Adam Day

            Are you Borg Now? is a smart, powerful, unput-downable memoiristic poetry book (“…I decided to write memoir, I guess as a natural antidote to self-erasure”), which I will not be able to do justice to in a review, because this book deserves to be experienced in its wholeness, and the review format inherently chops and scatters. This is the second edition; it is a revision of the original, and we’re reminded by the author that the Shaiye of 2024 is not the same Shaiye of 2020, as such, the speaker says near the end of the book, “When I first started this project, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be. In many ways, I still haven’t answered that question. I was in a different emotional space when I began. I was in flight or fight mode, struggling to breathe…” The first edition was published by a now-defunct press while the author was in an MFA program, and prior to the author’s diagnoses of AuDHD (Autism +ADHD), and after at least one false diagnosis. Shaiye’s poetics here is one of “refusal,” Douglas Kearney tells us in his Introduction. Indeed, of writing, the speaker says, late in the text, “This is the only thing in my life I can easily control and withhold and make my own and keep me from being alone.” The text is composed of a dialogue between this speaker and “The Voice,” along with images of immigration documents—reminding us that Shaiye and his family came from war-torn Somalia in the early ‘90s, when Shaiye was just seven—and images of the author.

            The first words of the text are: “Naomi Wildman,” the mixed-species daughter of Ensign Samantha Wildman, a human, and Greskrendtregk, a Ktarian. She was born, and lived, on the USS Voyager while it was lost in the Delta Quadrant, and never knows any other home. “Wouldn’t know what to do with it if she had,” we’re told by the speaker. This points to the topic of alienation, which is key to the text, where the speaker often feels outcast and anxious (“Most of my time is spent dissociating” and “…I very often feel very alone” and “You know how long I’ve been looking for someone okay with me for me?”). The speaker says of the role of “The Voice,” “The more I think about it, the more I see you as a guide to keep me protected from danger…” to which “The Voice” replies: “Maybe I really am the instinctive part of you that took over when you dissociated emotionally, to forget physically, when things got traumatic for you as a child. As a man. As a child expected to be a man.” And the speaker and “The Voice” not only converse, but they also often interrogate one another, as when “The Voice” states, “I feel like you only ever write when you’re trying to distract yourself,” and the speaker replies, “I feel like you’re a little too close to the truth for my comfort,” and later:

            Why do you care so much about me?

             Because I’m you, silly. All the parts of you that you can’t stand to see.

             All the parts of me I avoid looking into the mirror to see.

             All the parts of you that have been neglected, for one reason or another.

             So if you’re a product of my self-neglect, how can you even care about me?

             One of us has to care for the other.

             So what is a Borg? According to Wikipedia:

            The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star
Trek fictional universe. They are cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) linked in a hive
mind called "The Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other
alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming
individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically
augmenting them with cybernetic components. The Borg's ultimate goal is "achieving
perfection.”

This idea of perfection is pertinent, and is linked again to alienation, as the speaker not only often feels outcast, they also feel far from perfection:

No matter how much I learn about this craft, or how long I do it, or how seriously I commit
to it, the feelings of never being good enough won’t go away. Established writers tell me
that feeling never goes away. I guess that’s what makes us writers. The question is how
do we survive those feelings and keep living?”

            The key character in this text from the Voyager series is Seven of Nine, a human female who is a former Borg drone. She was born Annika Hansen, the daughter of exobiologists. She was assimilated by the Borg at the age of six, along with her parents, and is liberated by the crew of USS Voyager at the start of season four. “Why are Seven of Nine and her mannerisms so interesting to you?” “The Voice” asks, and the speaker answers, “…her emotional lexicon was limited. Think of her as an adult with a child’s understanding of emotions.” “Sounds like someone I know,” “The Voice” responds. And the speaker reacts by saying that his last therapist said he has “a limited emotional vocabulary.” On the next page, we’re told in a footnote: “One half of my brain craves stasis. The other half craves change, the NEW. Keeping both happy is hard & scary.” A couple of pages later, “The Voice” goes on to ask, “You feel like the end of a sentence?” to which the speaker replies, “Yes, but less complete, so I write,” but writing for the speaker is fraught.

