Silver Road: Maps, Essays and Calligraphies
by Kazim Ali

Reviewed by Nilufar Karimi

Kazim Ali’s Silver Road begins with an untitled journal entry: “To walk in the world is to find oneself in a body without papers, not a citizen of anything but breath.” What does it mean to be a “citizen” of not a country but the earth? In what ways do we already exist in this state? How might we reimagine our world so that we can exist stateless, triumphantly? Or, to what degree should we reengineer our world so that none must ever suffer such a fate? How do we navigate the contradiction that the hopeful eyeing of free passage is, too often, only that—a hopeful gaze which blurs in the face of bigots, walls, impasses?

Silver Road is a genre-blurring work that incorporates literary criticism, essay, memoir, and, verse fragments. In this exercise in hybridity and rejection of the colonial imposition of form on language, Ali compiles disparate genres -- all of which are situated in his own family history -- into an overwhelming analysis of human migration and being in the world.

Ali’s father was “an engineer for a hydroelectric project that would dam the river to the chagrin and economic dismay of the local Pimicikamak people” in the Canadian North. Ali’s family lived in the “small trailer park town” of Jenpeg, Manitoba, which no longer exists “except as a Facebook group for people who used to live there.” Throughout Silver Road, Ali parses fragments from his childhood home to reconstruct a complex narrative of growing up in a family that was, on the one hand, the “only non-natives/non-whites” in town, and on the other hand, contributing to the displacement of Manitoba’s indigenous population.

Silver Road questions our countries’ borderlines by problematizing the finality of the terms “nation” and “nationality.” One can be, geographically, from one nation, but exist within multiple cultures simultaneously. The Persian, Jewish, Muslim, and Western (Roman) new years, for example, point to different seasons, and yet each distinct calendar year, be it lunar or solar, exists in “a tapestry, a web,” wherein holidays overlap and cultural exchange is prevalent. The majority of living humans observe at least two calendars, one secular, one religious. Elsewhere, Ali takes a different approach to problematizing the concept of the nation by noting just how temporary the borders of empire are. He describes a sunken town discovered during a tsunami in 2004 “on the Tamil Nadu coast” off Mamallapuram, India. The tsunami receded to reveal the “rubble and outlines” of a monument “eroded but still there” after “a thousand watery years.” Land, like ownership, is in flux.

Silver Road is autobiographical, but far from self-involved. Ali describes himself as “lingering by the chain-link fence, clutching a copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” wondering how the poets and thinkers who came before him make sense today. Even in the more traditional poems in Silver Road—which serve as transitions between essays—Ali fuses historical voices with his own. The poem, “My Chewed Book,” tells us, “After forty days god blows a spirit into the clot says the Qur’an / And after forty more days it comes to look like a chewed morsel.” Legend then quickly collides with Ali’s own personal experience: “A baby plucked a book from my hand once / And put it spine first in his mouth to chew.”

The life-force of this book is its ability to reveal how land and its natural resources have had an impact on language. As we move through space, we are constantly deriving meaning from our external environment in order to survive. This relationship between place and meaning often results in a desire to name or rename territory using language. A prime example is the Silver Road Ali references in his title. Now a historical landmark, the Silver Road runs through the German free state of Saxony—a land known for its century-old history of silver mining and smelting along the Ore Mountains, previously inhabited by the Sorbs, an ethnic minority in the region. It is—in part—the name, Silver Road, that has drawn attention to the land’s economic resources and contributed to the displacement of its original inhabitants. Ali’s examples detailing the relationship between language and place span the globe. It is no accident that Patagonia’s ancient “ablation area” (melting glaciers) is called “the tongue,” or that in order to “descend into the chamber” in Israel’s Dome of the Rock, one is required to recite the “Qur’anic verses.” Nor was it coincidental that when Emily Dickinson wrote, “Eternity will / be / Velocity” on a “household scrap,” her fixation on “time and eternity” grew with every passing day in isolation; that her reflection on the universe occurred in “that gorgeous nothing.”

Silver Road’s treatment of poetry as a form of criticism (and vice versa) is not unlike Anne Carson’s 1994 The Glass Essay, which entails her visceral interaction with the poems of Emily Bronte, or Pat Parker’s documentary poem about a deemed “serial killer.” In fact, Ali brings Parker into conversation, detailing her decision to write about Priscilla Ford, an African American woman who drove her car into a crowd, was deemed “sane” by the state of Nevada, and imprisoned, even though her record indicated she had been treated for schizophrenia in seven different hospitals.

Like Parker, Ali draws language up from the margins of history. He reflects on the lines from Parker’s poem, “On Thanksgiving Day,” “The state of Nevada / has judged // that it is / not crazy / for Black folks / to kill white folks / with their cars,” calling it -- echoing poet Amiri Baraka --  “a poem that kills,” or a poem that “confront[s] boldly the real lived conditions of people’s lives.” This, in turn, becomes the project of Silver Road.

Like a musician who plays multiple instruments, Ali looks to different genres to resuscitate the messages buried in hegemonic narratives. The voices he brings into the conversation are diverse, including writers, thinkers, family, friends, and lovers, who—like the nations they inhabit—both accept and reject bodies without identities. Total acceptance is no easy feat. “It is not enough to redraw the maps of nation or body,” says Ali, “one must also parcel up the streams to send to the parched valleys.”

Silver Road floats, like a soul, over a world full of personal and cultural loss. As Ali reminds, it was Einstein who first imagined the universe was finite but had no borders,” a paradox this book speaks through and reckons with from beginning to end.