Leeya Mehta’s A Story of the World Before the Fence is a collection of poems which traverse time, space, and human emotion. Over the span of eighteen poems, Mehta, an award-winning poet, weaves together disparate peoples, locations, times, and events to blur the lines that separate while revealing the subtle yet profound bonds which tie together intergenerational and individual experiences. Throughout the collection, the fence reoccurs both directly and inadvertently as a barrier, one which severs the ever-shifting poetic voices from belonging, connection, and the notion of permanence.
Article by Nina Lee | Ahram Weekly Egypt
Leeya Mehta’s A Story of the World Before the Fence is a collection
of poems which traverse time, space, and human emotion. Over the span of
eighteen poems, Mehta, an award-winning poet, weaves together disparate
peoples, locations, times, and events to blur the lines that separate
while revealing the subtle yet profound bonds which tie together
intergenerational and individual experiences. Throughout the collection,
the fence reoccurs both directly and inadvertently as a barrier, one
which severs the ever-shifting poetic voices from belonging, connection,
and the notion of permanence.
The book of poems begins with the passage of Parsi Zoroastrian
refugees sailing to India, signaling that the poet and the reader are
likewise on a journey. From this original embarkment, the sequence of
poems follows locations, times, and events that may at first feel
disjointed and distant but are in fact gently tethered by reoccurring
connections. For example, the opening poem “Refugees” is set in 917 AD
on the Arabian Sea, while later poems traverse from India to the United
States and Japan. While these changes may seem random, they are
carefully tethered strings that pull the reader through the poetic
journey. The Zoroastrian refugees cross the Indian Ocean, where they
arrive on India’s western shore. The Thar Desert, located in India, is a
nuclear testing site where the poetic voice experiences tremendous
loss. In the Japanese city of Hiroshima, another site of a devasting
nuclear bomb, women protest the obliteration of their loved ones. In
Tokyo, the Japanese capital city, the poetic voice laments an
unrequited, “outside” love. Along a river near the capital city of the
United States, the country that nuked Japan, the poetic voice recalls
her own journey from the Arabian Sea to the United States that is
twisted and knotted like the brown river before her. And so it
continues. These shifts in location and time, connected by threads of
place and emotion, are accompanied by shifts in voice, perspective, and
time—and together are as tangled and profound as a river.
With the fence comes separation, an immediate line between here and
there. Frequently, the poems lament, reflect on, and even challenge
these borders. Instances of these include the experience of generational
trauma among the uprooted Parsi Zoroastrian community in India, the
poetic voice’s ancestral and personal experiences in immigrating, and
the feminine-centered voices of the poems. These generationally
traumatic experiences are nuanced in that they both sever the poetic
voices from a sense of belonging as well as connect the different
generational iterations by common, unvanquished memory. While the
refugees of long-ago face pressure to assimilate to the dominant
cultures and religions, thinking “how many generations it takes to go
from conqueror to refugee”, their descendent, in the form of the poetic
voice, reflects on the price of civilization, longing “to forgive myself
for what we have lost”. Similarly, while a young mother looks onto the
Indian coast and understands “the every day abuses girls seem not to
know they carry”, a small girl in Washington, DC throws off her dress to
play in the water, only for her and her family to be threatened with
the “fury” of racism, sexism, and the sexualizing male gaze. In linking
these stories across national and temporal boundaries, A Story of the
World Before the Fence reminds us of the interconnecting legacies of
shared trauma.
To add another layer of interconnection beyond the fence, the
author’s background clearly and unabashedly influences the poems. As
stated, Leeya Mehta was born into a Parsi Zoroastrian family in
Mumbai—the same group inferred at the beginning of the book and the same
western Hindustani shore. In fact, one of the only named characters is a
young woman and mother named Armaiti, who is one of the first Parsi
Zoroastrian refugees to arrive with her family. Armaity is also the name
of Mehta’s own grandmother. This subtle but clear connection reflects
the author’s presence in the text and her own direct connection to the
events that occur. Armaiti is not only named to identify the
often-forgotten, distant relatives who made a new life possible, but to
distinguish a distinct relationship between the past and the present as
well as the personal and the poetic. Furthermore, similar to the poems’
locations of Gujarat, Washington, and Tokyo, Mehta notes in her
biography of having lived in each of these locations. By so openly
referencing her own family and personal history in the poems themselves,
the author transcends her distance from the subject matter to create an
intimate reading experience which defies yet another fence: that
boundary between the poet and the poem, the author and the subject, and
the experience and the reflection. In doing so, she draws the reader
into a private world filled with love, loss, and ultimately, after a
long journey spanning nations and generations, forgiveness.
Although the titular “fence” is a physical barrier erected in
Washington, DC to keep out a herd of deer, the fence represents not only
physical barriers, but ones of definitions by which we divide and
isolate ourselves. In these poems, the fences are more than white
pickets around a house by the woods, but the very notions—such as the
linear passage of time, national divides, gender roles, and emotional
expectations—of imagined separations. As the sequence of poems defy
those long-standing conceptions of time and space, they likewise connect
the reader to the moving world. Mehta reminds us of the transience and
the interconnectedness of all things, even when belonging feels “like
loving a dead corpse” amongst “history’s endless funerals”. The trauma
felt by a young woman saying goodbye to her homeland thousands of years
ago echoes to the journey of another searching for a new home. In this
deeply personal and emotionally profound collection of poems, Leeya
Mehta questions our preconceived notions of the “fences” which separate
us from the oneness of ourselves and of the universe, the tangled flow
of life, and the love and loss we share across generations.
Leeya Mehta, A Story of the World Before the Fence. Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2020.
Reviewed by Nina Lee