[review]

The Minister of Disturbances, by Zeeshan Kahn Pathan

Diode Editions, 2020

On the title page of Zeeshan Kahn Pathan’s astonishing debut collection, The Minister of Disturbances, there’s a photo collage by the artist Kostis Pavlou: A man’s black suit jacket, with crisp white shirt and black tie, is capped with a surveillance camera in place of a head. In the background, the barbed wire of war zones and prisons. This collage has the effect of immediately disturbing us before we’ve even read the first poem. We are entering the police state and we are being watched.  

Then, turning the page, we venture further into the surveilled landscape of the book, where we encounter the first poem, “Ophthalmology,” and we are no less disturbed. A doctor cuts into a man’s skull while the man is apparently awake:

He asked the doctor

Who had been cutting

Into his skull with a scalpel

If something else might break

Inside the braincase —

Would it be fair

For the man to press the switch

Of departure? This early

In the journey to stop

The flutter of red phoenixes

And the glances of blond daisies

If it would be okay

To sleep where the children sleep

Where the narrator lives

Outside of the frame.

The doctor did not answer him

But held a scope to the man’s eyes

And kept cutting through tissues

Until the blade had reached

The pearl in his brain.

Like this first poem, quoted here in its entirety, with its glorious “flutters of red phoenixes” and “glances of blond daisies,” nearly every poem in this collection is situated at the perilous yet luminous edge between life and death.  

Whether the camera’s — or the poet’s — eye is trained on the detritus of late Empire, the colossal losses and grief associated with climate change and mass extinction, extremist violence, or a lover’s betrayal, Pathan’s tender and exact ministering — like a doctor with the scalpel — reaches always for the pearl that is poetry.

In poem after poem beauty (often in the form of flowers) and the violence of the State walk arm in arm, are fused. Flowered landscapes are strewn with bones, the vocabulary of war is conflated with the vocabulary of desire, an alchemy that creates lines like these from “Inside the Northern Cemetery”:

The road blistered like the feet of a Syrian refugee.

In the Nile all through the night —

I am hostage to juniper and orange

Do not let butterflies rise from my notebooks!

Sensuality and delight in simultaneity with our violent reality is one of the defining features of Pathan’s poetry, and a strong reminder of the possibilities of creativity and imagination as a form of resistance. These poems enact over and over a central question:  What poetry is possible in the face of the monolithic mechanizations of the surveillance state where language itself is drenched in blood? “After Hiroshima,” Pathan writes, “it is hard/to listen to music. It is hard to sing a song.” Yet, if we are to remain human in a culture of rampant dehumanization, we must try. We must become ministers to our own longing.

 For the speaker of many of these poems, the longing is that of exile and dislocation: longing for homeland, for mother tongue. The fact that Pathan is Muslim-American is certainly a headwater for many of the poems in this book, but it is only one. Tiresias presides over this collection -- what we choose to see, are forced to see, and how we are complicit or prophetic.  And Eros is here too, coming as Eros does, with force, without warning to “Manhattan/Where I can’t sleep even one night without you.” The book is dazzlingly kaleidoscopic in its perspective, poetic resonances, cultural influences –and in its impulses toward finitude and apocalypse and also toward redemption, which is never arrived at, never guaranteed.

Flowers are central and abound in these pages.  The attention given to them is devotional — yet tinctured often with blood, terror or bullets, as in “War:”  

In a winter of withering

Rose petals and pink clouds —

Blossom like bullets

In the collection’s satiric and absurdist title poem, flowers are stand-ins for human beings. A quintessential bureaucrat, the “Minister of Disturbances” stands before a microphone to offer empty sympathies “on the deaths of a 100,000/flowers mowed down in the garden of Damascus.”  The Minister then reads from the transcript of the “Official statement from the Ministry of Butchery and Nowhere” to offer more condolences “On the executions of forty-six jasmine bushes/In Al-Bab.” The substitution and glossing that is the language of the State is meant to obscure and confound the facts while in this poem of course, it dramatically amplifies them.

The speakers in these poems are all “Ministers of Disturbances” of one kind or another. Whether the disturbance happens in the night or in the day, whether the disturbance is butterflies rising from the page of a notebook or blood filling up the “flowerbeds in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” there is no peace, no place where the eye of the camera does not see us, where the ghost of Orwell does not haunt us, where Cupid’s arrow will not pierce and wound us. Pathan’s poems bravely ask us: How are we to engage with, combat, dance with, speak to, thwart, eradicate, listen to, feel, resist, sing, overthrow, transform and minister to what disturbs us? For Pathan, who in “Treason” writes, “Sappho and Khayyam, yes I believe in them,” — the answer is poetry.

And so, when I read in “Lorca, II”

This is my prayer. The doors of the night

Have been eaten by termites. I am just beginning,”

I take it to mean that Pathan the poet is just getting started—and for that I’m grateful. I urge you to reach for this book, let it disturb you, allow its tender ministrations to work on your soul.