On Being Stuck at Customs: The Poems of Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?

— "Social Skills Training"1

These are the first questions I received after giving a virtual talk on my book Climate Lyricism:

These aren't the exact words and I may have imagined the use of "neoliberalism," but I do recall in disturbing detail an audience member nodding vigorously in agreement in a square on my screen. The audience was small and most attendees had their cameras off, so this person was especially visible. This reaction — as much as the questions — seemed to communicate that I was wrong to think that effective climate action could come from anywhere but above. I was flustered, even though the questions are predictable and reasonable, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about a response.

Here is what I wish I had said.

Far from being naïve, a focus on the everyday is essential to any effort to address the environmental crises we find ourselves struggling with. It's urgent for people everywhere to figure out how to lead their lives differently and to believe that such attempts to live differently matter. A building up of a shared commitment founded on the idea that what people do locally is part of efforts happening elsewhere might be a process that occurs laterally, across a lot of different like-minded communities, but it also aspires to guide, shape, and eventually become the governing principles of the view from above. I want to go even further to say that the differences between lateral and vertical should be minimized as much as possible, and the more it is minimized the more we're approaching greater democracy. From this perspective, becoming unstuck from the dangerous climate impasse in which we all find ourselves is not a one-time occurrence. It involves thousands, even millions, of small and minor deliberate alterations in the way people live, and interact with each other, so that habits form, and new customs become second nature. Hence the importance of focusing on the everyday.

We try, we fail, we try again. Think of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, except the focus of the story is not on the work of a few powerful political leaders and their remarkably effective activists supporters but on the many whose ways of life are transformed as efforts to curb and reverse the emission of greenhouse gases are ramped up.2 The many are leading such efforts in this version, and the nominal leaders are racing to keep up. Indeed, I wonder, how far would climate action have gotten in the novel if the many refused to cooperate, or saw their interests in direct conflict with the goal of lessening carbon dependence? What if they viewed policies guided by this goal as an impediment to their way of life or a hostile takeover of their agency?

Maybe to get unstuck, then, what we need is to find novel ways to get stuck — newly formed customs that habituate us to different ways of living our lives and being in the world, and that reward us by offering what the way of life we've left behind could not. If this is the case, alterations in the way we live (fly and drive less, eat less meat, use less energy, consume less) are not just an acceptance of corporate greenwashing nor a neoliberal focus on the individual nor responses that have to be framed as a taking away or a loss. They can be these things, absolutely, but they can also be part of a greater practical working out of how to live differently and in more fulfilling ways (more collaboratively, more simply, more with a shared sense of purpose) and to develop the kind of habits that are going to be so necessary in the difficult years ahead. The poor all over the world have emissions that are infinitesimal, but even the moderately well-to-do in a country like the US individually produce a lot of carbon pollution and they will sooner or later have to produce less. Working out how at an everyday level — while avoiding the trap of personal responsibility discourses — can help speed up this process.

This is one reason why I want to tarry with Solmaz Sharif's new book of poetry. When every policy choice governing mitigation and adaptation really matters a lot and when every election is a contest over how we respond to a fast-unfolding crisis and when many climate activists feel understandably that what they have been doing isn't enough and that electoral politics is a dead end, the urgency of the current moment is palpable. We need to speed things up, but we may also need to create space to think carefully about how we are living and how we might want to live and what prevents us from living that way. Speed is not everything and action can make matters worse or disproportionately penalize already marginal communities. This means we need to slow down as well because establishing new customs doesn't happen quickly, especially if we are earnest about wanting a just transition.

What I value about the aptly named Customs is that it gives me occasion to slow down, and to consider the fraught nature of my own everyday experiences shaped by the past, bombarded by advertisement, restricted by the state's preoccupation with security, and threatened by a waxing of right-wing nationalisms. We're stuck in a moment of serious reaction and backlash, much of it fueled by the climate crisis but in ways that aren't self-evident. These are the impediments we need somehow to overcome, which means we need to understand them as fully as possible.

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It's a stretch to say the poems in Customs are about climate change, but they are good to think with about what it feels like to exist in the present because they are centrally about the experience of being stuck. The past is not past. Loss feels defining. Borders start and end long before any imaginary line. So much of the culture at large is toxic. Look at these lines from "Without Which" to puzzle over the moment we find ourselves:

The meaning of the words in this quotation is noteworthy, but so is the confusion caused by the double right square brackets. What do they mean? They're so pervasive in this poem and so mysterious, they seem deliberately designed to encourage the reader to pause in reflection.

