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Reviews
Not This Tender
Sarah Uheida
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Transcontinental Reconstruction
The epilogue of Not This Tender quotes, in part, from Mahmoud Darwish, and creates not only summary but a kind of thesis for Sarah Uheida’s collection as well:
The poetry of exile is not what exile says to you, but what you say to it, one rival to another. Exile, too, is hospitable to difference and harmony. So fashion yourself out of yourself.
Not This Tender probes the author’s childhood dislocation from North Africa. Uheida’s poetry, in this, her debut collection, begins by blending the personal with the mythical as the tension between disaffection and connection plays out in a broken terrain. Her exploration reaches into the past as a means of explaining the present and preparing for the future.
The collection is organized through three sections of firsts: “The First Night,” “The First Pang,” “The First Touch.”
The first poem, “Ribs of Satin, Mouth of Dusk,” is comprised of 14 numbered sections, and explores what it means to be a daughter. Set up considerably like Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” it opens with a reference to myth, the speaker claiming the pomegranate seeds eaten by Persephone fell from the speaker’s mouth as well. Persephone was abducted and forced to live half of each year in the Greek underworld. The first stanza concludes with “the music that played then paralyses now.” Following the image of Persephone and the earth’s slow turning from summer to winter, this movement from pleasure to prohibition is repeated at the end of the poem, though “music” is replaced by “prayer.” The speaker—the daughter—navigates her attitude toward her father who gives her veiled advice. And in later poems the mother, likewise, is an important element of the navigation toward personal identity, as is the grandparents left behind.
This first section prods and coddles “memories [. . .] porous with pain” (“A Wound Cauterized in Light”) as a way to make sense of her present situation. The speaker finds herself “suspended between / two countries” (“And What You Leave Behind”), hearing her thoughts in English and Libyan [Sulaimitian Arabic?], weighing the sound of the ideas to choose how best to express herself.
Similar in structure to “Ribs of Satin, Mouth of Dusk,” “Her Word Against Early Morning Light” lays out a search for identity in an adopted country where she has buried her passport and drinks “nothing / but rooibos honey.” Here she has learned that “the less she talks about exile, / the more sure-footed their plans.” But in the end, the plants she and a partner have tended for a decade fail to flourish. The male companion ends the poem, saying:
“never loveless, you and I, but—
oh, my love,
if these were roses,
they would have bloomed by now.”
The second section opens with the loss of language. “The Name of Home Dies Softly” opens with the line “I don’t recall Arabic.” The longer the displacement the greater the fading of memory. The world has become fragmented. Of the exiled, the speaker observes, “We all learn to eat our grief / in pieces” (“17 May 2011”) and “I learnt silence is absolution” (“Our Russian Holiday – II”). When the author was 13, Libya was in a state of war, and she relocated with her family to South Africa. She began to learn English at that time, a language in which she now writes. In semi-autobiographical fashion, the daughter-speaker reconstructs past behavioral patterns that were in response to incidents with her parents. The imagery of miscarriage is woven throughout the collection, surfacing in a number of poems, most notably “Our Russian Holiday – II,” where the speaker is eclipsed by the haunting of a brother that she never had.
The third section begins with a closer examination of the interplay of life and language, their inextricable tangle. The poems, on a practical level, should be “unthreading the faultline between aloneness and ease” (“Portrait Sundays”). However, such a goal is largely unachievable. The speaker recalls, “My bed was set on fire thirteen years ago” (“Entering a Room”); whether literal or metaphorical, the trauma of uprooting, now the half-life of the author’s existence, is at best only half-gone. The speaker, in “Entering a Room,” admits:
“I’m trying to detangle memory from trauma,
to open backdoors to my childhood,
so as not to have the alarms impale me.”
In “A Fig for Every Absence,” the speaker reconciles with the tangible response to exile: “I must spoon / homesickness into my mouth and it must taste / unsalvageable.” The manipulation of life’s fragments leads the speaker to conclude in “Overstay Appeal,” from which the title of the collection is derived, “I have wanted to be many things, / but not this tender.” The book derives its power from several facets of that word. Tenderness is gentleness, as in a mother to an infant. Tenderness is painful vulnerability, as in the skin’s response to bruising. Tender is commodity which can be bartered, spent, or stolen. Each of these aspects can be seen in Uheida’s poetry, uneasily sliding one into the other to make connections in the brokenness.
Sarah Uheida currently lives in Cape Town. Her poetry is alive with imagery that startles as well as settles. She is a poet to watch for, going forward. Dryad Press released the book May 22, 2025 at the Franschhoek Literary Festival (South Africa).
Review by Stan Galloway
05.23.25
Stan Galloway’s reviews have been published in such places as New Orleans Review, Callaloo, Christianity & Literature, and Paterson Literary Review. His poetry and fiction can also be found online in such places as Connotation Press and Hawaii Pacific Review.
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