Aimee Nezhukumatathil, sometimes mistaken for mermaid

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil sounds like the soft hum of earth, smells like the salt air in a foggy ocean town, and feels like reaching for the hand of a partner. The focus on ocean in the title and cover art points to the importance of the natural world throughout the work, but I was certainly pleasantly surprised to see into glimpses of the speaker’s experience with motherhood, relationships, and life growing up. In a way, this text reminded me that all of these aspects of life are not so far removed from the “natural world” as many people imagine today. I am definitely a city person. A born and bred New Yorker. My partner has made fun of me for describing the trees on our campus as a forest. But I also deeply love the ocean, not just because I’m a pisces! I have always been in awe of it, a firm believer that nothing is as cleansing and healing as its waves. I am thankful to Aimee for transporting me there. And for sharing moments of sweet honey bees, dandelion coffee, and travels from Switzerland, to Singapore, to the Philippines.

The work read to me as almost chronological, with poems like “when I am six” and “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” coloring the first few pages. Then, further along, the poems become “I Could Be a Whale Shark” and “Love in the Time of Swine Flu”. The speaker imagines herself as a whale shark, “newly spotted / with moles from the pregnancy”, and her partner swims in the ocean, preparing for fatherhood (31). And then, later, notes from her child; “isn’t the sky colored like a parrot, Mom?” (40). This undercurrent of narrative and linear time gives the whole book has a very personal, almost memoir-like quality to it, as much as I try to seperate the speaker from the author.

I love Nezhukumatathil’s reimagining of the Tarot deck with her poem “When You Select the Daughter Card”. In this poem she creates her own archetype, the daughter, “sometimes mistaken for mermaid” (19). I wonder if this card might also be a sort of self-portrait, or a card that Nezhukumatathil would like to pull, an energy she would like to see represented in a deck.

“The card’s lower half / features a fountain pen, which symbolizes history and future-history. By seeking / to understand the more salty aspects of yourself, you might grow another arm or leg, pointing at your truest self” (19).

This mermaid with a fountain pen, this daughter-writer predicts “wonderment and safety in store”. And it implies that writers get to shape history by choosing what gets recorded in permanent ink.

Oceanic featured a bunch of “self-portrait” poems; C-section scar, scallop, Niagara falls, an Egg-Tempera Illuminated Manuscript from 1352. I was charmed by the specificity of the places and things that were chosen to stand as portraits. Being a visual artist, I strongly associate self-portraiture with representational visual artwork (literal or figurative) but I absolutely love poetry as self-portrait. It is so interesting, so effective. Getting to see what a person could see themselves as, or what they see in themselves, shows off much more about a person than a portrait of their face would. I mean, if someone is telling me they are a painstakingly gold-leafed manuscript hanging in a spanish church, and that they’ve fallen in love with the man who illuminated them… that’s a lot of personality, and a lot of very specific visuals. A personification I never would have thought up. It’s charming, and also interesting to call such old, old Art history in conversation with one’s very contemporary poetry. And that is something Nezhukumatathil seems to do a lot. She calls up Dalí in “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”, bringing the painting with its twin tigers to life (22). She also brings up the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche up in several poems, one based specifically on a painting (49-52). All of these references to western/white art history and culture remind me of how contemporary poets of color use traditional forms like couplets, and reinvent them by bringing their own lives, stories, views, etc. to them. These old artworks get reinvented and reinterpreted through Nezhukumatathil’s eyes, through her ocean, and come out with a new, richer life.