Maybe the reader will sit in wonder, or in impatient, or even in anger. I probably encountered a mix of such feelings as I read — ignoring the brackets at first and then returning to them with questions about what they signify.

The brackets appear exactly three times on each of the twenty pages the long poem occupies in the volume. There are two pages on which there are only the brackets. They sometimes appear with a single line break separating them from the text, as in this passage, and at other times they skip several lines. On some pages they have to share space with a lot of text, and on others the text feels stranded amidst the emptiness that surrounds them. The poem itself is a meditation on the loss that comes from forced migration. It begins,

With an opening like this, it's not difficult to imagine the brackets as signally a loss that can't even be registered as loss. As Kamran Javadizadeh observes in his review of the book, "The effect is striking and disorienting: the brackets suggest the kind of editorial intervention that one sees in modern editions of ancient texts, to indicate gaps in the record, places where something now irrecoverable once stood. That they are only right brackets suggests a cordoning off of the past, a paring away of the historical self."5 Something is evading both memory and language. It's evading very old habits of narrative trope-making, which the poem signals by making reference to the story of Lot's wife from the book of Genesis only to insist that the literal and figurative turn to the past has gone awry: "I turned and looked / and not even salt did I become."6 The brackets, then, seem to gesture toward what we have lost so profoundly it's a kind of aching absence that we might want to ignore or fill in quickly, but we give in to this impulse at our own peril.

As much as this poem, like many of the other poems in this volume, is about the experience of being forced from home and living life as a marginal figure in another country, which might occupy the reader's mind as being geographical in nature (a spatial movement from one place to another), I found myself focusing on the quotation about the cruelty of return because I am thinking about how the word "return" suggests a desire to go back to the way some of us used to live. There's a kind of pulsing temporality behind the force given to the word "return." I am thinking less about returning to a place, then, and more about returning to a set of familiar social arrangements that once existed. Return is a kind of time travel. The response to the coronavirus pandemic has been especially instructive of how much this desire mobilizes discourse and policy-making. My employer was one of the first universities in Massachusetts to mandate vaccination for all of its students and employees with very few exceptions allowed, but then announced immediately that masks would become optional on campus. Surely, what shapes this policy is nothing less than wanting to return to normal as fast as possible.

This is a mantra for anyone alarmed by the effects of climate change: there can be no return to business as usual. It's business as usual that is driving an accelerating headlong plunge toward global cataclysm. This is, perhaps, a point that's easy to grasp in the abstract, but more difficult to realize in day-to-day life. What does it mean, after all, to disrupt business as usual in your own life? Maybe you should forego the vacation that requires hours of plane travel and tons of carbon dioxide released into the air? Maybe you need to think of new ways of getting around and where you live? Is this even possible? And what about what you eat and where you buy your clothes? Such questions aren't particularly appealing to think about, I imagine, and it might be easy to say that what you do individually doesn't matter.

And, certainly, to focus exclusively on such questions is a shifting of responsibility away from the major corporations that profit most from the use of fossil fuels onto the individual consumer (as the questions I was asked at my talk were focused on). The poem "Self Care" seems to speak to exactly this kind of shift. Just the title alone is loaded with pointed meaning, as care of the self means consuming more in a desperate attempt to ameliorate being totally burnt out. "Have you tried," Solmaz asks at the start of this poem,

And just in case the reader didn't get what the poem is referring to with "glacial water," other questions appear later in the poem that reference the same theme:

The questions to the consumer mounts, and gradually the burden of responding to the blossoming catastrophes of the world are placed fully on the individual, who seems alone, powerless. The questions are also always self-regarding, the focus turned inward, away from a public and the potential for collective action. The poem asks,

Your gaze in these lines leads you back to yourself, but carefully lighted to appear flattering for others, and so others are also always there, but as an audience rather than as equals. Everyone is looking at you; you are always thinking about how others look at you. More than anything, these lines speak of a profound aloneness that comes from being self-centered, and the weak agencies that necessarily follow from this fact.

You may nevertheless find some consolation knowing that the water infused with flowers (the hydrosol) can help keep you fresh, and even the glaciers that are melting everywhere can supply producers with the freshest kind of water with which to infuse the flowers — which further suggests that there's no crisis that can't only be managed but commodified and profited from.

