History of Forgetfulness by Shahe Mankerian Review by Alan Semerdjian

History of Forgetfulness by Shahe Mankerian 

Review by Alan Semerdjian

Publisher: Fly on the Wall Poetry (October 22, 2021)

Paperback: 86 pages

ISBN: 1913211622

The Memory Singing: Shahe Mankerian’s History of Forgetfulness

In her introductory essay to the seminal anthology of twentieth century poetry of witness Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forche writes that the impetus for the exploration and assemblage of such difficult work was to “understand the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination.” How does war and injustice and suffering impact the way in which we make meaning in the world? What shape does trauma’s footprint make in the earth and why is it important to remember that which has brought us such intense pain? Writers like Celan, Szymborska, Darwish, Ahkmatova, Vallejo, Kumunyakaa and dozens more from all over the world attempt answers to these types of questions, and it is not surprising that the collection illustrates the familiar tools of the poetry of witness. In these pages and throughout history, we see its ubiquitous direct address, dream-like surrealism, prayers of loss and sustenance, and deep reflections on the intersections between the personal and the political as fierce acts of remembrance. 

I think about what makes these grief-infused poems—often about man’s horrific inhumanity to man—tolerable or digestible, so to speak, is the respite offered by the juxtapositions inherent in the work. We can make it through a poem about genocide because of the way a slant of light manifests in the piece, the way a conversation with the self in exile reveals a garden of hope. Sometimes it’s the natural world that offsets the terror, and sometimes it’s a trick of our own resilient humanity surfacing in the poem that provides a glimpse of beauty that allows us to finish the poem and return to it.

In Shahe Mankerian’s debut collection History of Forgetfulness, it’s the focus on the innocence of youth and the rooms in the house of war the youngest among us inhabit that allow us time against the walls of an often overlooked dark corridor of history. The author is an Armenian-American born and raised in Lebanon during its crushing and complicated civil war (1975-1990). The poems are terse and artful reminiscences of a childhood deeply affected by the unavoidable death and destruction around it and the collection an important addendum to the ongoing conversation around poetry of witness.

The dissonance caused by the innocence of youth and the severe barbarism of war infuses almost every poem in the book. The titles serve as a conduit into the broken world: “The City of Lost Children,” “Educating the Son,” “The Sniper as Cupid,” etc. In “That Summer,” while playing “hide-and-seek / beneath the railroad bridge,” a corpse of a young woman, a student perhaps, emerges (“a leech was her third eye”) and ends the season “the day we buried her.” In “The Mosaic of the Missing,” other artifacts appear while searching through the remains: “the doll’s head / rolled under the chassis of / the charred Mercedes,” “her braided pigtail twisted / around the telephone wire,” and how the children mistook “shards of glass for fingernails.” The images are themselves tiny explosions, and Mankarian’s poems are snippets of photographs of a world where he and his peers live inside the savagery of a wartorn country attempting to still have a childhood, still fall in love, still gravitate to mischief and friendship and familial solace even though that which is going on around them is ultimately making these types of living experiences impossible to have in any functional way. 

In one of the collection’s most memorable moments, “The Last Mosque,” the boys are playing hide-and-seek again (a motif) while they “heard the planes / approach from the distance.” Avo remains outside and desperately calls for his friends. “You guys, come out. The planes—” he says, and then again, “‘Come out! Avo yelled, / ‘I’m not playing anymore’” and “Guys, / come out, please. / It’s not funny anymore.” Mankerian tactfully blends the plain urgency of the speech and its dire context with beautiful, albeit cripplingly sad, imagery when the search for Avo is on later in the poem and what’s found, among other things, is his “threadbare socks, / shorts the shade of Mediterranean.” The pulling in and out of the details is where the art lives in this book.

There are other motifs besides children’s games. Butchers, pressure cookers, skirts, religious divides, and the cover of night. The sniper makes several appearances here as well and is indeed the perfect conceit for Shahe’s commentary. The silent killer who slings death past your ear while you search for where and what he might be. The sniper’s face is never clear. It’s ephemeral but grave and always weighty. And then there is the abusive father…or, rather, what men become in a country where they kill each other and demonstrate their brutality publicly everyday. Brother vs brother. The mother is the dear innocent figure to the writer. The fountain of love and giving and resolve. The father is flawed and guilty, for whom Shahe is forever a “failing tourniquet” as one poignant poem asserts.

Form here is dictated by content. Stanzas have sharp turns and couplets, tercets, and quatrains are employed, so as to keep the pain somewhat contained and deliverable. The first section of the book provides a more distanced rendering of the conflict while the second dives into more personal/domestic concerns. Both seem to posit some necessary understandings of how memory works—namely, what we choose to remember and what is impossible to forget—as evidenced by the epigraphs (by Khalil Gibran and Indries Shah respectively) preceding them. 

The authors of the epigraphs are known for a kind of mysticism, which Mankerian also seems to employ in the poems. It’s a mysticism that is crafted in a retelling or what Toni Morrison calls a “rememory.” There are some memories that feel palpable, some that may still haunt us even like ghosts whose stories we’re still learning to understand. The poems in History of Forgetfulness have this feel and shape at times while they paint a picture of the senseless dehumanization of war and its impact on children who survive it. There is something in it for the historians for sure but more for the humanitarians interested in how imagination makes meaning of suffering, I think. Ultimately, like all moving examples of the poetry of witness, it’s not about the horror and the violence but, rather, the beauty in the world that goes on despite it and through it. The “singing,” as Brecht reminds us in that often-mentioned adage “about the dark times,” may still be, devastatingly, the most important part.

Shahe Mankerian is a poet, playwright, and a principal. His poems have been published in various literary journals.

Alan Semerdjian is an award-winning writer, musician, and educator who lives and teaches in New Hyde Park, NY.

14 September 2022