Book Review: The Book of Lamenting by Lory Bedikian

Reviewed by Douglas Manuel

The Book of Lamenting
Poems by Lory Bedikian
Anhinga Press Inc., November 2011
$17.00; 64 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1934695265

Do you remember when we had a president who was a reader of poetry? In 2010, our political climate was storming with many of the same issues vexing us now: healthcare, immigration, and the rise of nationalist right-wingers. Throughout that dark time, I found solace in a 2008 photo of president Barrack Obama carrying Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems 1948-1984. Walcott’s death in March brought that image back to me. As I watched the G20 protests, clouds of tear gas and drenching water hoses, which came just two days after the firestorm that is the Fourth of July, I was reminded of Walcott’s poem “Parades, Parades,” in which the speaker watches Independence parades and indicts the reader and himself, “. . . Tell me / how it all happened, and why / I said nothing.”

Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting, winner of the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, takes up Walcott’s challenge in many ways. It not only portents many of the issues that are headlines today but also takes up the task of witnessing for and humanizing refugee and immigrant family members. “Prayer for My Immigrant Relatives” limns a portrait of immigrants “wait[ing] in long lines, legs shifting, fingers growing tired of holding handrails, pages of paperwork.” The speaker asks to “give them patience” instead of making their task of getting into the United States more arduous. Rather than seeing them as just another problem, she sees them “At night, when worry beads are held / in one palm and a cigarette lit in the other.” She sees them calling “back home saying, ‘We arrived. Yes, thank God we made it, we are here.’”

Bedikian’s collection refuses silence. The speaker witnesses for her cousin in Beirut who “For years [has] known / the language of bombs.” She remembers how Anoush in Armenia described her husband beating her, and how for recompense “she pushed him into a ditch dug for grape vines, // threw in his bottles of bourbon for warmth.” The speaker doesn’t forget this valuable story and keeps “an inventory of the evening.” She remembers that women from Armenia to Lebanon to Syria to America still express their agency in ways similar to Anoush’s. She remembers the part of immigration that so much of our rhetoric surrounding the issue forgets: refugees and immigrants are people, just trying to make and live their lives. So, rather than just hearing a mechanic with an accent, the speaker in The Book of Lamenting sees and speaks Armenian to the man who “remembers working late into the Lebanese night, the plaza’s noise of backgammon boards, headlights beaming beyond the Mediterranean.” She blesses him and his “hand-made auto shop” and witnesses for his nostalgia and homesickness.

The Book of Lamenting does not display a perfect puzzle-fitting connection to the home of the speaker’s people. The book is a search for deeper understanding of the history, culture, and blood running through the speaker’s veins. In “On the Way to Oshagan,” the speaker is confronted with the realization that she really isn’t the same as her Armenian kindred. At a market, an older woman with “eyes, the color of two almonds” asks her “if [she] likes America, if [she is] married and where / exactly is this place called ‘Glendale?’” The speaker admits that

Until this exchange I had convinced myself
that I do not look like a tourist. After all, having
an ancestral name, firm family tree, the language
ironed to my tongue since the day I was born,
how could I be just another Amerigatzi? I say
this to myself, though I’m the one with the walking
shoes, the camera, the plaid-patterned pants.

The old woman then offers the speaker roasted sunflower seeds for free. The speaker almost demands to pay until she remembers a mantra her parents used to tell her: “Love this seven-member family all your days and nights, learn to take every offering with grace, no matter the given size.” So she bows her head, thanks the woman, and goes on her way, with the moment forever scarred into her memory.

These small moments of connection and communion, although not always easy and at times even painful, is what The Book of Lamenting seems to be seeking. This empathetic search is a valuable one that resonated in 2010 as well as today. As the immigrant ban becomes the law of the land, as protesters are hosed in the streets, as our 45th president cozies close to Russia and speaks vitriol against women, as the wars of the world wage on, Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting seems even more relevant. Bedikian’s speaker and the old woman in the market reminds me of W.H. Auden’s dictum from “As I Walked Out One Evening:” “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.” It takes empathy to love your crooked neighbor, and to have empathy you must first see your crooked neighbor, which Bedikian’s speaker does. She sees her family members in Armenia, Lebanon, and Syria. She sees the immigrant mechanic. She sees the old woman in the market. And, after we see people, we then must see ourselves, see our own “crookedness.” We can then see the way we are complicit to dominant, oppressive narratives, and hopefully realize the times we have said nothing. The speaker of The Book of Lamenting is not silent. She is as loud as the doves in the book’s opening poem “Beyond the Mouth.” Like those doves, she “chirp[s] the ugliness . . . of how we choke on what we hide.”

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He was a recipient of the Chris McCarthy Scholarship for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been the Poetry Editor for Gold Line Press as well as was one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His poems are featured on Poetry Foundation’s website and have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Superstition Review, Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, Many Mountains Moving, Figure 1, and elsewhere. His first full length collection of poems, Testify, was released by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2017.