Haddad & Identity

Thanks for the very directed reading response questions, Identity group—I’m excited to go deeper into these twelve poems on Tuesday! (Especially Camillo’s “The Monster of the Dead”, which I didn’t have space to blog about – his crying for the immortality of the doll, the beauty of the wine, the transparency of its glass – amazing stuff!)

When considering how these poets create or challenge identity in their pieces, I thought of Marian Haddad’s “Malfunctioning FLOWTRON.” This poem places us in the hospital room of a dying man; we do not know his relationship to the poet—he could be a grandfather, father, uncle, father-in-law, mentor—because that element is not critical to this piece. The tension established in the early lines tells us there is a close relationship and impending sorrow: “—he is /sleeping better now—quiet/makes us think—our minds/crank every few minutes, eyes/open…” The enjambment (yea, I wrote that word down in my notebook) and series of m-dashes make the verse stutter, and mimic the “cadence/of the high pitched beep…” The words are caught in this image of cranking minds, minds that seem afraid of the quiet that will force them to think. We know that the speaker is tired, stretched out, and anxious about the state of this man; so we gather she loves him without needing to know who he is to her.

His identity is then tossed around even more—we are offered suggestions and then those suggestions are negated. He asks for Agua in his hazy, Morphine-padded state, so we gather this word must be quite familiar to him, a word that comes from his deep subconscious. Then we are told he is not Mexican (as though this is the only type of person who could ask for water in Spanish). I was slightly offended by that line, and wondered if the poet chose it to play on the assumptions some Americans have that all Spanish-speakers are of Mexican heritage or nationality. Two lines later we learn that he is American and Arabic. But wait—Arabic is a language, not an identity. Again, the poet seems to be playing with our assumptions—that if a person speaks Arabic, it must mean he is an Arab. I’m fairly certain this isn’t true, considering the fact that millions of people around the world, primarily in Northern Africa and what is known as the Middle East speak Arabic but may not consider themselves Arabs. (If anyone else has more insight on this cultural identity, please speak up!) Defining Spanish-speakers as Mexican disacknowledges all other Spanish-speaking South and Central American (not to mention European) nationalities as much as defining all speakers of Arabic as Arabs homogenizes many ethnic identities into one umbrella term.

Of course, after I spent some time breaking this down and presuming what stereotypes Haddad is playing on, I read her bio, which identifies her family as Syrian-Americans living on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and as speaking English, Arabic and Spanish at home. So perhaps her use of the word “Mexican” is more intentional; perhaps the man in the poem was often mistaken for Mexican because of the family’s proximity to the border and his Syrian features. (My partner is Sri Lankan and is often mis-identified as Latino—folks will speak Spanish to him when he walks around Berkeley and he doesn’t understand a word of it.) I might even go so far to say that this potential mis-identification of the man in the poem was not always disadvantageous—perhaps he felt more at home on one side of the border than the other; perhaps his new-forged identity as a Spanish-speaker had some commonality with his identity as an Arab-American; perhaps there is even an degree of “passing” here that happened between the two. I bring this up because, in her bio, Haddad is quoted as seeking the “‘connective instead of divisive’ aspects of difference” in her work.

Later in the poem, the subject is infantilized, as he is portrayed sucking the water sponge like a mother’s nipple. Finally, he sleeps and we end with the sound of his snores, much like we began with the sound of the beeping—the sound of the living versus the sound of the dying. Haddad is further exploring the connectivity of these opposing identities—elderly and newborn, living and dying—as she pairs these sounds and images and synthesizes their presence in one person.

So many of the images in this poem could have been taken from my own witnessing of grandparents struggle against age and health—the dryness of the mouth caused by the Morphine, the beeping of the monitors (wondering if they hear, how it affects them), the feeding of the sponge stick. In the last days of my stepgrandfather’s life, he lay with his head back and mouth sticky-dry. All he asked for was water and all we could do was run that moist little sponge over his lips and his tongue. Sometimes he gripped it with the muscles of his mouth, absorbing the only fluid allowed (drinking water would have actually been harmful to him at this state). This man never asked anyone to do anything for him in life, and here we—the women of his family, only recently joined by marriage—were feeding him droplets of water, massaging his arms, warming his cool-shallow cheeks, and inserting Morphine enemas. He was transformed from a regal man into a helpless child, and witnessing this transformation made me feel first slightly sickened, and later, more intimately close to him than ever before.

I imagine many people have held this same sort of vigil over the loved and the dying, and that this poem is not just for Haddad’s unnamed loved one, but for each of ours, or for the shared love/pain that life’s last transformation erupts in us.