Monday, May 2, 2022

Omar Sakr's 'Love Under Capitalism': a close reading

Series introduction: From time to time on this blog I review an individual poem by a celebrated contemporary poet that I believe is overrated and explain why. Call it a guilty pleasure.


Above: Not many poets are featured as such on prime time TV.

Omar Sakr's novels sell in KMart and Big W: as a novelist he is a big name in mainstream Australian letters, a vocally bisexual and Muslim Tim Winton. He is also a widely published poet. The poem below was published in Cordite in 2019.

 

Love Under Capitalism

 

The new joint around the corner keeps

changing its name. I get it. I am afraid

of growing old. I can’t afford this face

for long, this place for long. I still invite

people in. The barista wants to know

me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup

as I sip at what he just made and feel

a little more alive. I shiver at the usual

delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.

Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.

It feels wrong to say don’t ask me

to be human. This is a transaction only.

I need to preside over when I am more

than money moving between machines.

That’s what all of this comes down to:

this is not my first coffee of the day &

won’t be my last. I rub my hand over

the silver band of my fade and imagine

it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug

at my trackies. He needs to be talking.

To be more than a service. A silence.

The cost of this moment is greater

than either of us knows or cares to

think about for the other. The radio

squawks: there’s been another attack.

A crack tears through the small café.

I take what I have ordered and leave

with what I need: no expectation

of a return.


Here is a fine example of that I term the fallacy of presupposed narrative in poetry. This error, as I characterise it (and have recently discussed its occurence in a poem by Evelyn Araluen), involves the culturally conditioned and conditioning assumption that an implicit narrative is applicable to the dramatic situation. It is the gratuitous intrusion of ideological baggage without any attempt to make it imaginatively compelling. 

Poets like Sakr, who belong to an identitarian leftist subculture in which every situation in life is fraught with microaggressions and problematic assumptions about race, gender and sexuality are particularly prone to employ presupposed narrative. And as long as their poetry circulates only in like-minded circles (which, of course, it generally does), the mismatch between presupposition and dramatic situation, between obsession and reality, is not remarked. 


The new joint around the corner keeps

changing its name. I get it. I am afraid

of growing old. I can’t afford this face

for long, this place for long. I still invite

people in. The barista wants to know

me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup

as I sip at what he just made and feel

a little more alive. I shiver at the usual

delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.


Thus far we have a thematic concern with growing old, entering middle age without having left behind the things of youth. The encounter between inner preoccupation and external situation is, obviously, nothing objection-worthy, but the stuff of consciousness itself--so long as the preoccupation is understandable in view of information given. And here all we need to know is stated: the speaker 'cannot afford this face' (cheeky? flirtatious?) for long; he is, frankly, 'afraid of growing old'. In fact, if there is an objection to be made at this stage in the poem's exposition, it is that the concerns are too baldly stated when they might have been 'shown, not told'. 


Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.


Preoccupation intensifies. The speaker is sexually interested in the barista so that 'large cap' becomes a double-entendre. This, of course, is amusing and still readily comprehensible.


It feels wrong to say don’t ask me

to be human. This is a transaction only.

I need to preside over when I am more

than money moving between machines.


The dehumanisation of life under capitalism: a time-worn and not unworthy theme, albeit one not explored with any excess of imagination here. The speaker might at least have extended the money symbolism by saying that he feels 'short-changed' by the impersonality of the barista's interest.


That’s what all of this comes down to:

this is not my first coffee of the day &

won’t be my last.


Surely now the transaction is being asked to carry more human interest than it really possesses, however attractive the barista. (Are cups of coffee a tenable vehicle for the profit motive?) The customer implies that he will frequent this coffeeshop throughout the day just to see the barista and fantasise about an erotic connection with him. Are we intended to envisage the speaker as a stalker, then? How many people have the time and disposable income to spend all day in a coffee shop, or, as I suppose the case may be, to wander in and out of different coffee shops just to enjoy a series of imaginary frissons with the staff? This does not resemble a day in the life of most people 'under capitalism', as the title invites us to conceive. 

Writing about an atypical person's daily routine is fine in itself; the only objection to be made prima facie is that the speaker seems rather obnoxious, someone free of what most of the world would regard as 'real problems' but who tries to pass off complaints about his bourgeois lifestyle as a lament on behalf of the masses toiling and consuming 'under capitalism'. 

We have still not got to the main objection as mentioned at the start, namely presupposed narrative, and I cannot help registering one more criticism of Sakr's exposition before broaching it. 


I rub my hand over

the silver band of my fade and imagine

it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug

at my trackies.


