Out is a light book with a heavy message. I found a few recurring themes in this body of work, and have sectioned my review accordingly.

ENTRAPMENT

Every time we get caught in an eddy of anxiety and depression, we create a prison for ourselves. The walls, as they become more stifling, induce reflection and expression, and have compelled many to push pen to paper, which perhaps is why entrapment shows up as a common theme in many poems, including Yanna’s.

In her poem The Weight of Her Light, she writes, “only blindness of self/ could make the night’s sky a cage” and “When she could take no more/the night begged me to let her go/ but all that flew out of my mouth was a bird the shape of death/tumbling down a black hole/its wings cutting deep into the edges of a universe”.

In her next piece, Three Paths, she speaks of the “map of the human heart/with no side doors or exits?”. In the Oldest of Ghosts she unleashes this line, “Time is a ponderous jest/under which I cup my tears”.

The outcome is a little different in Shhh, a poem on physical abuse, breaking out of the silence, and payback, which she artfully brings to life using the concept of shapes. Often it is the aggressor who entraps, smothers the voice of the weak, but in this instance, the victim refuses to stay down, and violence finds its way back to its owner.

LOVE

A few poems of Yanna’s touch on love. The one titled Tempest depicts the destructive nature of flare-ups in a relationship, how they sometimes come from a place that escapes reason, manifesting as “a one-eyed tempest/ howling up a fire from nothing/ until everything is wet ash”. Yanna goes on to describe how the cycle is renewed, her poem tapering off with the following verse: “She rages on and on/seeking answers to questions she doesn’t know/and in the morning, spent and shrunk/she wrecks herself, as always,into/ the moor of your battered arms”.

In her next poem, Curtain Call, she speaks of a house that had retained memories of its tenant: the blooming of her relationship with another, the “early tiptoe/of maybes and why nots”, the inevitability of rapture, the way their “hearts began to howl from the force/of collisions too violent to heal”.

“The song ends like so many sad things do -” Yanna writes, “sputtering to a stop as it drags/its last notes across the finish line.”. The house still stands, except the walls that once trapped in all the joy now cradles the emptiness that comes in the wake of love lost.

WAR

In many instances, we inherit the sins of our fathers. Yanna Hashri touches a fair bit on war and its implications, the way violence gets propagated from one generation to the next. In one of her pieces she opens with “The history of my people/is a history of madness”. In another she claims that there are only three paths to freedom: “To wade through decades of blood/To go mad from the silence of martyrs/To leap headfirst into the/ beast’s crepuscular belly”.

“Go look a mad man in the eye and ask/ how the flames wolfed down his heart/ and then tell me what you know of war”. In Neither Dream Nor Fable, she addresses the fire of violent conflict, the way it consumes everything in its path, how it makes us do the unthinkable: “We were hungry and desperate you see/ so we dug up the graves and sucked /the old pain from our grandmothers’ bones”.

The Dead Men Go Singing tells of the young who are exposed to war propaganda, who “gobble these songs up in their dreams like/hot fat dripping down their tongues/and into the proud swell of their chests”. Our youth are recruited into the violence and slain before they can understand its futility, “piling up mountains of useless regrets/ on the tips of blades they never learn to wield/until their bodies succumb to that last fall”.

DEBAUCHERY AND FALSE PERSONAS

In her poem Taste, Yanna brings to light how society is lost to gluttony, fakery and drunkenness, pointing to the idiots who could “drink/their weight in excess/and plop down to the earth,/sated and singing to each other/ in a language only beasts/ could understand”.

In her next poem, Hassia and the Fools, she speaks of a group of brutes, intoxicated by wine, wealth and lust. They fail in their pursuit of Hassia, who, to elude capture, “swam with swans in the day/and sang with wolves in the night”.

This theme of donning different personas trapezes into her next poem, Natural Disasters, where she writes: “Here comes Father in his suit and tie/choosing a face from the wall/to wear with care for the day”.

