What The F!#& Should I Read Friday: Self-Portrait As Ruth

What The F!#& Should I Read Friday: Books To Make Your Weekend Weird & Wonderful

Self-Portrait As Ruth by Jasmine Donahaye
Salt Publishing, 2009

Fair disclosure: Jasmine Donahaye is my mother. Fortunately, she is a damn good poet, because it would be extremely awkward if she wasn't. You should f!#&ing read her book. Not because she's my mother, even though she is therefore obviously awesome. Because it's a really f!#&ing good book, and really f!#&ing relevant, and I feel kind of dopey that I didn't think of it for WTFSIRF before. It's a book of poetry, but it's not just poetry; it's a book about politics as well, and the difference between politics as they are seen on the news and politics as they are felt in the heart. Right now, we need books like this more than ever. I've written about it before, but not in depth. So, let me tell you then, the answers to your five questions...

1. Who the f!#& wrote this book?

2. What the f!#& is it about?

3. Where the f!#& should I read this book?

4. When the f!#& is it set? 

5. Why the f!#& should I read it? 

1. Who the f!#& wrote this book?

Jasmine Donahaye on the beach at New Quay, Wales. Photo: me.

Jasmine Donahaye is a woman who happens to be, among other things, my mother; she's also a fascinating writer and a seriously fierce professional editor. (She's got my book right now. It's bloody terrifying. I say that lovingly, of course.) A relatively large proportion of her work has been about relationships between Wales and Israel/Palestine, and how those landscapes and places relate to identity, belonging, homeland, language, and her own body. Expatriation, longing, exile, loss, want - all these things show up in her writing, although (despite the first-person narratives that often thread through her poems) not always autobiographically. I can say this about her for sure: she doesn't like being pigeonholed. Introduce her as a "poet" and she'll bristle, because she's not just a poet. Calling her a writer of this or a poet of that is no good either, because if there is one thing she likes, it's writing that doesn't make things neat and tidy. Although in real life she's the kind of person who will get up for the dictionary if the etymology of a word comes into question at the dinner table, her poems are often about complication, entanglement, contradiction, complexity. Then again, when it comes to analytical writing, she writes with vivid clarity and organization, an elegant and logical coherence that lays out such twisty, thorny matters as the representation of Jews in Welsh history, for example, with the precision of a flower arrangement. If there's one thing she's not, it's simple. But complex and confusing are not synonymous, and much of what I love about her writing is the lovely distinction she draws between the two.

2. What the f!#& is it about?
Self-Portrait As Ruth is a book of poems largely, though not exclusively, about the landscape of the place once known only as Palestine, and the difference between the way the body and the heart see a place from the way a mind sees it. In talking to her about this book, and reading and rereading the poems, what I've come to understand is something like this: as a child, she had a strong, deep love for Israel, which - though she was born and raised in England - felt more like home to her than anywhere else; as she grew older, the simple experiences of her childhood grew into a intricate mishmash of conflicting, contradictory narratives, both historical and personal. For every story, it turned out, there was a counter-story; underneath each new layer of understanding of the conflict there was another, unseen set of facts or hidden histories. (I'm paraphrasing this as best I can. I've talked to her about this over the course of several years, now; it's hard to sum it up without oversimplifying. She might hate all this.) Underlying all the politics and revelations, though, there was also her own very early, almost wordless experience of the landscape itself, of the desert country without roadsigns, the vultures who don't care what borders they look down upon, a love and longing for the place itself, unnamed and unowned, wild and harsh and beautiful. And that's its own kind of complexity, that emotional allegiance not to a people but to a place - that sense of homesickness that will cause people to die for a patch of dry stones.

Really, Self-Portrait as Ruth is a book of poems about homesickness, about the longing for a homeland that is no longer there, maybe was never there - a childhood allegiance to a place that cannot exist once the knowledge of the fights for it, infinite and enormous in their bitter complexity, become known. It's a set of poems about the complications of longing, about thirst, about the wild and unreasonable hungers of the body that flaunt themselves at the mind as it seeks always to order and control. It's about the way politics simplifies and simplifies things that are not simple. In a way, the book is simply determined to say: I can't find a way to make this easy. People are not simple; their experiences are multitudinous, singular, variegated. But somehow we like things simple. We want answers, tidy explanations, rationales, and we get angry when asked to accept that maybe we don't get to have a nice clean reconciliation of opposites. Longing is messy. Yearning is messy. Grief is messy. In this book of poems, the strange and heartbreaking contradictions of experience are simply allowed to be, for a while, unattacked, untidied, honest, brutal, beautiful.

Jasmine Donahaye from Wales Literature Exchange | Cyfn on Vimeo.

3. Where the f!#& should I read this book?
I think reading poetry aloud is important, but only if you're not super overdramatic about it. Although in many ways the subject matter is intense, many of the poems are actually quite quiet. None of them are angry or ranty; they don't have much of an agenda other than exploring the depth of inexplicable yearning, sorrow, and desire. They're good for reading in a place where you have air and space to really think, somewhere you can let them sink in. Public or private doesn't make much difference as long as you have a sense of there being room for something with weight to happen, subtly, quietly.

4. When the f!#& is it set?
Mostly in the present, although the title poem plays with Biblical imagery, as do some of the others. Read your Bible! (In addition to being fascinating, it helps in all sorts of ways, not just literary - you'd be amazed at the kind of arguments you can win.)

5. Why the f!#& should I read it? 
This book does not have a lot of what I would call joy in it, exactly. But it's written, in part, about a memories of joy that were frustrated by the darkness of later experience, and about the struggle to decide whether or not those memories should be tainted by the knowledge that came after. Then, too, not everything I write about for WTFSIRF is exactly about joy, because there are emotions related to joy that are desperately important, without which I don't think joy can function properly - sorrow, and loss, and grief, and heartbreak, and longing. Especially, maybe, longing. I believe in joy as the sudden and momentary celebration of what is, in the face of the knowledge that it is fleeting; longing is its complement, not the lack of joy but the hunger for it, a bittersweetness one part hope and one part remembrance. You should f!#&ing read it because it's permeated by longing - for simplicity, for ease, for welcome, for homeland, for brotherhood, for the things that give joy, things that have been wounded and lost, but are not yet impossible.