Layered and Uncovered: A Review by Jo Freehand of Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's 'Dēmos: An American Multitude'

Ben Kingsley? Isn’t he the actor who played Moses or Ghandi or some other religious figure? Does that Ben Kingsley write poetry? The first line on the author page answers, “Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is not the Ben Kingsley best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Mahatma Gandhi.” So, who IS Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley? And why was the ardent-knifed work of painter Salman Khoshroo the chosen cover art for this particular book, Dēmos: An American Multitude?

“American Multitude,” echoing Whitman’s “I contain multitudes,” is also the title of this collection’s opening poem:

            From the languages of my Haudenosaunee: Onondaga Nation

               as every thing begins                       with the heart            beat of horses

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published Date: 03/09/2021
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 978-1-57131-525-0

Kingsley begins Dēmos with heart. Prior to this opening poem and after a memorial page, there is a “Before Anything” acknowledgment page that includes a photograph of Kingsley’s grandmother behind the “exactness” of prison bars. Bars that held his great-grandfather under the authoritarian rule of Emperor Hirohito for having written a “defiant” political poem. Kingsley continues his multi-cultured lineage of thanks. His is an Onondagan, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian lineage. Within these first pages the answer to Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s identity begins to form. The canvas is primed, clearly gessoed. And a primed canvas holds promise as well as questions. A primed canvas awaits a search.

Kingsley is that artist searching. With language as his pigment, with poetic form as his palette knives, Kingsley creates layer upon intimate layer as he uncovers multitudinous selves, simultaneously exploring just who is this WE in this “We the People.” The layering is dense, but not inaccessible. If I wrote an essay on each layer, each possible theme, of Dēmos, it would be a multitude of essays (or, at least eleven.) Yes, “multitude” is key here.

Questions are more important than answers in this poet’s conversation with identity. Questions of connection and fitting in when intersectional categories are more fuzzy than clear. Questions of what remains when ancestors are slaughtered away. 

From “Nantucket Sleighride”:

            [ . . .] know that my people
            weren’t neatly arked by America two by two, white boys named
            Noah harpooned our asses, by the tens, by the thousands,
collared our necks with barbs and slugged lead

“In the Coffin Meant for Chief Little Horse, Archeologists Instead Find Two Others,” is a poem about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first of many assimilation boarding schools formed with one goal, to eradicate Indian culture, colonize. Kingsley writes that, “…European English / paper WASPs, yellow jackets …” ask in a chorus of “frenzied debate”:

            In whose home will we build our next nest?
 In whose home will we build our next nest?
            In whose home will we build our next nest?

Kingsley questions home when you’re not welcome home, as in “Home/boy,” a poem about his Harrisburg, Pennsylvania homecoming, maced for looking too close at “over a dozen police” arresting a “smaller than five foot” woman. “I guess I got too close / to the other.” It’s a found poem made up of comments from newspaper readers following police version of the macing. One verse, a comment from “Rangerider,” reads:

            Thank you / officers / for your fine work. It’s a shame
           there are some in the city / who would try / to interfere
            in your great work and make good work / look
            bad. Don’t / forget / to replenish your mace
           for the next bunch / of immigrants!

Dēmos is lyrical and storied. It is layered with violent political and personal history, from the atrocity of genocide to not being able to kill a deer on a hunting trip. Kingsley questions and confronts masculinity. “Fire, you little pussy. / Your skin softer than split sausage?” With red colored-pencil, I underlined every violent word and image. From what I’ve told you, you won’t be surprised to learn that my copy of Dēmos, loud-and-clearly, turned red. Then I took a blue pencil because what I have yet to mention is the depth of beauty within Kingsley’s poetry. I highlighted that beauty and every bit of beautiful language. 

From “Out My Apartment Window, West Baltimore: August, 2 A.M.,” a poem wherein the speaker is witnessing the vandalistic attempt to remove the hood ornament from his car:

            […] hope
            within an anvil of heart
            that one boy will
            free the silver:

            And to him
            it will be
            Excalibur:

Beauty. Single words are outlined in blue: kci-coqols, obaasan, ghosted, crescentic, eyelets, akakagachi.  Particulars are outlined in blue: crepuscular twilight, hammy down, Haudenosaunee tongue, glossy fractals of fishhooks, watermelon bodies, twisting like Quetzalcoatl’s tail. Beauty. Entire lines and poems are outlined in blue.