Everything is a business opportunity if you're smart enough to spot it and nimble enough to take advantage. But, then again, the question about the rising shore and the need to "put your weight" against the door to keep it closed against the waters that are already here suggest something menacing, a creeping awareness that there are crises that aren't manageable. "You" may be left alone, abandoned, to respond to a problem that has grown too much to handle all on your own. "All of it?" the poem asks, the emphasis on "all" suggesting what can't be held back, and what is on the way in one form or another. "Self-care" turns out to mean that you are on your own to face what's coming, and the cheeriness of the language can only go so far to delay this realization.

The poem thus gestures to the logic of personal responsibility, and shows how this logic is a trap.

This to me is also the cruelty of return, because it mistakes this kind of abandonment with the ordinary — to which we are all supposed to be so eager to go back to. The title of the book Customs surely plays on a multiplicity of meaning that's related to such cruelty. It can, of course, refer to the area at the airport (and at other points of entry) where international travelers need to pass inspection. Passport, visa, declaration form, friendly face on travel-weary body, direct responses to pointed questions are scrutinized by agents of the state, who have to decide whether you're authorized to enter the country. Customs is a site of discipline — of behavior, of the body, of affect. Customs can also refer to the habits of a people — the way they have done things and continue to do things. Maybe the fact that "customs" is used both for scrutiny upon entry into another country and habits of a people are related to each other, as both refer to practices habitually performed and securitized. How does a people know itself if not through its customs? And so the pandemic, with all of its norm-busting, has disrupted customs and estranged (or maybe deranged?) daily living. And so now, as the most immediate danger seems to have abated and the still very serious harm can more easily be denied, people want to return to their customs. To normal. To business as usual. But really, don't we all deserve better than this kind of return? Don't we want to start fresh by cultivating new habits of collective caretaking and concern for others rather than cleaving to the always self-regarding self? What strategies can best get us to such a fresh start?

***

The airport, to stay with the double-meaning of customs, is not just a place of departure and arrival, of escape to other places, of travel for business and pleasure, and of home-coming. It is also not just a site of intense carbon emissions. It is, for many, a place of separation, loss, and extra racial surveillance. The latter is especially true for those who use the airport to travel internationally and must in the process face the undemocratic authority of the customs officers who can belittle, search, detain, or deport. There's something arbitrary about this authority, the reason why so many travelers hold their breath for the second (hopefully) before passports can receive a stamp, which Sharif in her poem "Visa" describes with such precision and menace:

Such arbitrary authority also means that for those waiting at the "railing," peeking through the doors that slide open and close at unpredictable intervals, trying to catch a glimpse of the inside of customs (or also the inside of state power, which is especially naked at the borders), there is a lot of painful uncertainty. When will they appear? Will they appear? What to do if they don't appear? Sharif asserts at the end of the poem,

The refusal in these lines to make use of enjambment, insisting instead on ending every line with a conspicuous period, reinforces this sense of being stuck at customs, waiting for what might happen without having any power to affect the outcome. There is a finality to the decision of the customs officer. There are lines that cannot be crossed. The state determines where those lines are and enforces respect for them with a heavy hand.

This feeling of waiting at the railing, powerless to affect the outcome I am hoping for and unsure even as to when I might know what the outcome will be, captures the knife-edge feeling of being in the present, as I wait for decisions to be made about what will be done about climate change and when. And with each passing precious moment, I despair that anything designed to slow or even stop emissions will ever be done. Maybe all my waiting is in vain. If there is no return, there is also a severe lack of imaginative possibility about what comes next. The waiting speaks to this sense of being stuck.

Given how pervasive this feeling of waiting is, it's no wonder that, as Heather Houser categorically states, "Climate writing is stuck." The reason is, in part (and maybe in whole), because, "Climate action also hardly budges." As a result, writers find themselves deploying rhetorical strategies that can feel repetitive and overfamiliar as if they keep finding the same forms to convey the same feeling. The "stuckness that's evident" finds expression through repetition: "The hopeful ending, ecocide aside, and the catalog of despair are gestures that at once feel disposable and insignificant, yet are carrying the weight of planetary and social upheaval. They provide a strange sort of comfort when paths forward feel elusive or blocked. We are ensnared in the stalemates of climate action."10

