Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse
Sholeh Wolpé
University of Arkansas Press, 2022
Review by Elmaz Abinader
Loss rumbles through one’s life—reverberates in every stage of our growth. We lose innocence, lose country, lose time, lose parts of ourselves; lose love, lose territory, lose our minds. Sholeh Wolpé’s memoir, Abacus of Loss, told in verse, addresses losses experienced and witnessed. Wolpé uses an abacus to count these losses, she says, because it is an instrument of remembering. An abacus adds, totals, compiles—calculates the sum of our experiences. The use of this framing instrument keeps the losses in this collection present, rippling—vibrating against hope and solace.
Following the poems as if they are beads on a rosary or a misbaha, we join the speaker in auditing the losses throughout her life and the lives of others. The ten sections (chapters) of the collection are composed of varying numbers of beads (poems), each of which holds a story behind its shiny surface. Beginning with section one, “Color of Loss,” and ending with section ten, “The Tally,” we move through a life thematically—each bead revealing stories the author has lived and witnessed. These are stories of sexual assault, of the search for home—of a niece’s suicide, of losing a homeland, and more. The accumulation of this loss is sometimes whispered—other times howled. Using the abacus to remember, moments move through our fingers; loss is tactile and caressed.
Sholeh Wolpé has navigated the territory of trauma in many of her works: five poetry collections, three works of translations, and a number of performances and librettos. Her most recent project, The Conference of Birds, is a libretto based on her translation of the epic work by twelfth century Sufi mystic poet, Attar. Wolpé’s writing dives deeply into alienation, imprisonment, and terror—love, sex, and society.
Many of Wolpé’s past works have been elaborations—others shine like crisp photographs. In Abacus of Loss, her poems resemble the line drawings that accompany each section. The language is delicate; perfectly rendered phrases sink deep inside our chests, trembling our understandings of our own losses and migrations.
In Bead 6 of section two, named “This Coffin,” “[w]omen sing absence like opera / they sprinkle it on white sheets like perfume, / graft it to trees like branches from homeland.” We accompany the author as she experiences her own migration from her home country of Iran to boarding schools and relatives’ homes. Here she speaks of the women and girls who are left behind to suffer the changes in Iran during the revolution; she bares the pain of exile and immigration; she shows the displacement of the body in foreign places.
“This Coffin” demonstrates the removal of the self from home. Where one is buried is where one ends up—as the poet states in Bead 3 of this section: “I carry my coffin / on my back.” In this poem, Wolpé must navigate an existence where she can’t find her grounding; moving from home, to England, to Trinidad, to living in the house of conservative parents, she aligns with women stuck at home. She sees death coming to Teheran, to women in similar houses—and those who cannot escape. In Bead 7, she says: “Refugees…are the dead who smell of bones-ash / They carry their coffins on their backs / and the bones in their eyes ache.”
The shortest section, “The World Grows Blackthorn Walls,” holds three beads. In this section, Wolpé folds inward, striving to stabilize. She recalls scents and senses rich with memory: turmeric, cardamom, her grandmother’s songs. Wolpé writes and writes her way back home, at the same time realizing that “Exile is a suitcase with a broken strap.” Her immobility at this point in the collection shifts her focus from the journey to the condition of femaleness.
In the section “Please Stop,” Wolpé enumerates instances of sexual harassment at different ages—committed by strangers and friends, luminaries and relatives. It is familiar territory for us and for her; each poem refrains “Please Stop,” but the pattern continues to repeat. Stories of love/marriage/lust in section five, “(UN) Lovers,” don’t so much surprise us with the events they describe, but rather capture us with the language they employ. These beads are written in couplets, filled with smells and beaches, moonlight and war—there’s a sadness to the love in these relationships. From Bead 2: “He smells of things distant: lemon groves, / almond blossoms and gun powder.” Here, love is connected to the terror of the couple’s lives—to the worries of history and their inevitable parting.
When love is found and sits dreamily beside the sea in section seven, “Honeymoon among Sargassum,” we are struck by the combination of magnitudes. The mundane, the sexual, and the historical, in unison, shift our perspective.
They are digging deep holes in the sand, these men who will
later bring us huevos rancheros on hot clay plates. Sometimes
they lean on their shovels and look past the shore into the belly
of the horizon, through which once upon a time Spaniard
came and never left
Sweet as salt,
pink as lazy pulse
immeasurable,
biblical.
Your finger in my mouth.
(“Bead 2”)
Desire and love exist in terrifying and splendid worlds. The biblical references—salt, belly—and the historical references combined with the located experience create a still life painting of a sweetness that is not detached from time or circumstance.
Wolpé resists the strictures of time except for in her narrative sections: “Pink” and “Honeymoon” are specific in time and place. The remaining sections are nets catching whatever floats to the surface of each theme. In section nine, “Un-Blinking Eyes,” childhood and adulthood intertwine with a story of deaths. Her niece’s suicide and her brother’s disappearance when she was a child influence her perspective on mortality; she fears her son’s death and wonders at her parents’ aging. This chapter dwells on family life as a whole, even after the family has been exiled, as they struggle to find their own paths.
Abacus of Loss handles tough times with silken language. The images and juxtapositions are at once hardy and slight—much like the sketches that introduce the book’s sections. These seem as if they were drawn with a pencil in flight: a child with a balloon; the silhouettes of kissing lovers; a fish with a thousand eyes. Each section is numbered in Arabic, which—for those who can’t read it—extends the graphic quality into a tiny illustration that pins us to the work.
These poems both lift us and plummet us downward. In the most searing section—seven, titled “Faith”—the camera is squarely on Wolpé as she pushes through the crashing waves of religion and identity. She is surveilled in airports, reprimanded for her loss of faith. Hair, rebellion, education, and God combine in these stories to illustrate Wolpé’s inability to walk away from who she was or what beliefs were taught to her—instead, she comes into her own power. In Bead 8, Wolpé enters a mosque with revolution on her mind. She does not sit in the women’s section. She is wearing red. Clearly, the expectation is that she will be admonished—perhaps even expelled. A Pashtu poet, who spots her in the mosque, moves toward her. She expects to be berated, but he is graceful as he reaches toward her:
…he bows not before a god
but before me,
this female blinking danger,
soft, strong and RED,
refusing…
Wolpé’s work as a librettist fuels the shape and feeling of this book—the movements, the varying tempos and paces, the sense of story, and the precision of language translate to a narrative that stirs us emotionally. Sometimes familiar, other times a blossoming, This book also serves as a master plan for a collection that both adheres to a story and provides beautifully differing poetic strategies. Abacus of Loss finds its way under your skin before you know it—bead by bead.
Elmaz Abinader’s recent work has appeared in Minding Nature, Mizna, and the anthology, Essential Truths. Her poetry collection This House, My Bones, was the Editor’s Selection 2014 from Willow Books. She has a memoir: Children of the Roojme, A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, and and book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams…winner of PEN Oakland. Elmaz was a co-founder of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). Find her at www.elmazabinader.com.