Saba Husain’s first poetry collection, Elegy For My Tongue, opens with the gathering of zinnias and marigolds on the eve of resettlement, a refugee community in bittersweet communion with one another and a place that was not originally home, is home now, will not be home tomorrow. “We clung to a music of our own,” she writes, “traced henna on our palms, / basked in bouquets. / No one said goodbye.”
Moving between Karachi, Pakistan and Katy, Texas, writing in the historical shadow and generational memory of Partition, and focusing on how the body and mind carry the past into the present wherever they settle, rendering everywhere and nowhere home to the refugee, Husain harnesses diaspora as a theory of time and place. The vibrant environments—grandfather’s garden in Karachi, filled with snapdragons, bougainvilla, and gulmohar trees; the vast sky and cow-dotted pastures of Katy and bayous of Houston; childhood homes in Pakistan and flooded homes in Houston; Houston’s “iconic graffiti / … and a glassy downtown”—are fashioned from eyewitness memory and set down with a poet’s observant attention to detail.
Husain’s poetic eye and ear are trained equally on language and silence, what can and cannot be, is and is not, expressed in words, in gestures, in actions and interactions, particularly for the immigrant in a new country. In “An Anthology of Urdu Verse” and “Truth Be Told I Did Not Care To Be Taken Aside” she grapples with the prejudices and assumptions called forth by the refugee’s presence in American spaces, how she feels unsafe to speak and live her own truths, the tension of living between sensibilities and cultures: Urdu and English, Pakistan and America. “The Donning” deftly presents the colonial paradox: having grown up in an English-speaking home consuming American culture—Little House on the Prairie, The Six Million Dollar Bionic Man, Archie comic books—yet, as an adult immigrant in America, she muses that “it takes time to shed the garments / that are the mark of a new immigrant” and notes that “the owner of a small bakery / next to where I worked / told me I looked American, / then asked me where I was from.”
There is a sense that regardless of how closely she attends to “being American,” however accepted she may be, she is always also still an outsider in the regard of others, and she turns an introspective eye on how this affects her own sense of self. There are barriers to belonging to any of the worlds in this book—the need to leave Karachi and become part of a diasporic community, the fear of prejudice that keeps her hiding the Urdu side of her dual-language poetry anthology while traveling by plane, the navigating of refugee status in America, the time- and energy-sapping job preventing her from becoming more immersed in the poetry community.
In the face of these barriers, Husain turns to family, poetry, and the natural world for solace and guidance. The result is a collection striking for its sweeping historical and contemporary landscape, observations on tradition, family, identity, and language, and ultimate thesis of the persistence of human spirit in a turbulent world.