In Invasive species, Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees—the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.
Reviews
[…]Helal’s first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none. It contains prose and verse; polemic and introspection; remixed pop lyrics and pellucid memoir; straightforward narration and constellated word games. The volume shows her powers — and her amply justified anger — in most of those forms.
Much of the collection takes place in cars, airports, waiting rooms; in dreams and songs; and in inventively reworked immigration documents. In this latter form, Helal reverses expectations (and syntax) and deflects the unidirectional flow of state authority with a biting sense of humor that jumps from threat to cartoonish mockery to near despair, her only constant a dead-aim of purpose: “these motherfuckers have a green card lottery while refugee babies wash up drowned at sea.”
Centered around a long hybrid section called “Immigration as a Second Language,” Helal’s collection blends verse and prose, memoir and reportage to recount the troubled passage from Egypt, through customs, and back again, a process that requires breathing human beings to define themselves through bureaucracies over and over again.
-Diego Báez, ALA Booklist
This new collection, which defies borders and genres, will show you how to break apart the bureaucracy of daily life (and omnipresent regimes) like a green live thing breaks open old pavement.
A poet with a master’s in creative nonfiction, a bachelor’s degree in international studies and journalism, and a passion for biology, Helal works the threads of her former aspirations, writing in one poem that “journalism is the work of the sleeping. poetry is the work of the dreaming.”
Candid and confident about its ecosystems of influence, at times wildly omnivorous and polylingual, purposefully pedestrian at others, the lyrical avatar of Invasive species is one whose existential impulse seems to be rabid availability—to the poet’s multitude of peoples and places—negotiated crossways by a slick, uppercutting investment in infiltration rather than naturalization, divergence (not “diversity”), and didacticism as a form of information smuggling.
But Invasive species also reimagines the conventions we have come to expect from poetry. It’s as if Helal proposes that, in this instance too, we should re-examine the confines of definition and the rules that restrict belonging.
Helal pushes against artifice, or perhaps more accurately, she seems most interested in what happens when the fourth wall dissolves—when writer and audience actually see each other, eye to eye.
Natasha Stallard spoke with Helal about the pressure to write ‘local colour’, the highs and lows of writing workshops, and the urgent centrepiece of Invasive species – an abecedarian memoir-poem that documents her family’s emigration from Egypt to the US.
Complete with meticulous footnotes, a person unfamiliar with this Orwellian labyrinth can get a real education here in painful thinginess: white vans, what color a green card actually is and which versions are valid, tracking and grouping systems, the poet’s hatred of embassies.
Anger courses through this urgent new publication from Helal, which makes potently unconventional formal choices — including footnotes and citations, introducing the Arabic right-to-left and left-to-right approach to line-reading — to bolster its exploration of the immigrant and the “other.”
Here, and elsewhere, movements we’re taught to think impossible become manifest. Our minds are not borderless—we are saturated with the language of the state—but our imaginations can begin to warp the lines.
Helal pulls out the receipts—shows you the form codes and federal regulation sections so you can read this alien jargon yourself.
What might seem at first like a path through tedious bureaucratic paperwork becomes, thanks to Helal’s analysis, augmentations, and translations, a clear and forthright account of cruelties and dehumanizations designed to protect white supremacy and assert imperial power.
Invasive species featured on Book Marks’s Best Reviewed Books of 2019!
“Helal’s first and often stellar book belongs to many categories, and to none… The volume shows her powers—and her amply justified anger… It is a push that could, and should, open doors.”
Marwa Helal featured in Poets & Writers’s Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry! Click here to read.
Invasive species is rife with questions, interviews, and interrogations like this one, all serving to put the reader in the Kafkaesque position of fearful, beleaguered responder… In recognizing that home is never stable, total, or trustworthy, Helal erects a new home in the movement of alphabets the sure, progressive spine of A to B to C.
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