“Naming It” By: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

“Naming It”


I love to tell you where I am from.
I look forward to the moment when
the nine letters
I utter evoke a contortionist’s masterpiece
on the faces of polite company.

I love to tell you where I am from.
I relish the dive into histories
bloodied with conflicts
dreamt up by egomaniacs,
the meander through memories
of war-torn summers,
a roster of lost battles
like an adolescent playlist.

I love to tell you where I am from.
I anticipate the raised eyebrow,
the sanctimonious correction of my
interpretation of events
by the pundits you’re sure know better
about what I have lived.

I love especially the commiseration,
the void which the well-intentioned must cross,
wobbling over the swamp of unknowns and foreign,
throwing out hummus! and Petra!
like lifelines.

I love to tell you where I am from.
That place with a name charged as an electric fence,
my story a barbed-wire cautionary tale,
my homeland an invitation to spar.

https://www.taosjournalofpoetry.com/issue-5/naming-it

The poem “Naming It” is by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. I think the main message of this poem is for Tuffaha to express how she loves sharing her stories through writing and translating pieces to other people. The title of her poem “Naming It” is significant since it encapsulates and exemplifies just how dedicated she is towards what she does that she does not and possibly cannot put those feelings into a few words to describe what she loves doing. 

Starting with the first stanza, Tuffaha starts off the poem by describing how she loves storytelling and letting others know about her experiences and what she has done. She then mentions how when she says “nine letters” she gets dramatic reactions from her audience. She describes this reaction writing it as “a contortionist’s masterpiece” which is a bit of a hyperbole or extreme exaggeration of the way the audiences’ faces contort and change drastically in terms of their expression. This first stanza is important in establishing a lighthearted tone where Tuffaha is able to convey her love for what she does as well as find content from her viewer’s reactions to what she does. 

In the second stanza, she again begins it with the first line about how she loves sharing where she is from. She describes her love for diving into the past and memories and learning of things from other people that can be imagined and made up referring to the bloodiness and violence from wars during hot summers and how many homes are destroyed or “torn” up. She has a long list in the sentence to describe this by polysyndeton where she uses multiple conjunctions as well as commas to list out and provide lots of visuals for the reader to understand her passion. In the last line of the stanza she wrote “like an adolescent playlist”. I interpret this line to mean that she implies that songs an adolescent would play are similar to rap and pop. This is an accurate and meaningful end to the long sentence since it shows the vigor and violence of the wars and violence people can make up in their minds. It refers to the rap lyrics and the songs are fast-paced, create deep strong feelings, show passion, and how one has to slow down and look at the lyrics and study it to understand its true meaning. 

The third stanza again starts with her love for sharing where she is from. She then shares how others tend to react. She has seen various reactions which tend to be the same where people raise their eyebrows and try to correct her. My favorite sentence is in this line, “the sanctimonious correction of my interpretation of events by the pundits you’re sure to know better about what I have lived”. This sentence is special and expresses what could be annoying in a humorous way by pointing out the peculiarity of a situation that happens often. There are many times where someone shares their story or experience and others listening try to interrupt thinking they know better what has happened when the person telling their story is the only one who truly lived that experience.

In the fourth stanza, the poet changes her first sentence saying she loves the empathy people have for each other. She describes the unknown or what others may not have experienced to be “swamps of unknown and foreign” which shows the paths others have to cross and how it may make them feel uneasy but they do it to comfort the person sharing their experiences. 

In the final stanza, Tuffaha shares more of a little detail about herself and her experiences. Saying that the place she is from is dangerous and is protected with “an electric fence” showing it is heavily guarded so she must take caution when sharing her story. In terms of figurative language, the poet includes various words including an anaphora starting off each stanza with “I love to tell you where I am from”. This is significant especially in the last stanza saying how she loves to share her story even though it opens room up for others to discuss and argue with her.

“Rings of Fire” By: Craig Santos Perez

We host our daughter’s first birthday party

during the hottest April in history.

