Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Rupture Anthem
by Hera Naguib
University of Pittsburgh Press
October 2026, US$20.00, 92 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8229-6840-5
In the poem “At the Allama Iqbal International Airport,” Hera Naguib, in the Lahore, Pakistan airport on her way to the United States, asks, “Because what perplexes here more than a woman / who claims her life as her own?” She’s talking about the prevailing attitude toward women in the Islamic nation of Pakistan. The poems in Rupture Anthem chronicle one woman’s quest for personal independence in the face of so many obstacles. The daughter of Pakistani foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, she experiences both sexual repression from strict patriarchal Islamic clerics, in educational settings, and the exploitation of migrant workers that her family endures. By the end of the sequence, has the poet made a breakthrough? It’s open to debate, but the very fact of this collection seems to argue in the affirmative.
The poems begin in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her parents had moved in 1979 and where the poet was born. In “Human Capital” Naguib writes, “My father thrummed
for distant coasts, tax-free
income, the day he too
will whip up some concrete
house on his shoreside
to vie for, a boy too green
to read what the ocean
before him archives: assets,
seized passports, obscene
fees middle-men pimp from
those lost to richer shores,
lost, in thousands, to mega
cities they raise with ripped
palms, to filthy labor camps
at the backwater where,
ten to twelve, they sleep, hemmed
in by stray cats, rations,
and roaches. But a boy, my
father hungered, as a boy
will…
Her father’s innocence, his naïveté, is bookended by her mother’s disillusionment. Naguib writes in “The Bride of the Red Sea,” “She was twenty-two, newlywed,
in the city they called the bride of the turquoise sea.
Her restlessness, prehistoric, chafed
under. She hadn’t known such loneliness.
She had yet to taste loss, its precise axle.
And their daughter, the poet? In “Bildungsroman” she writes, “It was not paradise until my expulsion, / my girlhood country.” She is sixteen years old. In both the prologue poem, “November 2003” and the first poem of part one, “The Expulsion,” as well in a later poem, “Exit Stamp,” Naguib tells of the “plainclothes men [who] cocked a gun at him, trawling / our house for his residence permit,” her father’s choice between “leave this country or go to jail.” She is sent to Lahore with her family; it’s during the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and they are part of the fallout. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, may not have been paradise, but it was the home she had known her whole life, and thus begins, as she concludes “The Expulsion,” “my private alphabet of loss.”
Naguib writes about her sexual awakening in the Islamic patriarchal society in several poems, including the title poem. “Everything pleasurable / is haraam and we do it anyway,” she writes in “Rupture Anthem,” and elaborates in poems like “Lessons from the Quran Teacher” and “Prologue to Womanhood” and elsewhere. “New Jeddah, 1992” begins:
Riding along the coastal corniche,
I marveled at Joan Miro’s bird-
woman blazing bronze before
the glittering sea. All beak, thighs,
and breasts. How did it get here
was a question that never startled
my mind despite the moral police
surveilling each limb, my naked hair…
Hera Naguib writes scathingly about Saudi Arabia’s Kafala system, “a severely restrictive migrant sponsorship system that ties migrants’ legal status to their employer, lending disproportionate power to the employer,” she clarifies in her Notes. The Kafala system has “created conditions of extreme vulnerability to abuse, including wage theft, perilous working conditions, exorbitant employment fees, debt bondage, forced labor, confiscated passports, etc.” The poem, “In This Country the Future Will Never Sleep,” is an eight-part indictment of the system. “Repatriation Trepidation,” as they are about to depart for Lahore, and “Exit Stamp” are also critical of the inhumane Kafala system.
Lahore is no picnic either. First of all, it’s unfamiliar. Naguib concludes the poem, “The Enigma of Arrival”:
As Lahore’s polyglot past, Urdu exiles
my old tongue from my mind’s stubborn colony,
its whirring nothings.
I learn a slow hermeneutic of return.
She writes about the extreme violence in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province (the twenty-seventh largest city in the world), in poems like “Lahore Nocturne,” “Besieged City” (“Always, we prime for another bombing”), “News of Another Femicide,” and in “Kicking Up a Mess” it’s the same old familiar stifling patriarchy.
Her sister’s husband asks her if she is a “feminist” – she is driving the car in which they are traveling. He tells about his “wise aunt” who knows her place.
This should have been for us
upper-middle class suburban Pakistani women
told to blend just right—not too stiflingly ‘traditional,’
not too controversially ‘modern,’ but he has spoken
for our bodies—arrived, after all,
like any other man, for those bodies
in which he has never lived. Between us,
my sister and I, his words pull up
like exhaustion itself—more ancient
than we can understand
or explain against his certainty,
which, wherever it lives, I imagine,
must be a windowless place,
though solid as a fact & boarded up
against any heave and plunge of debate.
And so she escapes to America. But does she feel redeemed? “Ode to American Manna” is written in a tone of sardonic praise (“O emulsifiers, cornstarch, / O synthetic herbs…”). “The Years We Carry,” which follows, takes us back to Jeddah, “As if all / our lives in Jeddah were a lie and we had // been found out.” But still they cast a shadow over the poet.
The concluding poem, “In the Name of Yellow Leaves That Is My Country,” takes us back to Lahore, its violence and corruption – “you will carry this burden.” The poem – the book – concludes with the poet still uncertain, any triumph provisional. The final lines read:
If I could speak plain as tarmac
to that shady, vigorous, fortressed city
that spills tedium like ash
and so much shit
would it condescend to me,
a stone splitting my absence, its far seas?
Though it tells a particular woman’s story, Rupture Anthem speaks for displaced immigrants everywhere. It is heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, or at least I’d like to think so.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.