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language: English
country: Canada
year: 1991
form: poetry
dates read: 7.7.22
I watched Ian Iqbal Rashid’s incredible short film Surviving Sabu last year because I assigned it for the class I was teaching in the fall, and subsequently I’ve been meaning to read more of his poetry than the examples that are in Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets. since I was going to be on campus today anyway I stopped by the library, and I ended up sitting down to read Black Markets, White Boyfriends, and Other Acts of Elision all in one go.
it’s really, really good.
first off, always a question with free verse: his line break placement is, with only a handful of exceptions, excellent. the enjambment often lets a line stand more or less on its own only to take the sentence as a whole in a different direction with the next line (“You are affected by the author’s brown sweating / body supple under punishment”), which is a great effect.
it’s also definitely at times in the realm of “gay literature from the ’90s that would be good for nominally progressive lgbtq people pushing reactionary politics but which they would not actually be able to handle” — there is, among other things, a poem about being caught by police while having sex in an alleyway:
Police man on me
policeman on him
policeman says pervertand he, pants down
nods yes, why not, somebody has to be,
so you can be policeman
(from “Civilities”)
it returns repeatedly to ambiguous racial dynamics within the gay community, not in terms of open racism or a generic critique of “white gays” but specifically in the context of sex and sexual desire (“For you see, my big, blonde, perfume-soaked Sahib, / you have, through your polite—your civilized—grace, / brought down my New World.”). even at its most political, it’s intensely personal: at times I feel like I’m listening over Rashid’s shoulder as he moves through his daily life, from the bedroom to a visit to a friend dying of AIDS in a hospital to a post-memorial service memorial TV night. strikingly (mostly) absent is family, obviously a central concern of “Surviving Sabu”.
if you can get your hands on this — or probably on any of his other collections — I would definitely recommend it.
moods: emotional, horny, reflective