Jehanne Dubrow’s The Arranged Marriage, from the University of New Mexico Press, expresses the violence of relationships

Jehanne Dubrow’s The Arranged Marriage, from the University of New Mexico Press, expresses the violence of relationships, and the emotional and physical toll that such violence creates. Front and center are poems expressing how men vie for control of their women, and how the simplest domestic chores reveal the chaos within a one-sided marriage, within a relationship, and within us.

The most striking poems in Marriage tell the story of how the poet’s mother was held hostage in a home invasion, and it is the diction of that encounter, of shock and violence, which permeates the entire volume. Whether Dubrow writes of a dog on the street or writes an ekphrasis response to a painting violence is inherent in the language. The consistency of her diction and her unified poetic vision elevate Marriage, and illustrate the violent tyranny of the patriarchy that for some women in the world is a very present danger.

An arranged marriage is a dated concept, and many of the men in Dubrow’s book are old school patriarchs, men who want their wives to cook for them and lay with them whenever their desires are pricked. These are men who smell of cigars and whiskey, and prefer women to express their freedom in the kitchen; remnants of an older, crueler world. But Dubrow’s book isn’t only a feminist political argument, it is a collection that aims to tell the story of her mother, and her mother’s sufferings, and of the women who suffer similar fates.  It doesn’t matter if Dubrow writes about a model of marriage that is out-dated in the West, the narratives within Marriage are important.

The collection opens with “The Handbag” where the poet’s mother checks the weight of her purse which she hopes she will not have to use as a defensive weapon. “What the man doesn’t know is that the bag is full of borrowed books rigid at their spines. The man with a knife.” Many of the poems, like “The Handbag,” speak in staccato rhythm, as if fear has broken down the language of the victim, in this case her mother. What’s terrifying and skillful at the same time is that the man, the invader, is all men. Marriage is as much of a portrait of men as as it is women.  Man, in Marriage, is father, husband, lover, antagonist, invader, robber, and rapist, and the roles blur into a figure of authority that looms large over the landscape of the poems. Dubrow isn’t man bashing here. These aren’t diatribes. These are poems that express the great woe of women who have had to endure suffering at the hands of men.

What makes Marriage all the more complicated is the way in which the women, her mother, and the other “characters” react to the men in their lives. The third poem in the collection, “Makeshift Bandage,” the woman in the poem, presumably during the break-in, has bit her attacker on the hand, and is now bandaging him “where she bit him.”  However “the towel won’t stay. She finds electric tape inside a kitchen drawer. The tearing sound it makes--nothing should tear the way the loop of tape uncircles from itself.”  Stockholm syndrome, sure. But more likely the garden variety kind of toxic co-dependence that both men and women find themselves stuck within. Here the sound of the tape is sticky and unnerving, it is the sound of torn flesh being mended, but it is the visual image of the circle that either character cannot escape that wields the power in “Bandage.”

It is that very circular nature that Dubrow plays with with regard to form. The collection is made up (almost) entirely of prose poems. They function like circles, or perhaps bruises, or scars. Fat blocks of black type that illustrate the starkness of many of the lives on display in Marriage.

In the end, Marriage is a book about identity. In “The Blue Dress” where the speaker is tired of playing dolls and dress-up, and discovers by accident old photographs, evidence of past lives, of secret histories unknown to her. In the context of the book, these discoveries aren’t revelatory, or joyful, they are like finding a corpse, “a body dragged from a lake.”

Dubrow’s poems about domestic life, childhood, and art, are not devoid of violence, in fact they reflect the pain expressed in the poems that are directly about the arranged marriage, and about the home invasion. However, there is hope.

In “Story” the mother is working for the government transcribing narratives. Dubrow is masterfully unclear about what kind of narratives she transcribes. The women could be discussing World War Two, they could be discussing Central America. The women could be from anywhere, which is Dubrow’s point.  Her mother translates another woman’s story, and in doing so relives her own, and also perhaps, puts the terrible event behind her. “The woman is telling a story--how many cigarette burns, that the camps were called HOUSES, the riverstone of her body. My mother asks, How many cigarette burns? and waits for the translation. This is the word for RIVER, this is the word for RAVISH.” Once again language is affected by the experienced violence, broken up in block prose poems. Later, in a moment of synthesis, her mother’s story becomes part of the woman’s story she is transcribing. “Twenty years ago, my mother was telling a story. She tries to hold the memory of that man, his knife, his hands, what he could have killed, each word a water glass, all of it water....” It is a moment that occurs in other poems in the volume, and one that occurs for the reader as well. This identification illustrates human nature at its most intimate, and most brave. When we try to understand another person in pain, how can we not be transformed by the experience?

Arranged Marriage is beam of light shining in dark rooms. A beam of light made up of dark words, dark stories, dark secrets. The exigency of this work is Dubrow’s mother’s story, but Marriage transcends the singular narrative and becomes something else entirely. It is as if the poet is acting as a healer, expressing what has long been in the dark and left to fester. And by the end, Marriage has cleaned up and cleaned out the old rooms, and “there are no surprises. Nothing is crouched and waiting with a knife.”