Final Words

Yanna’s Hashri’s collection feels like a walk through a gloomy cave with dripping fangs. But to my surprise, and delight, she concludes her collection with a piece that lights up the darkness, this turn-around brought on by the arrival of a child, her own, perhaps.

“You may have your father’s eyes/but you don’t have to look/at the world through them”, she writes in her concluding poem, One Day I’ll Love Yanna Hashri. “Gaze past the ramparts./It doesn’t matter what came before/or whose skin you were born into/… Lift your little boy into your arms/and wear his joy like armor/Leave all the bodies behind/and cross the moat/into the soft light of the morning”.

Yanna Hashri has produced an insightful, artistic and frighteningly real representation of the human condition, of a world lost to greed, violence and foolery. In her poem, The Garden, she writes, “The stories you cradle/in the dark palm of your hand/can serve you well if you/learn how to wield them”. I don’t know how autobiographical her poems are, but from what I’ve read, they appear to have been penned by one who has emerged from the fire a little scathed, a little scarred, but a whole lot stronger.

Yanna Hashri is a writer and editor with a degree in English Language and Literature. Her poetry takes inspiration from the complexity of human nature, surrealism and the magic of everyday things.

Jeremy Chin is a Malaysian-born author best known for his book FUEL, a story of a novice long distance runner who, fueled by sadness, wins the New York marathon. His book has developed a cult following amongst runners globally, and has been read by coaches, ultrarunners and Olympians worldwide.

If you are interested in obtaining a copy, you may do so at: https://www.amazon.com/Jeremy-Chin/e/B018LXOJJA/

#Yanna Hashri #At Night We Come Out #poetry #chapbook #Malaysian poetry #malaysian literature #Jeremy Chin #Fuel #book review

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mybukz · 6 years

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Poem: One Day I'll Love Yanna Hashri

Image by Viktoria Hall-Waldhauser on Unsplash By Yanna Hashri (after Ocean Vuong / after Roger Reeves / after Frank O’Hara) Yanna, wake up Half your kingdom is dead and the war won’t end till you say it does so look it right in the heart stay still, don’t run everyone has arrows for eyes and a natural talent for misfire. You may have your father’s eyes but you don’t have to look at the world through them You may have his hands, but you don’t have to tear holes in your shirt so your misfortunes have free admission You don’t have to lie facedown in  the mire and weep his tears for him You don’t have to wait with a net to guide his lost dreams back home for him. Yanna, take a deep breath Listen to that little boy laughing like a blaze of sticky lemon sunshine, the press of his baby teeth blessing your skin like absolution He can’t yet feel the heat sleeping in your chest like an old friend as dark as the silhouette of a bullet pressing on your heart so put out the fire before it starts. Yanna, gaze past the ramparts It doesn’t matter what came before or whose skin you were born into Think of all those empty rooms  you passed without looking in waiting for a person to call them home Lift your little boy into your arms and wear his joy like armor leave all the bodies behind and cross the moat into the soft light of the morning. *

Yanna Hashri is a writer and editor with a degree in English Language and Literature. Her poetry takes inspiration from the complexity of human nature, surrealism and the magic of everyday things.

Yanna says: "This piece is inspired by the poem 'Katy' by Frank O’Hara, in which the last line is 'Someday I’ll love Frank O’Hara'. Over the years this line has resonated so widely that other poets have come up with their own versions—most notably Roger Reeves and Ocean Vuong—dealing with different facets of self-identity. My version deals with the impact that growing up in a broken family has on self-acceptance.

'One Day I’ll Love Yanna Hashri' is featured in my upcoming chapbook 'At Night We Come Out', which is out on August 20, 2018 (to pre-order a copy, e-mail [email protected]). The poems in this book are inspired by the cover of darkness, and examine character in those fleeting moments between dreaming and waking, when the world is at its most raw and most magical."

#poem #poetry #Malaysian poetry #Malaysian literature #Yanna Hashri #One Day I'll Love Yanna Hashri

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