The speaker goes on to say of why they write: “To discover self, I guess. But I’m not comfortable with much of what I discover. It hurts,” to which “The Voice” asks, “You do it for the pain, then?” and the speaker replies, “I don’t like pain, I’m already in so much of it, all the time.” On the following page, the speaker states: “I hope to write my way out of pain, but so very often, all writing does is bring me more pain.” And they go on to say, “Maybe I’m still trying to find ways to wash that [self-] hate off of me. Maybe writing is the most effective scrub brush.” Writing is something the speaker can’t “walk away from”: “Like suicide, I’ve tried. Neither concept ever stuck.” Later, we’re told of Seven of Nine: “She could feel, she just didn’t see its value…I envied her ability to not feel. I feel too much.” But soon we’re told by the speaker that it's Commander Tuvok whom the speaker especially values: “All logic & intellect; no emotions.”

            I guess when your world is a rush of uncontrollable emotions, you start to see
emotionless but functional characters as heroes. You conflate their functionality with a
lack of emotionality. You think that if only you were without emotion, maybe you could
function. Be whole.”           

“You’re an emotional guy,” “The Voice” tells us, to which the speaker replies, “It’s how I see the world,” and the speaker dreams “of finding a wholeness within that doesn’t come with strings attached.”

Some of the strings attached are made clear when we’re told an anecdote central to the text, about a close Eritrean friend of the speaker who tells the speaker, “You write how a white man talks.” “What did that do to you?” “The Voice” asks, to which the speaker responds, “Tore me up something terrible…Man it broke me in a way I can’t explain. He was supposed to be my friend.” “We were both not quite Black American, so we related on a lot of things. You gotta find reflections of yourself however you can to survive this country,” the speaker adds. Survival, full-stop, is a key consideration for the speaker, “The Voice” tells us, following up with the question, “What does it mean for you to survive?” to which the speaker replies, “To write, to pray, to avoid family sometimes.” As an aside, family, we learn, is nearly as fraught as writing is for the speaker:

  Was there anyone there with you through all that pain.

             My family, yeah. But I felt alone; needed more.

             What you mean?

             Emotional support.

             They didn’t provide that for you?

             It’s a concept that didn’t exist in our culture when I was growing up.

             Still doesn’t?

             Still doesn’t

             So what does that mean for you and your life?

             I guess that’s why I write.

And later in the text:

            Family is hard.

             The hardest.

             You keep saying you love them. And you do.

             But being around them hurts, too.

             That’s trauma in action.

Family and faith are invaluable to the speaker (and the author), but both are far from complicated for them.

To continue with the story of the friend’s critique of the speaker’s writing, “The Voice” goes on to say of the interaction with the friend:

Basically, he was accusing me of being white-washed, of not being culturally
competent in the African American experience, which is absurd, because I didn’t grow
up in an African American household. I grew up in an African Immigrant household. And
I only had this definition of blackness hoisted onto me when I got here. How could I
possibly be expected to sound black, or white, or whatever?

  How does one even sound black?

  AAVE. Ebonics. The way that black people speak, and by black I mean African American,
by which I mean descendants of transcontinental slavery in this country, which is to say
the survivors of generational genocide, who paid for our (African Immigrants’) right to
be here with their bodies, with loss of agency to those bodies, with their cultures, with
loss of connection to those cultures. And their spirits, which wouldn’t let them break. Let
them become what they are today, which is something more beautiful than I have
words to say.

“America is an unhealthy way of being,” we’re told by “The Voice,” and the speaker soon follows up by speaking about a racist football coach they had in high school, which is not the only racist character we encounter in Are You Borg Now? “Boy, they didn’t tell us in Africa about the cost of being blessed with black skin in America,” “The Voice” says. Further, late in the text, the speaker states: “White people are so bad for black health in this country,” and they “wonder why” they “ hung out with so many white people.” We’re also told by “The Voice,” “They talk of racial progress as if it’s a thing of the past,” to which the speaker replies, “As if I can’t hardly breathe right now.”

