Fuchsia

by Mahtem Shiferraw, Kwame Dawes (Foreword)

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Ethiopian American Mahtem Shiferraw’s Fuchsia examines conceptions of the displaced, disassembled, and nomadic self. Embedded in her poems are colors, elements, and sensations that evoke painful memories related to deep-seated remnants of trauma, war, and diaspora. Yet rooted in these losses and dangers also lie opportunities for mending and reflecting, evoking a distinct sense of hope. Elegant and traditional, the poems in Fuchsia examine what it means to both recall the past and continue onward with a richer understanding.

Genres: Poetry, Africa, Ethiopia, African Literature

108 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2016

About the author

Mahtem Shiferraw is a writer and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Poets.org, The 2River View, Luna Luna Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Numero Cinq, and more. Her short story The River received an Honorable Mention at Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction Contest. In 2016, she won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets and her full-length collection, FUCHSIA, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her poetry chapbook, BEHIND WALLS & GLASS, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent collection, YOUR BODY IS WAR, is out now from the University of Nebraska Press. She has served as editor for Atlas and Alice, The Bleeding Lion, The Hunger Mountain, and more. She is the founder of ANAPHORA ARTS, a nonprofit organization working to advance the works of writers and artists of color. She has served as a jury member for different literary prizes and residencies, including the Neudstat International Prize for Literature, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the Lucy Munro Brooker Prize, and more. She is a Pushcart prize nominee, and her work has been anthologized widely. In 2018, she received the Imani Award for Artistic Excellence from Harvard University. As of 2020, she also serves on the Editorial Board of World Literature Today. She holds an MFA from Vermont College. Her next poetry collection, NOMENCLATURES OF INVISIBILITY, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. (2023).

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 stars /// Fuchsia is one of those poetry collections that I definitely have to come back to one day. Unfortunately, I rushed through it (I don't know what it was with me and trying to read ALL THE THINGS in April) and, in hindsight, I should've taken more time with it.

I don’t know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries –

nomads like me, have no place as home, no way of belonging.

Fuchsia is a complex collection that examines personal displacement and nomadism from an immigrant's perspective. Mahtem Shiferraw was born in Eritrea and spent her early childhood there before moving to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with her family. There, they lived until Shiferraw was a young adult. She attended an Italian school in Addis Ababa, therefore, she grew up speaking not only Amharic but also Italian.

In an interview, Shiferraw said that, to her, the Italian language really "lends itself very naturally to poetry". Therefore, she was inspired as a young adult and thinks it was just a natural progression for her, being an aspiring writer, to write her first poems in Italian.

Around 2006, the family moved to the US and Shiferraw attended a college in Los Angeles. She remembers how she had to learn English and how she then started exploring poems in English, which didn't turn out to be as natural as before. For her, "English is a very different and practical language". She first learned how to express the basic things that she needed. It took her some time to figure out the nuances of the language to be comfortably writing poetry in it.

Fuchsia is her first published poetry collection written in English. In it, she draws upon her experience as an immigrant, and how one can be changed by moving to another country. In an interview, she said: "I do bear the responsibility to share our collective history. And coming to the U.S., and having to explore our new identities as African-American or as Black, in all these race and ethnicity questions that we are exposed to, it reminds us more of the homes."

Sometimes I am asked
if I am Indian, Middle Eastern, or Biracial;
I don’t know what to say to these people
who notice the shape of the eye before its depth
the sound of the tongue before its wisdom
the openness of a palm before its reach.

In Fuchsia, Shiferraw didn't want to write the "typical" immigrant book, by discussing themes like assimilation, perseverance and how to provide for their children. Instead, she wanted to work through themes that immigrants rarely talk about. She said: "When people leave their homes for one reason or another, they'll leave things behind of themselves that they don't necessarily recover, or want back, or even realize. So it's kind of this sort of invisible shifting of things that occurs within people, and over time it changes who they are for worse or better."

My favorite poems from Fuchsia include: "Synesthesia", "Pilgrimage to the Nile", "Rumors", "Statues", and "Dear Abahagoy—".

In "Synesthesia", which refers to the condition of having one sense triggered by the stimulation of a different sense, Shiferraw muses on the different meanings of color, and what she associates with them, whether that be memories, people, or her own fears. Through colors, she reflects on her childhood, her insecurities, the scars she has gotten along the way.

Brown is the anomalous texture of curtains from my
childhood. Brown is also the parched wood
of a small coffee-grinder my mother used. Brown as in
the intimate angles of sharply cut ambasha my grandmother
made, flour and water, lemon skin and cinnamon shreds, the
dark heads of raisins, while on a cargo plane back to Ethiopia,
the tired eyes of war-victims and their slow recovery. Brown
is also the color of my skin, but I didn’t know it then.

Yellow is crying; it’s a bell, a cathedral in Asmara? A school? Or the 
shriek of a mass funeral. Yellow is dead. But listen to black. Listen to
 black notes, black heart, listen. Black is art. Not of the artist, the art of
being. The painful art of memory. Here’s to remembering.

In Fuchsia, Shiferraw also examines womanhood, through the various female influences in her life, like her mother, and the arbitrary cultural expectations of gender, the sensual pleasures of the body, but also violence, rape, and her own scars.

