Contributor’s Marginalia: Sally Bliumis-Dunn responding to Ruth Awad’s “Hunger”

Ruth Awad’s poem, “Hunger,” feels aptly named, for it moves down the page with an impressive appetite, able to digest and integrate the historical, Biblical, socio-economic and personal. Hard to achieve in a poem that is so deeply personal as well. And that the poem is a square block with no stanzaic breaks creates a certain intensity and momentum to this wide sweep of subject.

In addition to macro themes, Awad exerts a lot of micro pressure on language to extract multiple meanings. She had me at the opening, “Imaginary, the value of the pound” with the quite disparate associations, “pound” as currency and “pound” as heart or fist. And both, of course, work. The value of currency is “imaginary” as is the emotional valence of a pounding fist or heart. One could also say that the nature of “currency,” any kind of current situation, is always imagined to some degree.

She then pushes the language further with simile, raises the stakes of the “apple/pound” by saying that when the apple drops, “her family may starve.” She gives the economic fact, “1507 pounds to the dollar,” which deepens her credibility: the speaker is someone who pays attention to a cold economic fact which then sits next to the highly personal: “A kilogram of meat is now a luxury.” And of course, as soon as an apple is involved, the reader senses the Biblical. The poem breathes in this way from the objective fact to the personal experience of that fact.

Awad then grounds us in Beirut for a moment where people stand in line for bread, contrasting it with her current living situation, where the lights are on and she can “choose to skip meals.” The line break at “skip” is masterful: “Skip” also has a light and childlike connotation, as in skip down the street which makes the ease of the speaker’s current life that much more present in the poem. “Hunger” is constantly pairing opposites. Just after describing the current comfort of her life, she recalls a more impoverished past, “Once we were stitched together by food stamps.” The verb “stitched” is perfect in its sense of fragility and its implication of wound or something rent.

I also admire how the poem makes us question what becomes a cliché or accepted expression: “Dirt Poor” is how her mother described their living situation though “land is more valuable than almost anything.” The common connotations of words are interrogated and seen anew. Look at how the word “abundance” is used: “America and its incongruent abundance: fields of corn and the hungry in the streets.” Awad’s creative pressure on language makes us look at the world’s injustices in terms of the haves and have nots and how the language we have to use is both guilty and impotent to rectify the inequality. Another example is “Security guards in grocery stores.” “Security” can be seen as the subject and “guards” as the verb as though grocery stores and a sense of security are inseparable in some way.

The poem comes full circle with the apple, a circular fruit. And offers as its last line this horrible irony: “My father picked an apple from someone’s / tree, was chased until he dropped it. If you steal an apple, it’s a crime. / If you withhold an apple from someone who is hungry, it’s not.” As humans, in our language and behavior, we are a mass of contradiction that is difficult to parse. Ruth Awad gives us a clear albeit momentary window into these inconsistences.