Here the sensation of one's own hand on one's head is imagined as that of another's hand--very well. But then it is further conceived 'as (italics mine) a tug at my trackies'. How to parse this? By some odd physiological mechanism, the speaker's scalp is connected to his loins--not in the sense of cause and effect (a caress leading to an erection) but in a manner more direct, such that pressure in one place is felt 'as' a sensation in another part of the body. Alternatively, the speaker fantasises about the barista tugging at his trackies; imagines him reaching down with the other hand to access his genitals. The trouble with this reading is of course the same: touch at one place can scarcely be felt 'as' touch at another place, unless the subject is somehow perceptually confused.


He needs to be talking.

To be more than a service. A silence.

The cost of this moment is greater

than either of us knows or cares to

think about for the other. The radio

squawks: there’s been another attack.

A crack tears through the small café.


Here the presupposed narrative makes its appearance. What is this 'attack' of which there have been others before, and recently? As far as I can see, it must be a terrorist attack. The following assumptions are now automatically in play: 

1. Muslims are perceived as terrorists in Western societies and vilified, scapegoated in Western societies as a result. 

2. The speaker is a Muslim, or is taken for one.

3. The assumption that he is a Muslim is readily made, despite his anonymity in the coffee shop and the fact that he is wearing casual, secular attire.

4. Sensing that the speaker is a Muslim, everyone looks askance at him, wondering if he is about to attack them, or if he might be a terrorist sympathiser. 

Now, 1. in either of its variant forms is surely true enough, though less so than, say, twenty years ago. Assumption 2. is, however, an unwarranted presupposition. Nothing in the poem, except the name of the poet, justifies it. (Sakr, apparently, makes little of the distinction between author and speaker in poetry.) Assumption 3. is also tendentious. A man of Sakr's complexion could be taken for Italian or Greek, or for a Coptic Christian. But we are expected to assume 4.; that everyone in cosmopolitan Sydney (or wherever the poem is set), late in the second decade of the 21st century, is hyper-vigilant around anyone who might possibly be a Muslim. 

Parenthetically, we might look into the historical moment Sakr so vaguely evokes, to see whether his narrative makes much sense in light of it. There were a couple of attacks in Australia in 2018: one in February and one in December, the first since the more highly publicised Brighton siege in June of the previous year. Presumably Sakr is evoking one of these. The public reaction was mostly a shrug, as I recall; no popular anti-Muslim backlash would eventuate, nor had there been any to observe since the Cronulla Riots of 2005.

Finally, there is the unsubstantiated assumption, implicit in the poem's title, that prejudice against Muslims has something to do with capitalism per se, not just particular capitalist societies at particular points in their history, in response to contingent events. I am sure that this incompatibility between Islam and capitalism would be disputed by business elites in countries such as Saudi Arabia, for example. But whatever the rights and wrongs of Sakr's worldview, the point here is that it has no business obtruding into a dramatic situation that evidently has nothing to do with it. In ordinary life, one thing often follows another without any thematic coherence, but we are entitled to expect greater coherence in artistic representations of this world. Love 'under capitalism' and terror under capitalism may be linked in any number of ways, but no link is evident in Sakr's telling.  


I take what I have ordered and leave

with what I need: no expectation

of a return.

 

Now, if the speaker is indeed a regular, surely there would be the 'expectation of a return' on both sides. Here is a forced attempt at wordplay that vitiates the narrative--not the presupposed one, but the explicit one of a lonely cafe patron ogling a hospitality worker.  Another problem lies in Sakr's use of the indefinite article in the final line. The common expression is simply 'expectation of return', with no article. By introducing the article, Sakr hopes to play on the contextual narrative implications of 'return', as in 'I do not expect to return to this cafe, nor am I expected to do so by the spunky barista, who, after all, does not know me from Adam'. At the same time, of course, he is trying to make a statement about the ubiquity of the principle of quid pro quo 'under capitalism', as per the poem's title. The speaker does not expect the barista to return his feelings (because, presumably, it is only under capitalism that the young and attractive are disinterested in ageing and less attractive admirers, or that people are expected to pay for their drinks in respectable establishments without expecting sexual favours from the staff). It is a lot of weight for an article to carry, and, unsurprisingly, the poor little 'a' cannot bear it. 

'Love Under Capitalism' is not only a blatant example of presupposed narrative, it also demonstrates a lack of thematic unity. One can imagine the writer protesting: 'But this really happened in my life; it's a slice of life and therefore true!'--A view of art that, of course, need only to be stated to be refuted.

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