Therefore, Fuchsia is very similar in theme to Warsan Shire's Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth, as both collections focus on a female African immigrant experience. One poem in particular, "Twenty Questions for Your Mother" reminded me a lot of Shire's style and thematic focus. In it, Shiferraw asks:

When armed men came, where did you hide?

I didn’t. I was taught to stand. They were looking for
something in the dark, and I was the light. Even now,
their footsteps can be heard right before sunrise.
I see only morning lights.

And, similarly to Shire, Shiferraw also stresses the importance of education, a notion which was ingrained into the generation of their parents: "What of your children? / 
I taught them how to read / so they didn’t have to hide."

One of the most eery explorations of rape come from her poem "Statues", in which she seems to talk to herself in the position of a victim/survivor: "tell yourself / there is much to be gained / from stillness / playing dead, being dead / imagining yourself farther away, / motionless". The poem ends with the chilling words: "even statues / breathe out a little / when violated / a pugnacious exhale
released, / then quickly absorbed / into thick fog".

So, like I said in the beginning, Fuchsia is a very rich and nuanced collection that I will definitely come back to one day. I'd still recommend to people, especially if you enjoyed the snippets I shared in this review, and I'm lowkey mad at myself for not taking more time with this collection when I first read it. I'll do it better next time, I promise!

[sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

’And what to those who call me “African”?
Don’t they know I can count the years spent back home
wishing I knew I was “African”?
And how to cradle and contain the disappointment that is
rekindled whenever someone does NOT know
my Ethiopia, my Eritrea.
I don’t know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries—
nomads like me, have no place as home, no way of belonging.’

evocative, richly prosed collection with poems that wander and weave through the author’s life. beautiful.

‘When armed men came, where did you hide?
I didn’t. I was taught to stand. They were looking for
something in the dark, and I was the light. Even now,
their footsteps can be heard right before sunrise.
I see only morning lights.’

‘Yellow is crying; it’s a bell, a cathedral in Asmara? A school? Or the
shriek of a mass funeral. Yellow is dead. But listen to black. Listen to
black notes, black heart, listen. Black is art. Not of the artist, the art of
being. The painful art of memory. Here’s to remembering.’

‘And then, you ask, what is fuchsia—and there’s a faint smile,
a sudden remembrance, an afterthought in hiding, forgotten smells
of wildflowers and days spent in hiding, in disarray. And mulberry
daisies carried by phosphorescent winds into the warm skin of sleeping
bodies; moments spent between here and there, pockets of emptiness—
without sound, without reckoning.’

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mahtem Shiferraw's explorations of sound and color and their synthesiac relationship to personal and collective history here is illuminating and inspiring. The Ethiopian American experience of diaspora runs though the book as do butchering sheep, hyenas, blood, kalashnikovs, racism, and hair. Some of the imaginary may appear melodramatic to readers used to more restrained poetry: from the muddy banks of Nile to the consumerism of the States, Shiferraw concerns map her experiences in wonder.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5/5) Fuschia is the debut collection from Mahtem Shifferaw. It is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Although rich with evocative imagery, this book didn’t resonate with me. Though made to elicit feels, I felt little for Fuschia. Too often, the images felt melodramatic and somewhat repetitive (similar images happening, ineffectively, in many poems). I grew weary of “death/ dead” in so many poem titles and felt anesthetized to its effects. The exercise-esque poems fell flat and argued little merit to justify their inclusion here. That said, there were poems I enjoyed. “Listro (Shoe-Shiner),” “While Weeping (Broadway & 5th),” and “Ode to Things Torn” were a few standouts.

My favorite moment: “... oh the song / of wonders! One must have ears // and so much grief to hear them.”

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mahtem writes very visually. In her poem " how to peel Cactus Fruit" you can almost feel the pricks of the cactus fruit. The poems gives you a sense of reminisces even though I'm not from Ethiopia and haven't visited i felt a sense of nostalgia. My favorite poem is " Twenty Questions for Your Mother."

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

The imaginary and subject matters throughout this work will break your heart and invigor your spirit.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful words, but dark tones.

[Rosa Frei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a strong voice! Raw, powerful! Loved it!

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I don't know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries- nomads like me, have no place as home, no way of belonging."

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not totally sure what I think of this poetry collection. I read it piecemeal, a few poems each day when I woke up, so that may have diluted the overall effect. Also, I'm a very new poetry reader. Kwame Dawes, in his introduction, praises the way Shiferraw works with synesthesia and memory, personal history and collective experience, and more. I get that--and it's helpful to re-read the poems with his critique in mind. It opened up the poems for me in new and interesting ways.

But he also praises her precision of language, and I thought the language here wasn't super-precise. Some phrases felt clichéd, some felt vague. Sometimes the language just thudded for me--words didn't seem right to describe what they were describing, or I wanted more from what was on the page. I don't have my copy with me as I'm writing this, so I'll need to go look up some examples. I also need to finish reading Dawes's introduction--I waited until after I'd read the poems, to avoid skewing my reading and also to make myself do the work--to see if he spins my take on that too.

[Tiah]

Interview for Short Story Day Africa: http://shortstorydayafrica.org/news/w...

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous!
There is some major witch craft in this collection!
It was like I could almost taste these poems.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 S5554f 2016