Review: The Self and Others—Ramna Safeer’s Year of Saving Self // Kate Finegan
On my 29th birthday, my partner planned a day of surprises. Because he knows my joys in life, one stop was Queen Books, where I bought Year of Saving Self by Ramna Safeer (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2018). I mention this by way of thanking the excellent bookstores who champion microliterature titles. If online sales are Tinder, in-person sales are the pleasure of catching a handsome stranger’s eye and feeling an immediate spark.Safeer dedicates this collection to “women, especially the women of colour” whose “resilience is folded behind every space and comma.” Safeer folds a great deal behind every space and comma. These poems are expansive, often utilizing long lines and recurring themes and images. Repetition of sensory details (cardamom, the sun, bitter citrus) and of metaphors (the body as a house, language as a living thing, womanhood as deity)reflect the interconnectedness of the self and the women who surround and have preceded the speaker. The titular poem, “Permission,” builds to self-affirmation:
Let this be the year of take. Year of grab.Year of thank you, but that’s mine.Year of here I am. Year of it’s me.Year of saving myself.
But this poem is packed full of other people: "Year of cold fingers against feverish foreheads,” “ … year of welcome mat. Wipe your shoes / biscuits are in the tin, come in, come in.”The first mention of the speaker in the poem is in first-person plural. The first-person singular does not appear until the last three lines. These poems blur the line between the personal and the collective, with many poems utilizing the first-person plural while building to a personal revelation. Often the speaker seems to emerge from a line of people as the poem progresses, but those people are always present in the background. One key person in this collection is the speaker’s mother. The speaker often addresses Mama directly, as in “Mother Tongue”:
Mama, I miss the language. My tongue hits the roof of my mouth, comes back homeless. Our home in the hills is still there, Mama. Hussein and his truck of milk bottles still pass our mango tree at dawn.
This direct address allows for specificity—the shared memory of Hussein and his truck, the mango tree—as well as a sense of legacy. That legacy involves strength and resilience, as well as burden, as in “Isha”: “At nightfall, our feet grow sore. The women in my family / have been sacrificial for generations and ache / is a symptom of my lineage.”This collection carves out a place for self in a family that exists in liminal spaces—between waking and sleeping, life and death, a new country and an old home. In “Daughter of In-Between,” the speaker dreams of her mother crying “past the ghosts folded into our suitcases.” The second stanza details the painful experience of being separated from a dying parent: “No one told Daddy the ships were one-way vessels.” The speaker weaves her story with the stories of her parents and ancestors, with her family’s homes and distances between them, all these insurmountable distances.The speaker explores this lineage of loss and proclaims that she will no longer wait, that she will no longer apologize; she will make her life her own, in the company of others. The final line of the collection signals that this is a prelude to something else: the speaker asks, “And isn’t this where I begin again?” I hope so; I hope this is just the start of a long career for Safeer.
Kate Finegan lives in Toronto. Her chapbook, The Size of Texas, is available from Penrose Press. She is the assistant fiction editor of Longleaf Review. You can find her at katefinegan.ink and follow her on twitter @kehfinegan.
