Autowar
Assiyah Jamilla Touré
Brick Books, 2021
Review by Catherine Harris
Assiyah Jamilla Touré’s debut collection is both concrete and abstract, dissolving and rematerializing into new forms at every turn.
The speaker in Touré’s collection is repeatedly reborn, shedding their previous self to reveal a new iteration. “Fruit are peeled down to the goodness,” they say in “snakeskin,” “to the newest, to the goodest.” Later in the collection, “autodeity” mirrors this image and expands on it. “Every six months i shed my skin / and become new and pure, another…i’ve lived so many births i’m dizzy.” Always renewing, the speaker’s body is a site of transformation and learning—the body and the self blend together: “i am soft to impact absorbing blows / i want to break that fall.” As Touré’s speaker experiences trauma, they change, absorbing impacts so as not to be broken by them.
The collection explores touch and contact as sources both of trauma and of rooting. In “physics,” the speaker reflects on a moment of contact between their face and their mother’s palm:
i am reeling! gravitational pull years seeking that same
perfect
combination of tenderness and pain
in every passing intimacy
This moment of touch is an “anchor,” a shard of clarity embedded in the speaker’s memory and informing their experiences. At other times, touch is a repeated assault; in “flinch,” Touré uses repetition to engage with sexual violence:
white men love to touch me white men
who purport to love me love to touch me white men
who purport to love me love to shove their fingers in me
while i am asleep white men
Repetition is used again in “rehearsal,” a poem about the speaker’s rape. In a section of prose poetry, formatted separately from the body of the piece, the speaker repeats, “i survey the damages. i am all of the aftermath. i am the damages. i did the damages. i am the damages. i do the damages. i am the damages.” These sections are erosive, wearing down the speaker through their repetition, through the repeated nature of these acts of violence.
Loneliness permeates this collection; the speaker is often alone, reflecting on the intangibility of others. In “sun pharaoh,” their partner is unfocused, never paying attention to them, always in “some faraway, warmer / different better maybe than here place.” The speaker finds freedom in this lack of care; they feel “unshackled” and crave “nameless,” explaining that they “could be anyone” in the other’s eyes. In “fetishes,” the speaker imagines their room preserved in stasis as an exhibition after they’re gone, complete with “little plaques” one might see in a museum. The speaker imagines witnessing, from a distance, the audience as they “surveil” the speaker and “gorge” on their suffering. This sense of being removed from the world and people around them, of being uprooted and untethered, is complex—at times liberating, at others draining. “I am present,” says the speaker in “keener,” “but my presence is convalescing / the borders of me blur with little intervention.”
While many of these poems linger in abstraction, others are intimately concrete. In “an empty space,” which centers around the speaker’s father, the speaker recounts memories with heart wrenching specificity. “When my father sneezes he covers his / mouth like this,” Touré writes, eliciting an image through omission. Later, the speaker recalls their mother kissing one eye, their father kissing the other, at the end of the day—a tactile moment rich with tenderness. The body too, at times, is crystalized and tangible. In “bloodthirst,” Touré’s speaker describes a scab in a way that lets us feel it in our mouths: “i am insatiable for my flesh / …all my tiny after-wounds / hard crust of goodness come up.”
Throughout this collection, trauma, experience, and the self are continually reexamined and recontextualized. Touré pays careful attention to the way the world impacts us, to how our experiences become incorporated into our flesh. At its core, Autowar embodies the cycle it describes, ever devouring itself and birthing something new.
Catherine Harris holds a BA in English from the University of Bristol. She lives in Vancouver with her dog, who likes to keep her company while she’s writing.