Sugar House Review(s)

 

Dream State: A Commonplace Book

by Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse  

(Unnamed Press, 2025) 

Reviewed by Alan Ali Saeed

Unusually, a useful place to start with this genre-subverting lyric poetry collection is the title.  A commonplace book is traditionally a thinker and writer’s highly personal collection of items of knowledge from books, conversations, experiences and other sources which can be used later to create written texts. The subtitle, a ‘commonplace book’ suggests two meanings. First, that Dream State is both a poetry collection based on Levinson-Labrosse’s time living and working at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan and a series of translated narratives and memories from named Kurds about Kurdistan. (While Iraqi-Kurdistan was recognised officially in the Iraqi constitution of 2005, it has existed since the 1970s as a de facto, partially autonomous area. The unrecognized Kurdistan is rather more complex to imagine and would include parts of the current states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.) Levinson-Labrosse, however, did more than just teach at a university in Iraqi-Kurdistan, she is highly regarded as a translator of Kurdish to English. She co-translated Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters and she helped found the Kashkul center, an important Kurdish arts and cultural center in Sulaimani, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Levinson-Labrosse is determined to ensure her poems don’t elide or overpower the voices of actual Kurds which is part of the ethical and political framework of the volume.  

Second, the subtitle A Commonplace Book, refers to the fact that the future Kurdistan often talked about by Kurds, is itself a kind of commonplace book, made from the dreams and hopes of forty million odd stateless people about becoming a nation and which they have been working towards it seems for centuries. In that sense, Kurdistan is describable as an idealized "dream state," albeit in a highly positive sense, functioning in a broad mythic fashion within the Kurdish people’s vast imaginary. It is also a "dream state" for the poet, due to its uncanny strangeness to her own culture. Levinson-Labrosse informs us in her prefatory note (i) that the middle eastern equivalent of a commonplace book is a kashkul, named after the wandering Sufi dervish’s traditional alms bowl, so this volume is also to be seen as a Kashkul. The working practices of writers across the world’s borders are surprisingly similar, despite differences in language and culture.

While this review focuses on the author’s own poems, the Kurdish authored material is interesting and often striking in its own right and plays a significant role in the organisation of the volume, insofar as it puts Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in dialogue with the Kurdish people that directly inspired her. The volume shows considerable variety to match what her interviewees discuss while exhibiting Levinson-Labrosse’s own personal poetic voice. She is always conscious of being in dialogue with the Kurds, sometimes even silently. "The Book Men" is a moving poem, one which dramatizes how the speaker feels while being watched by Kurds when examining their precious archival poetic material, which they risked their lives to preserve against an oppressive regime intent on destroying both their language and culture:

The book men have been 

jailed and beaten

for their libraries, 

used as evidence at trial 

then burned.

[…] 

They read 

as they went blind and after 

whatever they had

learned by heart.

She is acutely conscious of how valuable texts are to these wary, secret librarians who share them with a stranger whose plans they do not understand. The poem concludes with lines suggesting these unresolved tensions and the librarians’ measured fears, which also symbolize the unspoken anxieties that all Kurds have about the continuation of American involvement in their world as "They wait to see /  what I can become."

Baghdad features prominently as it was traditionally the cosmopolitan home to Kurds, Sunni and Shia Arabs, and Assyrians. In "A Series of Suggestions," a visit to photograph the ruins of Baghdad garners an "amused" comment from their driver, a detail reminding us of the huge cost in human life that permitted the overthrow of the Ba’ath regime:

our driver laughs. What were you photographing?

the body 

was on the other side.  

The end of the poem is somewhat equivocal in terms of how far an American poet can appreciate the gulf of distance between America and Iraq. Mulberries are ripe in both countries at the same time, and she picks a few which in turn remind her of the Iraq she has recently left:

I pinch the stamen and pull

until a single bead

hangs at the opening. I hold

the open flower steady

and sip

An untitled prose poem vividly brings to life both the world of the camps for Internally Displaced Person (IDP), and the considerable gender gap in rural Kurdish society:

Her daughter crawled onto my lap. Some camp sickness crusted round her           

nostrils. She wouldn’t stop touching my pen as I wrote, as her mother spoke. […] Hanna kept apologizing. She’s never seen a woman write before.

"The Plains of Nineveh" recounts the aftermath of the war with Daesh [ISIL or Islamic State], with the burning oil wells set on fire as Daesh retreated, through the use of another strange detail:

This is the season of narcissus, wild and delicate, growing into the miles of trenches the Islamic State dug. Villagers will cut the narcissus in handfuls and take it to the city, standing at intersections, asking 1,000 dinars—75 cents—for each. Drivers will stop for a moment, buy a bunch, and carry it throughout the day, giving each person they meet a few stems until the bouquet is gone.

The imagery here turns on the contrast between the pale yellow of the spring narcissi and the notorious black flag of Daesh, as well as the fact that sociable Kurds buy them to give away as presents to acquaintances and friends. There’s also an implied contrast to the solitary poet amidst the daffodils in Wordsworth’s "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Other poems in the book similarly recall memories of the plenitude of Kurdish life and the poet’s experiences of this. "Glass Tangerine" recalls a morning swim in a mountain lake with a local friend under a Kurdish moon:

We swam our makeshift course

across the vast lake and back.

On our drive home, snacking

on dates, Nab tells me 

how he never really learned to swim, how he 

only wanted to see the seagulls 

hatch, how afraid he was.

Again, in contrast to the episode with the "troubled pleasure" of the stolen skiff in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book 1, the emphasis is on sociability rather than the lonely experience of the sublime. The form of the volume overall, with Levinson-Labrosse’s poems in continued dialogue with the words of Kurdish interviewees, shows how she wishes to subvert expectations of both lyric poetry and expatriate writing. Her position as poet is always liminal, neither quite inside nor quite outside of Kurdish society, wishing to speak of Kurdish subjects but not to simply incorporate them into her experience as lyric poets often have done with their subjects, from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads (1798) until now. 

While Levinson-Labrosse clearly understands the Kurdish situation as well as many Kurds (she also has a PhD on 19th Century Kurdish poetry), she is still acutely conscious that she isn’t a Kurd. The cover design of the volume by León Muñoz Santini is based on a photo taken by Hawre Khalid in 2015 of a child, Abdullah Hazbar, seen through the fabric of a tent, at an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camp near Kirkuk Iraq. The translucency is a good image of the inevitable distance between poet as observer and the Kurdish people. I understand and appreciate Levinson-LaBrosse’s ethical and political stance and her "deconstructed" commonplace book is a gracious gesture, suggesting she wishes to involve both an international and a Kurdish audience. She is genuinely interested in listening to our narratives and memories to write sensitive, lyrical poems for everyone to engage with.

Alan Ali Saeed is an associate professor of English literature at Sulaimani University, Iraq. He has a BA from Sulaimani University, an MA (London University), and a PhD on Bergson and British modernist stream of consciousness women's writing (Brunel University). See his publications here: Sites.google.com/a/univsul.edu.iq/ alan-ali-saeed/publications.