The Red Hijab. By Bonnie Bolling. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2016. Pp. 69. ISBN: 9781943491063.
Bonnie Bolling, who won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize for this book, also won the Liam Rector First Book Prize in 2011 for her first poetry collection, “In the Kingdom of the Sons.” She was awarded fellowships by Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Prague Summer Writers, and by the University of California, Riverside (UCR), where she received her MFA. Her play The Red Hijab was produced at UCR by Playworks in 2010. Bolling is currently the editor-in-chief of Verdad magazine and divides her time between Southern California and the Persian Gulf.
The author has been living part of each year for the past few years in a village in Bahrain, as the author of the foreword notes. That has helped her to poetically write her observations from the point of view of a “white American” who is also familiar with the lives of people in that region as an insider, rather than based on negative reports from media on the Middle East.
This poetry collection consists of three parts. Part I (pp. 13–32) is focused on different parts of Bahrain and its streets or homes and on the significance of daily life in the Middle East. The author beautifully merges the small pieces of a daily life such as cooking, doing laundry, loving, or the calling of the muezzin to prayer with the reality of life in that region, polluted with protests, war, rubble, bullets, and violence. In the first poem in part I, from which the title of the book is derived, she watches people on a rainy day in the street:
… I am watching the trash-picking man,
His head wrapped in a potato sack
… dragging his bin down the cobbles,
… and then a housemaid passing by,
basket of laundry in one hand
opened umbrella in the other,
her brown face turned down
but her red hijab a damp smudge
of brightness, moving in relief,
against the bruising sky. (p. 13)
In another poem, “Broken,” she shows how life and expectations could be different among people of different countries:
… I go out for lunch and listen
to one of the Americans complain
how her neighbor
has a bigger and better something.
we discuss the heat
and the film
playing at the cinema.
I don’t mention
the tear gas late into the night
or my despair over
a son, back home, who has lost
his way again.
Isn’t it important to stay empty,
to remain unfulfilled,
to be a kind of negative force,
or to become something broken
that cannot break further? … (pp. 20–21)
In part II, Bolling provides a deeper glance at individuals’ lives by letting herself into their homes, coffee shops, communities, and so forth (pp. 35–58). In “Shamaal,” she describes young boys:
… Like the young boys wearing black,
gathering beneath the village arch.
They’re restless again.
You can tell by their eyes…
…they go after the old Pakistani.
They cast their stones.
And then, because a mother’s love
isn’t enough, they take him
down in the burning street.
All of this makes a great
and terrible debacle but,
even so, the boys look away.
Bored of this game, they trace
bare toes through wet dust…. (pp. 38–39)
And in “Noon” (Al Dhuhr), she describes the emotions of a suicide-bomber by portraying what he sees in his surroundings just in the few hours before he pulls the bomb’s button:
He’ll put on the vest at noon.
But first, he’ll walk his sister to school
and buy bread for the house at the market.
…His sister kisses his cheek, turns away, goes inside.
Her eyes are blue.
…Eleven fifty eight. Almost time.
He lets go of the bread and puts on the vest,
zips it up, puts his hands in the pockets.
The vest feels comfortable, soft like old skin.
It smells of sewing machine oil. Gingerly,
He fingers the smooth face of the button.
No, not yet. Still too soon.
…Finally it is noon, he is not unhappy or unloved.
He does not live in squalor, or out on the streets
but these days, it seems not even a king has any hope to spare.
A pity that bus pulls over, stopping at the curb,
letting those people get off—(pp. 40–42)
Part III of the collection (pp. 61–69) is a mix of hope for bright days and sorrow of the lost ones. The author closes the collection with the poem “On a Balcony with the Lunch Poems, ” connecting the life in Bahrain with her life and family in Southern California:
The sun kneels on the landscape.
The sky is chalked.
Helicopters.
…The azan pierces the afternoon,
a lost nuthatch panics on the railing.
An apron of tear gas
(made in America) snowing,
a man face-down, praying.
In southern California, my sons enduring
the accident that is their mother.
I remember loving
the way their faces
looked when I pushed
the red plastic swings
…always the going,
always the returning,
the four of them wearing
Superman underwear. (pp. 68–69)
Throughout this collection Bolling, with an unbiased journalistic and poetic point of view, delivers a well-observed vision of the lives of people in the Middle East, their ordinary lives along with their political and religious beliefs and the consequences they embrace. She brings voice to their unspoken representation or misinterpreted conditions by sometimes shifting as a listener to someone who is one in action on the scene, and sometimes as a third person to observe and interpret.
In general, this poetry book is an appropriate source in any literary collection focused on poetry and Middle East Studies.
Shahrzad Khosrowpour
Chapman University