Review of
Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?
by Hedy Habra

Reviewed by Dr. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk

Lush, allusive, multi-layered, there are many “other sides” to be found in Hedy Habra’s Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? Following the ekphrasis so masterfully employed in her award-winning Under Brushstrokes (2015), this collection’s poems (each titled with a question beginning “Or…”) allow Habra to investigate multiple facets of a woman’s life and sensibility with the work of artists as touchstones. Although Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo is a primary influence, Habra also gleans inspiration from other women artists, such as surrealist Juanita Guccione or exile Helen Zughaib, with the music of visionary trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith thrown in for good measure. Presenting richly woven tapestries with many interconnected threads, Habra’s poems conduct the reader through shifting liminal states, blurring boundaries between self and legacy, past and present, in personal and often searing explorations of the speaker’s consciousness, journeys, and life story.

With their androgynous figures, eerie stairs to nowhere, and mystical symbols, Varo’s paintings match well with Habra’s psychic journeys. Taking much the same care as the artist in precise, elaborate detail, Habra’s poems are remarkable for their scope and specificity as well as the allusions they create. Beginning with the title poem, which opens the collection, Habra immerses her readers in psychologically ambiguous, sensual worlds: with, for instance, a carpenter’s (or a lover’s) hands, the rubbing of oil, damask, a heavy breath on one’s neck, scattered petals, tears, scars—all coalescing around a mysterious series of questions starting with Does a tree feel pain in its phantom limbs? (p. 3).

Both pain and phantom echo throughout Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? Phantoms and alter egos, hauntings of what is and what is not, waft through the poems in response to the intriguing questions posed by each of Habra’s titles, which give rise to the lovely impossibility of answering any one of them in, say, twenty-five words or less. Indeed, rather than answers to her questions, Habra gives us process—wonderings, multiple layers of associative, imagistic explorations that drill down to matters of choice and identity, destiny and freedom. In the fast-paced prose poem “Or Weren’t We Always Told to Remove Our Makeup at Night?” Habra weaves in a lover’s touch and her “newborn’s avid lips” as she “peels off the masks…that haunted me all my life…caught within a self-woven web of conflicting feelings brimming with sap and dew”(p. 7).

Giving up masks allows Habra to cope “with the different roles allotted me at every crossroad” (p. 7) and hence find freedom from those roles. This chafing against one’s “allotted” (one might say “patriarchal”) disempowerment and repression emerges as a prevailing thread throughout Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? At the end of the first section, we see Habra struggling to overcome the nightmare of a submerged self, “bound by (her) mother’s recurrent dream,” in order to “wake up from the murky waters where she was left for dead holding onto a broken trunk singing her way out like a diva” (p.16) Here, despite nightmarish circumstances, Habra resolutely stakes a claim to her identity as poet, a theme that recurs frequently as she interrogates her own reflections or alter egos in order to discover her inner music. This struggle is beautifully rendered in the middle of Section IV in “Or Would She Ever Shed Her Many Faces?” in which her mirror of self “grows into a pond/ a deep well (that) reveals/veiled shapes/shedding/ gilded gowns… (until) She slips in lunar light/…soars without wings” (p.65). Habra’s poetic affirmations emerge fully in Section V in a dizzying sequence of ars poeticas that conclude the collection with “Or Did You Never Think I’d Find A Way Out?” as she “wake(s) up from/ a life not lived” (p. 84).

It’s rewarding to discover via Google the very images that are in conversation with Habra’s poems. Thanks to an appendix that lists each poem with its corresponding artwork, readers can appreciate the two-way street that is ekphrasis: one “enters” a work of art and is also entered by it. And what a gift to discover Beirut-born American artist Helen Zughaib, whose family left Lebanon due to civil war when she was a teenager, or performance artist Chiharu Shiyota with her motifs of keys, boats, and nomadism that echo in Habra’s work. These artists inform poems in Section II where Habra widens her horizon to engage themes of migration, war, and injustice and also expands her formal choices: prose poems make room for pantoums, free verse, stanzaic forms, and list poems like this one, with its relentless anaphora, that opens the section.

..keys to unlock one’s buried memories
keys to the family cottage you had to sell…
keys to the meaning of feelings that you kept losing
keys to the safes holding papers that ruled your lives…
keys to the homes you kept leaving, from country to country, from one

neighborhood to the next. (p. 19)

It’s not hard to understand how the paintings of Helen Zughaib resonate with this poet, herself no stranger to dislocation. Fluent in five languages, Habra (of Lebanese descent) was born and raised in Heliopolis, Egypt, earned a B.S. in Pharmacy in Beirut, and lived and worked for several years in Europe before moving to the US and becoming a scholar and Professor of Spanish at Western Michigan University. As in her most recent previous collection, The Taste of the Earth (2019), Habra brings the traumas and relocations of war into the her poems’ sensual journeys. She identifies with the dispossessed as represented in Zughaib’s vibrant, heart-rending Syrian Migration series on display at the Kennedy Center in “Or Could There Ever Be Rainbows in the Midst of a Storm?” where migrants crowded into a “fragile skiff/…stick together/forming the same/ rainbow defying/the tall waves/the angry scum” (pp, 26-27). Unwavering in their beauty and honesty, Habra’s poems raise their hands against waves of tradition, depredations of age, and loss of desire, “hoping to make sense of the artist’s strokes” (p. 74) upon life’s canvas. Her questionings about love, being an artist, one’s destiny, and poetry itself help us to consider that even if one thinks “crushed hopes (can’t) reawaken” (p. 30), what is broken recomposes, “tesserae after tesserae” (p. 30), and becomes beautiful again. After all, “What Is Life If Not A Constant Carving Of Oneself? (p. 57)”

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.

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