{"id":2627,"date":"2022-12-26T17:57:03","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T17:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2627"},"modified":"2023-01-04T20:45:51","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T20:45:51","slug":"threa-almontaser-the-wild-fox-of-yemen-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2627","title":{"rendered":"Threa Almontaser, The Wild Fox of Yemen – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The approach of Threa Almontaser\u2019s The Wild Fox of Yemen<\/em> is quite different [to that of Maurice Riordan’s Shoulder Tap<\/em><\/a>]. Though she\u2019s uneven, some readers will prefer her vivid self-dramatisations and linguistic excitement to Riordan\u2019s polished reserve. Her book explores the difficulties of living between two cultures as an American woman of Yemeni heritage, especially after the Twin Towers attack. Sometimes its protagonist feels excluded by America and reacts defiantly, aggressively asserting her Yemeni identity, as when she says<\/p>\n

I quit being cautious in third grade
\nwhen the towers fell &, later, wore<\/p>\n

the city\u2019s hatred as hijab\u2019.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, however, it\u2019s Yemeni culture that seems alien and excluding. Such problems will resonate powerfully with many people. Throughout the book they\u2019re embedded in a language that switches between American English and Arabic, and uses other devices to force the reader to experience what being a foreigner can feel like (there\u2019s a stanza written backwards, for example).<\/p>\n

Her linguistic exuberance and willingness to take risks make for memorable, excitingly original writing but do create their own problems. On the one hand, she makes lovely, sensuous images and phrases. For example, the poem \u2018After Running Away from Another Marriage Proposal\u2019 uses the recurring image of the wild fox of the book\u2019s title. It starts with a lucidly evocative image of the fox\u2019s flight in the desert \u2013 \u2018I run, for months, a furred wind of sand and blue silt. At the dunes, midnight.\u2019 However, to me the next sentence seems jarringly overdone, almost pseudo-poetic: \u2018I am in the mounds, illumed, topaz-mooned, sprinked quiet.\u2019 That\u2019s one recurring problem. Another shows itself in the next paragraph or prose stanza \u2013 one that, ironically, is extremely good in other ways:<\/p>\n

A rishta auntie\u2019s whisper falls out of a shooting star. My animal ear pivots, To be single is to grieve. Until zawaj, you are only half of what you could be.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Internet tells me \u2018zawaj\u2019 means \u2018marriage\u2019 and a \u2018rishta auntie\u2019 is a matchmaker. I love the whisper out of a falling star. \u2018My animal ear pivots\u2019 is a startlingly vivid activation of the fox metaphor. That daring switch between sensuous image and abstract argument works brilliantly. However, having to look up \u2018zawaj\u2019 and \u2018rishta\u2019 threw me out of the poem. Another reservation is that I sometimes felt the sheer vividness of the images overwhelmed the ideas they were meant to express.<\/p>\n

Threa Almontaser, The Wild Fox of Yemen<\/em>, 96pp, \u00a310.99, Picador, London<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Maurice Riordan<\/a>, Threa Almontaser and Tua Forsstr\u00f6m<\/a> in issue 68 of The North.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The approach of Threa Almontaser\u2019s The Wild Fox of Yemen is quite different [to that of Maurice Riordan’s Shoulder Tap]. Though she\u2019s uneven, some readers will prefer her vivid self-dramatisations and linguistic excitement to Riordan\u2019s polished reserve. Her book explores the difficulties of living between two cultures as an American woman of Yemeni heritage, especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-threa-almontaser"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2641,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions\/2641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}