Outside, my dad grills meat over charcoal;

inside, my mom steams rice and roasts

vegetables. They’ve traveled from California,

where drought carves trees into tinder—“Paradise

is burning.” When our daughter’s first fever spiked,

the doctor said, “It’s a sign she’s fighting infection.”

Bloodshed surges with global temperatures,

which know no borders. “If her fever doesn’t break,”

the doctor continued, “take her to the Emergency

Room.” Airstrikes detonate hospitals

in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan . . .

“When she crowned,” my wife said, “it felt like rings

of fire.” Volcanoes erupt along Pacific fault lines;

sweltering heatwaves scorch Australia;

forests in Indonesia are razed for palm oil plantations—

their ashes flock, like ghost birds, to our distant

rib cages. Still, I crave an unfiltered cigarette,

even though I quit years ago, and my breath

no longer smells like my grandpa’s overflowing ashtray—

his parched cough still punctures the black lungs

of cancer and denial. “If she struggles to breathe,”

the doctor advised, “give her an asthma inhaler.”

But tonight we sing, “Happy Birthday,” and blow

out the candles together. Smoke trembles

as if we all exhaled

the same flammable wish.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154797/rings-of-fire

Similar to most of Santos’s poems he shines light on the increasingly negative effects of global warming on earth with the hopes for others to understand its effects on the world they live in. The title of this poem being “Rings of Fire” I believe is significant since it represents the intense hot weather of the setting in the poem as well as is used to describe how his wife felt when their daughter was born. I think he significantly felt it important to write this poem and in relation to his daughter since global warming’s effect can already be felt today but he sees and can picture the effects worsening by the time his daughter is older.

In the beginning of the poem Santos describing the weather as the “hottest April in history” subtly brings attention to global warming and its effect on the weather. Then he writes, “outside, my dad grills meat over charcoal; inside, my mom steams rice and roasts vegetables”. This sentence in the poem has multiple literary elements included contrasts the outside to the inside of the house and showing the difference in temperature because of global warming. Since it is so hot outside Santos compares the charcoal associated with fire and hotness to the inside of the house that requires a lot of air conditioning for it to stay cool. There is also parallelism where Santos writes about the type of cooking then the item being cooked “grills meat…steams rice and roasts vegetables”. The effect of this is sort of like a mirroring sentence structure that unites those ideas showing the copious amounts of food being cooked.

“They’ve traveled from California, where drought carves trees into tinder—”Paradise is burning”
This is another reference to global warming and how it is so hot and dry that there has not been rain in a long time in California that it has led trees to become tinder or dry flammable material used to create a fire.

The next part of the poem contains sudden interruptions and abrupt transitions of Santos writing about his daughter having a fever and comparing that to the high temperatures as a result of global warming. First writing about his daughter’s spike in temperature and the doctor saying she is fighting off an infection. Then to how “Bloodshed surges with global temperatures, which know no borders.” Santos writes about the narrator’s daughter having a spike in fever and if that happens to go to the emergency room then writing about how “airstrikes detonate hospitals in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan”. This shows and compares a child being sick to the world and mother nature being sick. Bringing attention to how the earth needs help. Santos writes about how if his daughter is sick he is advised by the doctor to bring her to the emergency room and Santos writing about the airstrike and droughts right next to this moment represents how he feels that others should also treat global warming as an emergency that needs to be fixed.

In the next part of the poem Santos uses cacophonous diction in order to emphasize the magnitude and gravity of this situation using words like “erupt”, “sweltering”, and “scorch”. Santos also includes a simile shortly after “ashes flock, like ghost birds” this simile compares ashes to birds similar to how there are often many birds traveling together in v formation to how the ashes are flying through the air in great magnitude.

The end of the poem is very impactful relating to his daughter’s birthday and the wish of the family for the daughter to get better as well as for the earth to get better and heal from the extreme heat and lack of water. While upfront it may seem like it is about the girl who is sick and her birthday it is actually about wishing to fix and change pollution to help stop global warming.

