Steffi Sin reviews Eman Hassan's Raghead

Bicultural poet and essayist from Massachusetts and Kuwait, Eman Hassan is the author of Raghead, which was the recipient of a Folsom Award and named as the 2018 Editor’s Choice for a first collection of poems (New Issues Press, 2019). She recieved an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University, where she worked as International Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, and a PhD in poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she worked as an Associate Editor for Prairie Schooner. Eman is one of the founders of The American University of Kuwait and part of Zayed University's start-up team (UAE). She is also a veteran of the first Gulf War, where she served as a medic-interpreter. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Aldus Journal of Translation, Blackbird, KUDZU, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mizna, Pilgrimage, and sub/Terrain, among others.

Raghead offers a glimpse into the Gulf War from a bicultural perspective but also reminds audiences that war, indeed, begins at home. For Eman Hassan, the war at home began with the tension between her narrator’s Kuwaiti and American halves, her father and her mother, home is a battlefield with a “thorny spillage of language/ begetting violence.” 

In “War Starts at Home”, Hassan writes, “There’s alienation consequent to a bicultural marriage/ without networks of a racial similar.” The narrator is subjected to feelings of alienation as a result of her mixed heritage, and even when she leaves home, she carries this feeling with her “across the planes of my face, into landscapes/ of an otherness.” This tension shows how the consequences of war reverberate within people because a war never truly ends— the narrator’s struggle with her bicultural identity recurs throughout the collection. People who are displaced by war carry their scars into new landscapes and are forced to live with their past experiences. Parallel threads of this alienation are woven into other poems such as “Occlusions” where Hassan continues, “I am lost between the diphthongs of one language/ and another.” The narrator reiterates how the different sides of her identity are continually at war, but there is also a wish for a resolution to her feelings of displacement. She is not only alienated, but she is “lost” and searching. Raghead ends with “Singular Notes,” where the author leaves readers with an unfinished conclusion. Hassan writes, “My shattered chords/ seek assemblage/ against dystopian backdrops.” As the poems progress, the narrator feels more and more lost. She was only “lost” between two languages before, but by the end, her music, her voice, is “shattered”. Hassan leaves readers with a narrator who is indefinitely seeking unity for her discordant self, as people who are affected by war are also continually seeking unity that will mend what violence has “shattered”. 

In “Slow Matricide,” Hassan writes about a mother who “performs her own ritual of controlled burning” on her skull by shaving her head, pouring gasoline, and wrapping it in rags in an attempt to rid her scalp of lice she believes are there. The narrator “cajoled her to get help,” but her mother still “pooh-poohs the doctor’s diagnoses.” Hassan deftly employs evocative images as the mother continues with the “fracking of her scalp,” and on the surface, readers interpret “Slow Matricide” as a poem about a family’s struggle with mental illness. But as the narrator drives away, Hassan subverts expectations. The narrator wonders, “what if our mother is the only one who got it right?” What if the world was really coming to an end, and no one was listening to the warnings, to the “omens?” The meaning of the poem twists; it puts the audience in an uncomfortable position along with the narrator because we have all doubted what the mother believes. By opening up the possibility of the mother being right about the “omens,” Hassan forces her audience to confront the fact that we might have missed important information by writing women off as mentally unstable in society. The word “omen” is nestled within the word “women,” and a deeper analysis into Hassan’s poetry provides readers with an understanding of how violence of war has affected the female body as well as the landscape. 

Raghead flows with haunting acoustics, especially in lines such as, “a commitment to ping-ponging between continents,” and “I was a whore. I was not a whore. And the world is at war.” This poignant collection of poems focuses on the internal struggles of the narrator while highlighting the resiliency of women with lyrical sharpness. Hassan’s poems are the “froth of acidic peninsula brine,” “the clamors of many-tongued flames,” “barbed wire and dandelion.” Ragheadshatters the audience and forces readers to step outside of the poems themselves and think. 

Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco. She is currently working on her MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University. She was a finalist in the 2019 Hemingway Shorts Contest, and her work has been published by Hyphen Magazine and elsewhere. She is also an Associate Fiction Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.