“Salaams” by Sally Festing
Published 2009 by HappenStance Press
UK price £4.00
www.happenstancepress.co.uk
‘Salaam’ either means ‘peace’ or can be used in greeting. As a title it suggests Festing’s playful attitude to language and her interest in our own mother tongue. This is demonstrated in ‘Salaams in Jerusalem’, in which she explores the linguistic effects of different greetings:
Sabah Al-Khair
the kick of gutturals at the back of the throat
drops a new day from the woken hills
Sabah Al-Noor
first light flies out
from the sky
This poem’s reference to “red in the bougainvillea” hints at Festing’s obvious love of the natural world, and flowers in particular. Salaams is an explosion of “black arum lilies”, “lion’s shag” of sunflowers and bracken uncurling “pale heraldic horns”. As these quotations suggest, the foliage in the pamphlet can be equally glorious and sinister, and most of the poems have an underlying darkness, like the cold beauty of a Venus Flytrap.
For example, ‘Wallflower’ contrasts the childish naivety of a game, “so turn around and face the wall and turn around again”, with the aching reality of old age.
You dance around
the margins through bright flowers
you planted yourself before they burst.
She explores the fickle nature of modern language and how it can seem inaccessible to the elderly: ‘You stand outside your bones/ as you do the sentences of the time.” Her character hobbles in the gaps between words, finding her experiences inexpressible.
Aging (and the gap between generations) is widely explored in Salaams, and in ‘Fire’, a child is seen learning the language of her mother, through flowers—a tradition clearly passed down through Festing’s family:
Ep-il-o-bium, the child
writes cursive, feeling the ping of sound
on palate. Mixing mauvish pink. Bound
by circumstance and shape, she holds
her breath till almost faint before (impelled
to dip) she colours tongues, lips, wounds.
This poem’s ending speaks powerfully about the inheritance of the child, from the innocent tradition of learning flowers and the mother-tongue of their names to the sinister element of family pain, the ‘wounds’ the matriarchy will pass down to her wordlessly. She is both “bound” and “impelled”, and has no other option than to accept her history as she becomes a woman. This is the inexpressible baggage that we discover has been locked in our DNA from conception.
Festing’s collection benefits from further reading: the clever links between each poem are not all discoverable at first. Language, aging, mothers and the natural world seem a mixed bag of topics, but Festing is able to blend them as seamlessly as the child in ‘Fire’ mixes a mauvish pink.
All content ©2009 Lizzy Dening
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