Censorship Made Me a Metaphor Engineer

In 1999 I wrote a poem about my brother's arrest and could not use the word arrest, the word police, the word cell, or his name. What I had left was a heron, a fisherman, and a river that would not give the fisherman anything back. The poem passed the review office in April. It is still the only poem of mine that people quote to me on the street.

I want to resist the sentence that usually follows a story like that, the one where censorship is framed as a cruelty that produced beauty despite itself, a silver lining stapled onto a wound. That sentence flatters the censor by making his violence generative. It is not generative. What is generative is the specific engineering problem a writer solves when a referent is forbidden and the feeling attached to it is not. Censorship supplies the problem. The writer supplies the engineering, or does not, and most did not, which is why most poems that year were confiscated notebooks of complaint rather than anything a reader outside the argument would want to keep.

The substitution ledger

Here is the operational tool, the one I still use, long after the review office stopped mattering to my sentences. Take the forbidden referent, the thing you cannot name, and list two columns beside it. In the first column, write everything the referent does in the poem: it grieves, it accuses, it dates the event, it names a person. In the second column, write what a candidate image is willing to carry. A heron can grieve. A heron cannot date an event to April of a specific year, and a heron cannot accuse a specific ministry. The ledger is where you discover that your image is undercapitalised, that it is being asked to do four jobs and can only afford two, and that the poem will fail exactly where the ledger comes up short.

Most bad political poetry under constraint fails here invisibly. The writer finds one image, feels the relief of having found it, and stops auditing. The heron stands in for the brother, yes, but does it also carry the specific charge, the specific date, the particular cruelty of the interrogator who smiled? If it does not, the poem is not being subtle. It is being incomplete, and dressing incompletion as subtlety is the oldest excuse in the room.

My own ledger, from that poem, looked like this. The referent, my brother Bijan's four months in a cell whose name I could not print, needed to carry three loads: that he was taken, that time passed without news, and that the family kept living anyway, badly. I tried a caged bird first and abandoned it in a week, because a caged bird can carry the first load and nothing else; it has no relationship to time passing, and it certainly cannot carry a family setting a fourth plate out of habit. The heron worked because a heron leaves and a fisherman waits, and waiting is a temporal verb, which is what I actually needed and had not admitted I needed until the ledger made me count it.

What the ledger does that the censor did not intend

The review office wanted fewer facts printed. The ledger, once you build the habit, makes you notice that most first drafts, censored or not, are carrying referents that do less work than the writer assumes. I have run this exercise on poems written in Toronto with no censor at all, poems about a divorce, about a dead parent, and found the same undercapitalised image sitting in the middle of an otherwise honest stanza, doing one job when the poem needed it to do three. Constraint did not teach me to hide. It taught me to audit, and the audit turns out to matter whether or not anyone is reading over my shoulder.

The honest objection

You could say this whole account is survivorship talking, that for every heron poem that got through there were a hundred writers whose ledgers were flawless and who were arrested anyway, because the reader who mattered was not the general public but a specific bureaucrat having a specific bad morning. That objection is correct and I will not soften it. No amount of engineering guarantees passage past a person who has already decided what a bird means before he opens the page. I am not claiming safety. I am claiming that among the poems that did get written under that risk, the ones that outlasted the risk were the ones whose images could bear real weight, and that this is a craft claim, not a safety claim, and the two should never be confused by anyone making the argument I am making.

There is a further cost worth naming plainly. A ledger this careful takes longer than a ledger you do not build, and under real threat, time is not always available. Some of what got written fast and unaudited under danger has its own kind of honesty, the honesty of not having had the luxury to engineer, and I do not want the substitution ledger mistaken for the only legitimate response to constraint. It is the response available to a writer with enough safety to sit with the second column. Not everyone had that, and pretending otherwise erases the ones who did not.

What stayed with me, decades later in a country where nobody reviews anything I write before it is printed, is that the heron never stopped meaning the arrest to the two or three readers it was built for, and it started meaning something entirely different, a private grief with no ministry attached, to everyone else. I did not plan for a poem to hold two unrelated truths at once and pay out the correct one to each reader. The ledger built that by accident, solving for capacity, and capacity turned out to be the same thing as range.