Customized Absence: Aiden Farrell Reviews Tracy Fuad's about:blank

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                                           am rûbâ bir nâdâ                               |                 this river doesn’t flow  

                                          biryâ aw kâráy nakirdibâya                |                 would that it hadn’t been done  

                                          ba am shawá l’era bibaynásar           |                 let’s spend tonight here  

                                          dastim khwenî te tizâwa                    |                 blood has collected in my hand  

Tracy Fuad’s debut book of poems, about:blank (Winner of the Donal Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Claudia Rankine), suggests spaces in which preexisting symbols deform and reintegrate in a manner inconsistent with the original. She uses the concept of a green screen to represent the mutability afforded by online spaces as powerful means of exerting control over context, a backdrop whose function is to appear quite literally as whatever the user fancies, which can then be weaponized in any number of ways:

the fact disrupted  

my feeling of you in a vacuum,  

Your feelings are in empty space

Your bones are in the area 

you against the green screen, a place

without history. 

You live with a sweet spoon  

without history 

You have to face a green luster 

without history 

            …  

            The trench of me was smooth and I was sure that I was where I should be  

            …  

            When did I get tired and I believe where I live?  

            …  

            I was awake and believe that I live in the room between the room  

            from “Causativity” (26-28)  

Applying the concept to broader areas of online identity creation, the value of lived experience as a reliable standard of recognizing the world plummets, even in terms of its value as a commodity, which it has become. The green screen, both literally and figuratively, is a microcosm of our new ability to customize our appearance. The consumerist self-regard of customization allows for the expression of an American dream: the annihilation of personal history and violence against a self that necessarily exists relative to it. As such, the internet becomes a deformation zone (to use Don Mee Choi’s term) into which symbols hoist themselves, granulate, and recompose as a surplus of mirrors that people and software accept as reality:

            I am trying to cultivate the feeling of being my-own-witness

            But this planet will be forgotten

            I am done with nostalgia, the human said, but what shall I put in its place?

            …

            So we speak through a machine, unsure of what it is we want

            Algorithms in a second floor tea shop of the old world’s erstwhile seat

            A leaping at; a flashing by and gone

            …

            I didn’t come here not to find you

            The earth’s last snow gridding the air

            Beyond, a pulse of coursing blankness

            The damp behind each original

            A human calling me forward and into the unfruited future

            from “Eject—to be read aloud by a robot” (71-89)

Fuad’s multi-layered and intersectional project in about:blank embodies the consequences of a global culture in which manipulations and interpretations of experience are taken to be the experience itself. Of course, this can also be said of visual representation before computation took over. Propaganda, for example, consists of equally doctored depictions of lived experience aimed at promoting oppressive narratives and ideologies to equally devastating ends. A key difference, though, is that with online spaces we surrender not to an image or poster but to an entire interactive environment. The environment is created, encountered, and aggressed by algorithms just as much as it is by ourselves. The perceptive schemata are different, but the uncertainty is the same. Fuad’s sensitivity is to the effects this culture has on one of our most basic questions as a social species: what stories do we tell ourselves, collectively and individually, how do we tell them, what tools do we use to tell them, who tells them, and who are they about.

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The book’s title, “about:blank”, is a URL in your internet browser that displays a blank page. It’s not a website, but represents an error internal to whatever browser you’re using. There are any number of reasons why “about:blank” might show up: you could be trying to use a bad link or URL, the browser may have detected malware, or it has no idea what to display, so it displays blankness. “about:blank” is a hollow web address. Translated into the title for Fuad’s book of poems, which spends a lot of time in intimate, embodied, yet public spaces, the phrase metabolizes an atmosphere of meaninglessness, but only in the sense that anything can mean anything, meaning nothing really can. Meaning becomes an exercise in pretense. It is a screen that renders all screens blank, ineffective, even absent. Fuad’s exploration of her Kurdish roots materialize through this lens. The complicated and enriching feeling of home, history, identification presses up against its contrary: an empty space with no such reference points but through which any identity has the potential to be fabricated and applied. This process skips over the time, struggle, and collective experience it takes for such reference points to gain their reliability and substance. The space of “about:blank” creates a procession of void symbols instead:

            …dissect every
            object with a circumstantial blade. When the object is fully dissected, remake it, but more in your image. …
            …Hold
            each piece to check for resistance: if it withers, it’s an object.
            if it shudders, it’s a subject.

            from “Object Exercise” (31)

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            …

            On that hill, I will put my emotions. Look in any language. The water, it has become high.

