The central challenge to Asiya Wadud’s No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body involves the generational trauma. What are the consequences of externalizing the internal? In particular, how could contemporary culture possibly account for the horrible crimes that occurred during The Middle Passage. On a factual basis, there is a breadth of economic crime, a deep toll on human lives, and both these seem impossible to account for. But Wadud’s book is concerned with more than just the factness. For these poems, the Middle Passage consists of an internalized reality.
A reality Wadud investigates using lyric methods. But, unfortunately, the lyric does not ensure 1:1 representation, especially when it comes to something like generational trauma. Wadud’s lyric, then, works to tease out those internalized wounds—wounds that had not previously been connected to language. But is there a paradox to externalizing the internal? Yes, poetry can effectively communicate through the implicit. The metaphor’s bridge comparing thing to thing can serve as a means of sense. The image with the poet’s guidance can serve on the level of analogy. But can the implicit fathom the enormity of Wadud’s internalized pain? Is there a loss of understanding when a poem relies on the the ambiguity of implication?
This loss of understanding is one of Wadud’s main concerns. Her book opens with explicit positioning of God. He’s figured in a chapel with stained glass window. He’s focusing his attention on the Mason Dixon Line. But even in all this he-ness, God is more a lyric presence. He might be framed in a conventional light (ie using He pronouns), but God, by the second poem, has shifted to nature. Like a bird with “a laden knowledge.” Or a horse in “all its equine parts / leav[ing] the stable.” Or, with an even greater lyric charge, the honeybees investigating the convent. It’s this hovering influence that’s outside the self, but, with lyric energy, accounts for its presence inside the self, that leads me to think especially of the position God might offer as a structural framework. Or at least God in that spiritual and religious sense, gives me access to methods I read in many of Wadud’s poems.
I have always thought God served best as a means. Like understanding is a means for arriving to an idea or concept. Thinking is a means to language. And in these movements, there is God, ushering my thoughts—an intermediary. Maybe this is some Romantic sense of my inner spirit ushering thought. Maybe this is my self-importance, thinking I carry a divine intervention when my simple thoughts gather or unfold into complexity. In a religious sense, God can be working in you. Or, if you’re not religious, there’s at least a cultural understanding that what other people might call “God” accounts for something in the human body that shifts. It’s a mysterious newness.
For Wadud, the sense that God might be present, though that presence is beyond human understanding is one of the commentaries on mediation present in the book. The paradox of the internal communicated as an externality. But the book is dense with these mediations. Most striking to me is the image of a house being turned inside out in “At first, day one.” Is it possible to describe the domestic spaces of a house if they’ve actually been exposed to the world? Does the familiar evocations of the domestic (a book on a table, the holding patterns that appear on the walls) represent enough of that internal to communicate its significance, even as it’s been externalized?
For Wadud, there is a bewilderment in the extremity of generational trauma, especially as it relates to the Middle Passage. Or like the crisis driving immigrants to risk their lives for a different home. God may surpasseth a human understanding, and what is the human supposed to do with whatever amount of understanding they have of these worldly realities?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.