If You Like "Blonde" the Album, Summer Spectres, and Driving Down the Freeway at Night
Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo by Hazem Fahmy
VIOLETS’ PICKS 011
Where I found it
Every time I hear Frank Ocean, I think of the time I dyed my hair electric peach (a fancy way of saying: orange). That’s because in 2016, right when his album Blonde was coming out and right when I set bleach on black hair, I was blasting Channel Orange non-stop, tingled by the sensation of music so texturally specific and unconventionally imaginative that later I’d find not one but two poetry books inspired explicitly by Frank Ocean (on my ever-growing poetry reading list: I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean). A poet’s musician, perhaps?
So, last year I came across a YouTuber, Emily Butler, so far the second one I’m calling by name in these series, who I learned much of what I know about poetry from “being poetic is not being vague” and how to be intentional with line breaks. Have you ever met someone with discerning taste, and found yourself wondering: well, what do you think is good, then? Emily is fair in her critique, not a content creator who exaggerates opinions to get views, but by now, I’d watched more videos explaining bad poetry than I had examples for “good” poetry. So when she made a video giving this poetry collection 5 stars, specifically calling out that she felt it was perfect for people who don’t usually read poetry or are just starting to (hint, hint), consider me influenced.
I usually don’t buy the books I feature: maybe about a third of them, a mix of chapbooks I find while travelling that I may just never pick up anywhere else and collections I’ve read that I want in my brain and on my shelf permanently. The rest, I pick up from my local library. But before Emily’s video had ended, I was opening a tab checking out on “Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo” and thinking about my peach hair and that first summer I felt free.
First impressions
The cover features a watercolour-or-the-like iteration of Blonde’s album cover art, Frank Ocean with his hand covering his face as if exhausted, as if hiding from the limelight, as if both. The poet’s name, Hazem Fahmy, and his publisher, Half Mystic Press, are styled like the explicit content warning label often found on album covers. I have a feeling this will be bold and soft like my favourite kind of poetry, words and rhythm finding a way to create the kind of tension that feels like waiting for something unknown and familiar in the midst of every other kind of noise and silence that fills our lives. It’s not lost on me that “Frank Ocean” feels poetic, that name-dropping a well-known musician in the title of a poetry book is not just intentional strategically but creatively, like it means something other than the name of a man once known as Christopher Edwin Breaux. Something sharply honest and incomprehensibly vast.
They said it
Weaving the lyrics of Frank Ocean’s discography, Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a poetic account of four years of shuffling, a catalogue of the constant in-betweenness of being caught in the middle of two places across an ocean. Exploring themes of family, gender, and the attempt to find meaning outside the confines of the state, Fahmy’s sophomore collection uses the singer’s iconic music and persona as a guidepost to a firmer understanding of the self and the spaces that define it.
—From the publisher
Lines to remember
I could dream all night drive all night how far is a light year? —From “It’s All Downhill From Here”
I could hate you now, but I’d rather never. Instead I raise the volume. Drown out the rest of the house. —From “In Which I Prefer to Blast Frank With Door Closed”
But I sometimes wish the night was a field of budding roses, stretching from the Nile to the Hudson, wide enough to get lost in —From “Still Life of Teita’s Balcony, to the Tune of “Futura Free””
We laugh, unsure why—perhaps the weight of being neither here nor there. —From “Still Life of Reunion, to the Tune of “Thinkin Bout You”
You might like this if…
You were also waiting for Frank Ocean, for more of what he does, how he weaves references to jelly-pink alien villains from Dragonball Z with lyrics on desire (”Pink Matter”), how he wrote a 10-minute version of a story featuring ancient Egypt and a modern strip club (”Pyramids”), how he took the interlocking Cs of a fashion brand and turned it into song about bisexuality (”Chanel”). You can read Arabic (there are words in Arabic woven throughout a few poems). You are ready for a new way to feel the kind of nostalgia we so yearn for today, something other than Y2K fashion and 90s movies redone. You get the feeling of waiting, waiting, waiting. You like blasting your favorites on the car stereo while driving down the freeway in the middle of the night; there’s almost nothing like it. You dye your hair new colours to invite new possibilities. You have a running list of books you’d like to read and places you’d like to go.
This was the colour of…
A tapestry of memories and wants woven across cities and songs, time and space. Nights and lights. Streetlights and highlights. Freeways and dark roads. Hot July afternoons and rare cold mornings. Orange channels and dyed green hair floating in and out of the periphery of old haunts and new feels.
Details
Year: 2022
Author: Hazam Fahmy, whose Substack (wust el-balad) features interviews with writers and is back in action with an issue about Spiderman, memes, and pizza
Location: Cairo → New York City
Publisher: Half Mystic Press
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
Just ordered this - thank you for the recommendation and awesome post