            This is an offering to the unmappable other.

            Beneath me there is a rigid grid, but I swear I have nothing to do with it.

            from “Report of the Excavation at Tell Sitak” (17)

Vacancies open when we abstract the essential moments of a life into discrete plot points, synthesize them into arbitrary narratives, or sequences of information, like the data that algorithms mold into a kind of digital archetype based on influences irrelevant to the source of the data. The quotidian, the mundane, the now of time, the intersection between private and public in an age of computation, become dispensable. Fuad’s stanzas in about:blank intercept the transition from perception to affected interpretation as it exists on the multiple levels of selfhood, social identity, cultural and ethnic identity, and block it not only conceptually but also in their enactment of narrative structure. about:blank‘s concerns include the inaccuracy of computed data (or life made legible to a computer program) and its irreconcilable opposition to the variability of lived experience. about:blank‘s is a world in which the two are forced to blend despite their conditional incongruity. Accordingly, the work combines aloof, social-media-soaked rhetoric and carefully poised lyric on the same page, same stanza, same line, such that the distinction between this particular rhetoric and lyric becomes its own poetics of intersection. Fuad makes plain the arbitrary authority language wields over its referents—its structural insufficiency in noting the minutiae of a mottled, mutable patchwork of identity—and how language itself is a process of generalization. Data enters here as the particular language that inundates our lives, representing us ever more as inhuman, as products, with little character, feeling, history, or ethical consequence, except for our potential as drivers of commerce. We are shown the many subtle ways representations can end up writing our waking lives, influencing our conceptions and perceptions of self. The poems are sites wherein Fuad reveals the fluidity of the boundary dividing this experience and language, language whose function is precisely to appear rigid. Each phrase is at once multivalent and counterintuitive, yet offered to us both intuitively and coherently, and vice versa:

it was red when i woke, or yellow

who was I to try to name the color?

…

something was wrong with the light

something was wrong with the language

I looked for a face but found a dead other

so slunk back into my body

my resolute cactus, in an act of duplication

…

I hunger for the tender ping

my fly loves it when I’m home

I say hi with a rolled book of songs

I dreamt in the new language, but couldn’t understand it

…

I took the glaze-flecked chip out of the trench

I licked it with my light and made it whole

            from “The Pith of Every Language is a Rift” (49)

On an equally abstract and material level, language becomes a figure, an active participant in the world it interfaces. What we read is graceful, precise, musical, while retaining that characteristic tonal plateau that makes textspeak textspeak, that makes a learning algorithm’s data set a learning algorithm’s data set: a language of mechanism and utility, not wholly without style (though it evidently takes a great deal of skill to make it work in a the context of a poem) but based in procedure. Fuad, though, banks on the reality that procedures are also organic, fleshy. about:blank is where computational procedures cohabit with a person’s own procedures. In this regard, a person’s organic procedure can consist of, for example, taking the world as it appears to them, and, regardless of what the case might actually be beyond this appearance, acting on a questionable conviction in a way that will have some degree of outward consequences. An algorithm’s procedure can consist of, for example, a sequence of data applied to a series of matrices from which it makes associations (an easier word to swallow than “profiles”) based on its training in order to target certain intended outcomes, which will also have some degree of outward consequences. Both depend on generalization to make predictions about how the world is and/or will be by virtue of a conditionally incomplete vision of how it has appeared until now. Language, as a system we use to render data, fits into this scheme in its capacity to mis-represent, while remaining a more than indispensable tool. The poet interrogates the uncertain space this pries open:

               Color coded to avoid grave error. A badge of counter-culture.

               Then mass produced in plastic. 50,000 migrant workers, slap-bang

               in the middle of nowhere. A thing that can be pressed toward irritation.

               Or with quotation marks to emphasize the consequence.

               To give illusory control at crosswalks and office thermostats.

               To drop the mustard gas and then to fire the Tomahawks.
…
               Click submit. Click to like. To enter the site. To go back home.

               Do you want to stay on this page? Do you want to leave without finishing? No,

               Sometimes I wish to unknow North. Sometimes I don’t want to be a form

               so easily undone.

            from “An Abridged History of Buttons” (13)

Fuad’s mesh of the grave and the flippant resists generalization in terms of its broader application to our digital lives and its effective homogenization of our habitat, digital as well as organic. “Generalization” in this sense can be specified as the dispossession of nuance and diversity from experience. Processing the world in terms of binary (its own system of symbols) will eventually bring it all down to one, at which point there’s nowhere to go but zero.

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