Kohl and Chalk

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2014 San Diego Book Award for Best Published Poetry. The bride who contemplates her half paralyzed face on the eve of marriage (in the opening poem, "Facial Palsy") is emblematic of the larger story of an ancient culture fractured by new and divergent identities. The poet, like the bride whose face is divided into "lit" and "dim" halves, gazes into the mirrors of history and politics to make sense of the disjunctive parts that refuse to come together as a whole. The very multiplicities of culture that the poet celebrates ("Socrates / mangoes cut in cubes," "Iqbal's poems on marble construction paper," "rouge from Paris, coconut oil from Orissa") are also the cause of dissonance ("War cries of the Greeks / in plume red / Mongols / in horse-leather red," "Gunga Din's ghost lifted from the tennis courts / of Peshawar Club")—dissonance that is further amplified in the post-9/11 wars to which a Pakistani-American response in poetry has thus far been absent. KOHL AND CHALK is that response in the voice of a daughter, a mother, a global citizen.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 2013

Reviews

[Dr. Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the greatest American poet of her generation! I can't say enough about her verse to do it justice so I think I will let her art speak for itself! You'll just have to check it out for yourself!!!

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kohl & Chalk begins with "I Look Out the Mughal Window," which contains a line about "cherry bombs" (one of my long fascinations:

Some of the cobalt and turquoise tiles had split. There was much
that needed mending. Our sons would fix walls damaged by cherry
bombs and doors that were like sieves; so many bullets had passed
through them. Our daughters would inscribe from memory all that our
burnt books had contained.

In those lines, Shadab Zesst Hashmi embraces the past & future and establishes a reflexivity that occurs throughout much of the book. As with many writers, Hashmi Zeest uses writing as a tool to cope with time. When she writes, "We strain to write down each syllable our/elders left us,” she writes about how she sees her fellow writers. In the strain to get everything into the best words, she notes, laughter can be missed and meals grow cold.

Known as the venerable past-editor of The Magee Park Antholgy, Zeest Hashmi has gift for seeing poems like tiles in a mosaic. While her previous book, [The Baker of Tarifa, focused on the golden era in The Alhambra before the expulsion of the Moors and the Inquisition of the Jews, Kohl and Chalk connects to the present, speaking directly about The War on Terror, for example in "Guantanamo" (full disclosure, this poem has been interwoven with my song "Gulag Guantanamo"). Kohl and Chalk is an Asian-American book. Zeest Hashmi claims it with care & words.

Again employing metawriting, Zeest Hashmi makes a music of collisions the poem "Malabar Hills" (an upscale residential area known for its hanging gardens in Mumbai). She turns within the span of two words, so her lines spin as much as the run in this somewhat experimental poem:

Honey tipped knife
Cancer cell pluralizing
Marketplace/massacre/mosque
Foliage/failure (57)

For all the travelog that is a part of Hashmi Zeest's writing, the travels end within, as "Hunting by The Ravi" conludes, "We come here/to end the hunt" (43). Zeest Hasmi uses the global "we" rather than the royal.

Then there is also writing's lonely office. Zeest Hashmi ends [book:Kohl and Chalk|17293304] on the poem "Andolu," where Baker of Tarifa began: "At the end of the river, a woman makes bread/...My cold desk, wafting in the Bosporus/is circled by honey bees" (75). As honey is to flowers, so is wheat to flour, so are Zeest Hashmi's poems to the warm bread.