Contributor’s Marginalia: Benjamin S. Grossberg on “Halloween” by Chad Abushanab

“For Halloween this year I’ll be a man.”

Why does the poet want to “be a man”? Isn’t he one already?

What I love about Abushanab’s “Halloween,” a poem which is half elegy for his father and half criticism of him, is its understated emotional complication. That complication is there from the first line, which is clearly ironic in some way, though we can’t yet know how. The poem’s stakes unfold slowly.

Over the next stanza and a half, it becomes clear that Abushanab is referring to a very particular kind of man: a drinker, a fighter. It isn’t until the sixth line of this fifteen-line poem that his father is even mentioned, and that mention is off-handed, not explicitly connected to the desire to dress up. “A man should fight, my father said.”

But by the second mention of the father, halfway through, it’s clear this definition of manhood was his, the one he embodied and encouraged, and which the speaker, it seems, hasn’t lived up to. (Again, you don’t have to dress up like something you already are.) Am I reading too closely to note that the form of this meditation, a poem, might well be understood as standing in opposition to the father’s model of masculinity? The booze, the bloody rags, and the speaker with his elegant terza rima—unpacking his heart with words, to quote another son haunted by a hyper-masculine father.

So behind the poem is the father’s ideal of masculinity and the son’s failure to realize it. And that’s touching enough. But it’s not so simple. The son seeks to remedy this failure through a Halloween costume, and that in itself criticizes the ideal. Traditional Halloween costumes are ghosts, skeletons, and the like. Is the father’s version of masculinity similarly frightening?

The last lines of Abushanab’s lyric drive home his ambivalence. He writes, “On Halloween, we’re closer to the dead. / His teeth were crooked and his hands were red.” The penultimate line feels like a statement of real loss, a moment of purer elegy. What the son finally wants is just a way to be “closer to the dead”—even if it requires him to become something he isn’t. But the very last line retreats from mourning. We close on an image of the father which, though it may well be accurate—it’s not uncommon to have crooked teeth or reddish hands—suggests a monster from a B-movie, a kind of zombie, the undead. The poem’s tension, then, remains unresolved: the poet’s sense of failure—but of failing to be something which isn’t all that appealing; and the poet’s mourning—but mourning someone who, at least in his embrace of violence, was frightening. For this reader, that ambivalence heightens the heartbreak. Isn’t it more moving to say, I knew you, who you really were, and I found it terrifying, but I miss you anyway and long to be—somehow—closer.

Abushanab’s ambivalence is delivered with sharp imagery and bound in graceful terza rima. He knows when to interrupt his iambic pentameter, such as the enjambment onto the trochee “sometimes” in line seven, suggesting that mostly the father was about winning, that the exceptions were notable. (Does the poem itself count as a loss for the father—the fact of a poem, rather than booze and bloody hands?) And the music of closure, created by Abushanab’s exact quadruple rhyme, is watertight.