 From “An Old Song, a Frog’s Song: Sing-Along”:

             with your         whole        body
                  sing
           for all         who are         to come
                  sing

Blue for beauty became as abundant as red. My copy became a visual aid illustrating Kingsley’s poetic tension between beauty and violence. The pain disrupts and challenges the beauty while the beauty softens the blow. Notice the proximity of pain and beauty in this excerpt from “Get Out of the Goddamn Car”:

            buoy me to safety             restart my world with a rainbow
            like Noah’s magic boat never            dreamt it could.            

I added green pencil for fresh language and innovation which I quickly realized would overlap what I had already underlined. Green also outlines entire poems such as Kingsley’s reworking of a Punnett Square. Remember that diagram from biology class used to predict genotypes? Kingsley’s version is more about genocide than genotypes. It’s a series of Punnett Squares that includes 18th century Massachusetts Lieutenant-Governor Spencer Phips’s proclamation, one of a multitude of such bountied proclamations: “Twenty-five Pounds ... For Every SCALP of such Female Indian or Male Indian under the Age of Twelve Years, that shall be killed and brought in”

Color coding and penciled notes by Jo Freehand.
From Dēmos by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org

As green and innovative as Kingsley is, this is not sterile poetry written for the sake of experiment or form. His experimentation and form feels secondary to a primary drive to connect, to write or paint humanity.

I had two colors left in my color-coding experiment. Gold for place, and there is much gold to be found in Dēmos from a Friday night around a campfire to Somerset Kitchen to Conodoguinet Creek to Pulse Night Club to a Boy Scout flag burning ceremony to an uncle’s razed orchard to East Jesus, PA. Dēmos is deeply rooted in place. Identity is deeply rooted in place.

As Dēmos is poetry of identity, why then did I include purple for identity as a final color? Why not simply color every page purple? I used it anyhow and listed Kingsley’s (and/or speaker of the poem’s) many selves. The list was long. To name a few, poet as: descendent of a political prisoner, torch carrier, biologist poet, obedient son, skeptic, historian, storyteller, political poet, language keeper, mixed-race, young witness, racist’s target, lyricist, disrupter, descendent of artists, middle-finger, connected to and part of Nature, father, white man’s myth dispeller, truth teller, “left-over ingredients,” year-of-the-Uma baby, and rule follower. The choice of purple for identity was not consciously planned, but somehow it was right. Purple is the blending of red and blue, identity emerging out of violence and beauty.

Like the portraiture art of Salman Khoshroo, Dēmos is not a search for answers; it’s for engaging with these textured layers, layering and uncovering, layering and connecting, layering and revealing. In Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’sDēmos, it is the search that matters.

Comments may be directed to Jo Freehand, Contributing Editor at: jfreehand@verizon.net

Review by Jo Freehand: Bringing it to the Page: A Review of Dena Igusti's 'Cut Woman'

Publisher: Game Over Books 2020
The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Paperback, pp.42
ISBN: 978-1732498693

Dena Igusti is a queer Indonesian Muslim poet, playwright, and producer. Cut Woman is Igusti’s debut chapbook. The title refers to the violent practice of FGM, of which Igusti is a survivor. In his poem “altar” Igusti writes: 

            [ . . .] CNN called auntie’s celebration
            FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION
            the gauze between my legs // becomes //
            a banner for each pity party in my body //

Cut Woman is not, however, poetry of self-pity or pity-seeking poetry. It is as strong as the strongest cliché about strength. One could say that it’s a collection of poems about trauma, dissociation, and reconnecting with that dissociated self. One could also say it’s largely a collection about loss, personal and community-wide. Loss is right there in the first line of “bounty” the opening poem:

            the grenade’s lung exhaled into our chests 
and muslims have been spilled ever since

