Un-American

by Hafizah Augustus Geter

Overview

2021 PEN Open Book Finalist
2021 NAACP Image Award Finalist, Poetry
2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, Longlist

Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.

SAMPLE POEM

Testimony
        for Tamir Rice, 2002-2014

Mr. President,
After they shot me they tackled my sister.
The sound of her knees hitting the sidewalk
made my stomach ache. It was a bad pain.
Like when you love someone
and they lie to you. Or that time Mikaela cried
all through science class and wouldn't tell anyone why.
This isn't even my first letter to you,
in the first one I told you about my room
and my favorite basketball team
and asked you to come visit me in Cleveland
or send your autograph. In the second one
I thanked you for your responsible citizenship.
I hope you are proud of me too.
Mom said you made being black beautiful again
but that was before someone killed Trayvon.
After that came a sadness so big it made everyone
look the same. It was a long time before we could
go outside again. Mr. President it took one whole day
for me to die and even though I'm twelve and not afraid of the dark
I didn't know there could be so much of it
or so many other boys here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819579829
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
Sales rank:	918,774
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, HAFIZAH GETER is an author and agent whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and editor. Hafizah's poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

The Pledge • The Life of a Cell • Naming Ceremony • Fajr • The Break In• Salah • Naturalized Citizen • Hymn • Visiting Prophets • Un-American • ii.
• How to Bring Your Children to America • Testimony • Alabama Parable • Testimony • Eid al-Adha • My Brother-in-law Recites the Takbir • Testimony • Testimony • The Leaving • Family Portrait • iii. • Out of Africa • The War on Terror • The Widower • Three-Hundred Girls • How to saw a man in half • Felling • Naming My Mother • Iddah • Hajj

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Hafizah Geter's Un-American chronicles the haunting legacies of brutal loss written in blood and memory across continents—'together, slowly domesticating / our suffering.' The poems' narrative clarity edges against exile, and in gorgeous language deliver a trenchant testimony and understanding."—Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne

"Hafizah Geter's Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items—cups, cards, couches—get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can't, what she needs to hear from her family but won't. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story."—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

"In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter's poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

"Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer—poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book."—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

"This timely and powerful book speaks to the struggles on two nations, and to the grace of the invincible light of black life."—Rigoberto González

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/15/2020

Geter’s vivid debut invokes the pain of familial dislocation, illness, and death, exacerbated by the twin plagues of xenophobia and racism. The marriage of Geter’s parents (a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man) saw her family move from Africa to various inhospitable locations in the U.S.: “my father leans down the barrel of a shotgun/ house/ and looks in both directions.” “Lesson one: there’s no god/ in Alabama,” Geter writes in “Alabama Parable.” Many of the narratives are moving, and the mother-daughter dynamic is central to the collection: “In America, no one would say her name/ correctly. I watched it rust/ beneath the salt of so many.” There is joy to be found in Muslim prayer and the Hausa language, but every blessing has an underside: Nigeria is “the land where my family will ask/ why I haven’t a husband.” Racism is addressed in poems recounting the murders of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, and personal compulsions offer their own dangers: “I’ve always been/ attracted to little/ violences.” It is this violence, captured in rich, musical language, that command such power. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Hafizah Geter is the kind of poet I can't do without. She questions how poetry operates in our culture and is unafraid to show us the ugly. She is committed to the public, to the way social imaginaries become real ones. It is unglamorous work and only a few poets do it on the regular, who use the title of "poet" as a vocation, as interrogator of false meritocracies, as a way to distill how racism works in our institutions."—Megan Fernandes, BOMB Magazine

"Geter's vivid debut invokes the pain of familial dislocation, illness, and death, exacerbated by the twin plagues of xenophobia and racism It is this violence, captured in rich, musical language, that command such power."—Publishers Weekly

"In the resulting poems Geter moves through her grief while refusing ideas of whom America belongs to and who belongs in America."—Poets & Writers

"Incisive, devastating poems about what it means to be American, and who gets to be American and who doesn't."—Roxane Gay, bookshop.org

From the Publisher

09/01/2020

The Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian Muslim and a Black Southern Baptist, Geter portrays life at a familial, cultural, and religious crossroads in language that's forthright, affecting, and ringingly lucid, with nail-sharp turns of phrase (her aunts have "smiles hard/ as Baptist pews"). The pain and complexities of Geter's upbringing are immediately evident ("We have so many gods/ and none of them/ can be trusted"), and Geter is excellent at capturing her mother's frustration as she moves from Africa to America ("At night, she prayed to Allah/ for something from America that was more/ than children"). Throughout, Geter portrays her father's struggle with life's indignities and the tragedy of her mother's death from an aneurysm while offering her own challenge to American racism in testimonies to murdered Blacks like Sandra Bland and Eric Garner. Finally, she declares, "My grass-stained knees pledge allegiance/ to a country that belongs to no one I love." VERDICT An eye-opening story of immigration—and of America; for most collections.

Library Journal