“A Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef” By: Craig Santos Perez

We dip our hands into the outdoor reef exhibit
and touch sea cucumber and red urchin
as butterflyfish swim by. A docent explains:
once a year, after the full moon, when tides swell
to a certain height, and saltwater reaches the perfect
temperature, only then will the ocean cue coral
polyps to spawn, in synchrony, a galaxy of gametes,
which dances to the surface, fertilizes, opens,
forms larvae, roots to seafloor, and grows, generation
upon generation. At home, we read a children’s
book, The Great Barrier Reef, to our daughter
snuggling between us in bed. We don’t mention
corals bleaching, reared in labs, or frozen.
And isn’t our silence, too, a kind of shelter?

https://poems.com/poem/a-sonnet-at-the-edge-of-the-reef/

The main purpose of this poem is to spread awareness to humans of the negative effects on our environment. The poet writes that “we don’t mention corals bleaching” to children. This brings a generational aspect to attention and how our actions on the environment now will affect our future kids and next generations. Perez’s intentions with mentioning his daughter and wanting to “shelter” her shows how we do care about our kids and their well being so we want them to live in a safer world where nature is still beautiful and thriving with the resources needed still available. Perez wants to bring attention to global warming and its effect on our Earth and way of life with the drastic depletion of our natural resources as well. With reference to the more recent issue of coral reefs dying and their lack of vibrant colors that they are known for.

Perez also seems to mention how people want to shield their kids from the dangerous and sad or malicious things in life however he wants to break that silence. He acknowledges that some people do not care or are too scared which is why people’s “silence” is “a kind of shelter” from reality. It seems like he is trying to convey that even though parents want to protect their kids sometimes they are scared too which is a scary concept. Kids often like or want to think that their parents have all the answers and solutions to problems so when a parent is scared it makes the child even more scared.

Towards the start of his poem, Perez mentions how animals and plants in the ocean grow in great detail, referencing how they take a full year or longer to grow back and they are “grown generation upon generation”. Perez starting the poem writing, “We dip our hands into the outdoor reef exhibit and touch sea cucumber and red urchin as butterflyfish swim by” creates a sense of connection and reminisce on visiting an aquarium or zoo as a kid. At young ages children love to see animals and pets or touch them loving hands-on activities. 

In the middle of the poem, Perez includes an asyndeton “only then will the ocean cue coral polyps to spawn, in synchrony, a galaxy of gametes, which dances to the surface, fertilizes, opens, forms larvae, roots to seafloor, and grows, generation upon generation”. This sentence lacks conjunctions that allows for the reader to read through all the steps and thoughts without extra pauses or conjunctions interrupting the sentence. The commas instead of conjunctions also provide a flow when read aloud. This part of the poem is about how coral forms and describing the process. Perez lets the reader know that this process takes a year so it is a fairly long process. It shows the steps of the coral spawning how it fertilizes and forms. 

In the poem there is an important contrast to the life of coral reefs from the description of the process of how they are formed to their death. When Perez mentions coral bleaching although the coral is not dead it loses its bright vibrant colors that it is known for, turning completely white. He alludes to the Great Barrier Reef as the title of a book and there is a Great Barrier Reef in Australia known for its large amount of coral reefs. Coral reefs are important for not only the animals living in the ocean but also humans. Coral reefs provide shelter for small fish and other sea creatures and also are used for food and medicine for humans.

Overall this poem brings attention to the issues of global warming and how they not only hurt our earth but to spread awareness so people want to preserve the earth longer for future generations.

Craig Santos Perez – Bio

“Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008), from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn, 2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn, 2014). He has been a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He is director of the Creative Writing program and an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing. He maintains his own blog, and has blogged for Harriet.” -Poetry Foundation

“Craig Santos Perez is a scholar, poet and environmentalist, an Indigenous Chamoru (Chamarro) from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is also an English professor at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, who teaches creative writing, eco-poetry and Pacific literature. A scholar of many literary talents, he is the co editor of five literary anthologies, author of two spoken word poetry albums as well as five books of poetry. His latest, 2020’s Habitat Threshold won the gold Nautilus Book Award. Even though Perez doesn’t consider himself an activist, he aims to use poetry as a vehicle to raise political awareness that inspires empathy, community engagement, and environmental protection.” -Red Room Poetry