 However, after months of engaging with Cut Woman, I no longer say that it is about loss, disassociation, or reconnecting with that dissociated self. Now, I hesitate to even call it a collection. Yes, these poems are bound within an intriguing cover, are published, and have their own ISBN. Yes, okay, a collection. Still, and instead, I want to call it process. Process, not as in unfinished. Process, as in, this is not a collection of poems about loss. This is the navigation of loss. It’s a right-here-happening-now-on-the-page navigation of loss. This is not a collection about reconnecting disassociated self. This is reconnecting with dissociated self. It’s a right-here-happening-now-on-the-page reconnection with dissociated self. Verb not noun. This is embodiment. Verb not noun. You, as reader, are witness.

This sense of intimately witnessing Igusti’s personal odyssey is attributable to his willingness to experiment until whatever the journey requires of this poet is brought forth. Words, lines, and poems in Cut Woman are brought forth exactly the way they need to be and only the way they can be. That might appear as all-caps, the absence of a word, a one-act play, an erasure poem, double slash marks, bilingualism, the use of both margins, and/or whatever it takes. All of this is more than playful experimentation. It feels essential as Igusti courses his journey:

From “altar”:

            at 9 years old // in a dusty kitchen // i am sprawled // out on the metal altar //
woman in a house dress // face mask // no gloves //dips // a scalpel in a bowl
of muddy water // i ask my tante [ …]

Notice the double slashes, the lower case i, the fragmented list of imagery. How do you feel about those choices? Are they random? Perhaps each was chosen because it was the one and only choice for this moment in Igusti’s trek as he brings this experience as close to the page as wordly (and worldly) as possible. In other words, the opposite of disassociation. To me, those double dashes feel and look like blankets protecting every word. They feel like a safe space, a safe space for a trauma survivor to bring it to the page. And what about the fragmentation in that excerpt? Would memory of such gruesome trauma happen in complete sentences with proper punctuation?

How close to the page can a poet bring disassociation?

From “after the incision”:

            i tell me i miss you

i ask can we ever happen again
           the body leans in        

            [ . . .]

            i sob.

From “self portrait as kuntilanak:”

            but I’m forever tethered
                to the way
                     my body is suspended
                          in memory

Here Igusti writes about the anchoring effect of trauma when, from that point on, living is forever in relation to that moment. Because of Igusti’s creative play with form and because the form matches the moment, even this excerpt hovers, feels tethered, lingers.

Throughout Cut Woman Igusti navigates layers of identity and loss. In fact, it almost reads as a poetic archive of loss, one that includes the anticipation of loss. In his* poem “sacrifice (reprise), or trajectory” he writes:

[ . . .] I think a lot // about death // for someone //
so afraid of dying // i call all my not-loves a loss and grieve

  for parts of me: whether it’s 2 strands of hair

The poem of loss “the tsunami drowns rick del gado’s ‘usa for indonesia’” is one of Igusti’s erasure found-poems. It’s an erasure of the lyrics of a disgustingly racist parody of “We Are the World” about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami:

            there was a time,

      a wave             20 feet high
                        washed         whole country away

The use of erasure here seems multi-functional in navigating this particular loss. Visually, there is an immediate sense of so many lives swept away. It is loss on the page. Remaining words are now distanced as if fractured family members that survived. Secondly, the erasure serves in taking away some of Del Gado’s white power.

In spite of, or perhaps, due to its painful subject matter, there is power in Dena Igusti’s first book of poetry. Power, life, and living.

“sex: a necromancy”:

(which my mother wasn’t allowed to feel that which hers couldn’t either)
this time a thing that will               feel sharp but in the best way this time
I’ll    make use of what was left of what I      lost

And from “in this life you said roses”:

meanwhile, all versions of (what’s left of) me // will try to figure out a way to say

As devastating and as full of loss as Cut Woman is, it is equally full of joy and living. How could it not be? It’s right there on the page. Dena Igusti is right there on the page.

* For those wondering if this has been a typo. Yes, female genital mutilation requires a clitoris. It does not, however, require that the person with said clitoris identify as female.