The speaker then talks of “Asian dudes” who could “move in and out of social classes with ease,” to which “The Voice” responds, “While you were (are) trapped by your skin.” Soon after, we’re told that one reason why the speaker encourages “so many Somali kids to start writing” is “So they don’t have to walk into dark rooms at boys and girls clubs across the country,” to which the speaker replies, “Hoping no one walks in and catches them listening to pop-punk emo heartbreak songs in the middle of the hood, where the only thing you’re allowed to listen to is gangsta,” prompting “The Voice” to ask, “Tell me about expected and assumed renditions of Blackness in the hood?” “That’s a stupid question,” the speaker replies, to which “The Voice” responds, “Why do you say that?” “Because the girl(s) I had crush(es) on (all) listened to P.Diddy and Kube 93 while I went onto Limewire and pirated (it’s in my blood to pirate) Blink-182 songs. I tried to share my love of the songs with them on AIM. They were like, nah dude, my favorite song right now is Let’s Get Married P.2.,” the speaker replies. “What a twisted web you found yourself in,” “The Voice” responds, and the speaker gives back, “I’ve felt sticky my whole life.” Later we’re told of how the speaker uses his “position as a teacher of creative writing in a subversive way,” “Shoving black knowledge & anti-ableism down white people’s throats.”

             The speaker’s relationship to white culture is indeed “sticky”: 

Tell me about editing your writing.

             I don’t have a problem with it, per se, but I hate for white people to do it.

             Some would call you racist, the way you talk about white folks.

             If anyone calls me a racist, they’re right.

This is soon followed up by an anecdote about the artist and author, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, telling how cashiers in Louisville “avoid touching Black people’s hands when they are due change”:

As if Blackness is a disease that’ll leap off my body and onto yours, whitey. As if we don’t
deserve change, financial or otherwise.

As if white men don’t have a predilection for protecting white women from Black men.

While at the same time creating this sick view of the Black body as nothing more than a
sexual device and projecting fear of the imaginary hypersexuality of Black bodies onto
their own.

  Like we’re all just walking phalluses and pectorals and mammories and thighs and hips
and…

And later in the text:

            White people have ruined poetry for me.

            How?

They take our musicality and turn it into an archaic form and teach Wordsworth for 300
years.

            So what you're saying is that poetry is meant for and by the indigenous?

            Poetry is for Black folk.

            It’s in your blood?

            Yes, but white people don’t know how to read our blood. They only know how to spill it.

            Shaiye writes both inside of and exceeding race, intimating that he is both more than his racial/immigrant identity yet indissolubly linked to, and captivated by, the upsides and the suffering of Black/immigrant life. Indeed, the speaker and “The Voice” in this text recognize the abundance of subtlety born of the entanglements and arduousness of life as a person of color and of an immigrant in America, regardless of the historical moment—particularly in the current American setup. Embedded here are inter- and intra-communal connections, where reliance and ill feeling are hard to disentangle, where social embrace and discrimination exist side by side, and where self-discovery and self-mastery compete with domination by others, as in this exchange:

             Tell me about Blackness as a construct.

            It’s a burning building we’re all trapped inside of. I can feel my skin melting.

            Tell me about burning buildings?    

            It’s this country. I can feel my breath choking.

The very character of Are You Borg Now? is to indicate that dichotomies separate the seemingly inseparable, that art, life, history, and humans are far more intricate than the classifications used to understand them, so that, stale as it may sound, the personal and the political are not only innately connected, but indissoluble. And Shaiye gets you digging: you want to know his characters (“The Voice” and the speaker) rather than feel disaffected or bothered by them.

Regarding faith, “The Voice” says, at different points in the text, both “…being Muslim requires a lot of self-discipline,” and “Faith is hard to hang onto in a place like America. In a place that hates so efficiently,” and yet the speaker also says of faith that “It’s the only thing that holds me together.” “So where does writing come into all this?” “The Voice” asks, and the speaker responds:

  Well, it’s been a secret dream of mine to write something that’ll get me into heaven.

  How so?

  Something that changes people’s lives, helps them see their purpose, brings them to (or
back to) Islam.

  Something of beneficial knowledge that you can leave behind and will continue to
accrue good deeds on your behalf?

  Yes, to make up for all the sin I’ve committed in this crazy world.

This is that kind of book. Shaiye has indeed written something that will impact other lives positively, helping others to feel understood and to find their own voices to speak truth to power, easing the pain of others. There is love, understanding, and good teaching in this text. It’s a book that the author can be exponentially proud of and should be read and taught widely. I loved my time with Are You Borg Now?