When I reflect on these mini-conventions, as Houser calls them, I am certain I've used them all before and will no doubt use them again. Their attraction for me is easy to decode because it's the same attraction other writers are feeling. A lot of awful events are happening pretty much every day, and if there's one thing I can be certain about it is that such events — the floods, storms, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, sharp fluctuations in air temperature, stalled fronts, mass animal die-offs, and perhaps right-wing extremism, fiercer wars, stochastic violence, forced migrations — will increase in frequency and intensity, so to capture the plentifulness of such environmental destruction it makes sense that I'll resort to the list. There are many such events. They are geographically dispersed. They each carry a heavy weight of loss and are equally momentous for those afflicted. Lists help to signal all of this. As Ian Bogost observes, "lists remind the literary-obsessed that the stuff of things is many. Lists are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely because they are so inexpressive."11And there are of course many occasions when I'm writing a sentence that has nothing to do with such events, and an aside helps to remind me not to let them slip completely from mind. I have a meeting to attend and am running late and so I have to gather my things and rush out the door — meanwhile an early spring heatwave led to a high of 49˚C (or 120.2˚F) in parts of Pakistan. This last sentence is an example of the ecocide aside.

Finally, there is the hopeful ending. This one is perhaps so obvious its use can feel perfunctory. Julie Offill's novel Weather, to take an example that Houser also uses, ends with the web address obligatorynoteofhope.com.12 The .com seems deliberate. It suggests there's something almost marketable about the hopeful ending, a way to confirm for the reader like an advertiser's reassuring messages during times of disruption that the crisis is manageable and there are responsible people working deliberately to do the managing. Aviva Breifel recalls the emails she received at the start of the pandemic: "Their messages assured me that Sephora & Nordstrom & PetSmart & Crate&Barrel were keeping their 'stores safe and clean for you, our employees, and the community at large.'"13 But then again the "obligatory" undermines the .com — the hope is offered grudgingly, against the author's will or inclination, required because the alternative is too awful to consider.

Against the obligation to hope, I find myself wanting to spend more time with Sharif's poetry. Meaning doesn't come easily. Many — nearly all — of its poems are presented to the reader in fragments. There are many things happening under the surface. The poems most center on habits, on the experience of passing through immigration control, of waiting for loved ones who live far away, of wanting to return to places you can't. And in its last and most elegiac poem "An Otherwise," a title which resonates with Avery Gordon's "imagine otherwise" and Kandice Chuh's further reflections on this phrase, there's a sharp reference to oil culture — starting as it does with the phrase "Downwind from a British Petroleum refinery."14 As the speaker later observes,

The "beloved" here does not seem to refer to a person but an idea of a life not defined by all the forces working so recklessly to protect the rich and powerful nor to return society to an ideal state that never existed before. Rather, it seems to refer to a flourishing together, a life lived more inclusively and equitably than seems imaginable today. The yearning for such a flourishing is not hope nor resilience; it's persistence, or what Rachel Carson called "the obligation to endure."16 It's a persistence that is felt in the body itself: "The metal in my teeth caught its frequency. / The iron shavings of my blood pulled toward this otherwise."17

This kind of wanting an "otherwise" leads me to think about a story that Robin Wall Kimmerer tells at the start of Braiding Sweetgrass. She asked her students — nearly two hundred, nearly all headed into "a career in environmental protection" — "to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land." As she goes on to report, "The median response was none."18 It seems to me that if you sincerely believe humans as a species are innately prone to destroying their environment and cannot find ways to co-exist with other living beings in a way that's mutually beneficial, you will then logically have to conclude that the only way to reduce the human impact on the environment is to de-populate as rapidly as possible. This is the very logic that motivated the Christchurch shooter and his epigones — mass killing non-white people for existing in too large numbers and therefore threatening the well-being of white people, who are more deserving of all the natural resources their country has to offer. This is the same logic that is leading to the militarization of the border, the demonization of asylum seekers, and the making vulnerable people who look like they come from afar. All of this too is a kind of climate action, and the latter examples of how changes from above are something to fight as much as it is something to petition for. Against such misanthropic thinking, an imagining otherwise insists that different kinds of climate action can blossom everywhere. A focus on the everyday is how we figure out in very practical and immediate ways the forms such action can take.

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Min Hyoung Song is the chair of the English Department at Boston College and a member of the steering committee for the Environmental Studies program. He is the author, most recently, of Climate Lyricism, which is open access, as well as The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Climate Lyricism received the Ecocritical Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE).

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