Ode to the Security Woman

“The maiming and obliteration of language preempts and attempts to excuse the maiming and obliteration of bodies,” writes the poet Solmaz Sharif. Indeed, empire requires an ongoing campaign of distortion: It produces a weapon from thin air after an agent of the state murders an unarmed child, contorts a genocidal occupation into a grammar of two-sided conflict. Even borders themselves are a kind of doublespeak. Though they masquerade as natural, necessary, inviolable, they are in fact selectively porous, their uneven application governed by power’s myths. Mona Kareem’s “Ode to the Security Woman” takes place at a routine border—an airport checkpoint—where extraordinary violence is made ordinary and obscured into commonsense. Kareem refuses the obfuscation. The language is clear, what happens to the body in plain view: “Every day / she violates people’s bodies / to protect the nation’s honor.” What is mythic (“the nation’s honor”) authorizes the violation of what is real (“people’s bodies”) because empire’s imaginative geography conditions the terms of travel. But in Kareem’s poem, the reader is plainly told what the security woman doesn’t know. By the poem’s end, there is no unknowing to hide behind—so what will we do about it?

– Claire Schwartz