Lately I am learning to live with my feelings of loneliness. I carry these feelings with a sense of clarity and understanding. I hold more tightly to poetry as a source of connection and community. I am beyond grateful to be a poet and want to share some of the collections and poems I read recently.
In an interview with writer and translator Huda J. Fakhreddine, she talks about Palestinian poetry, focusing specifically on a poem she translated called My People by Samer Abu Hawwash:
I highly encourage you to read the entire poem. I appreciate the silence unfolding from each line. The poem reminds the reader to live in the silence as much as what’s said. It brings me back to what Palestinian American poet and translator Fady Joudah says in an interview with Boris Dralyuk, “Listening to the Palestinian in English does not mean that the Palestinian is always talking. We also need to learn how to listen in silence to the Palestinian in their silence. So far, when a Palestinian goes silent, it means they are dead or viable, digestible, English has not begun imagining the Palestinian speaking, let alone understanding Palestinian silence.”
What is unspeakable in these moments? Moments in the midst of memory? What about the memory within the body? Holding all of these together in the silence? What if the memory does not exist, only silence?
Fakhreddine says, “Abu Hawwash capitalizes on the silences and pauses to make meaning …The poet creates tension in the poem and builds its arc through his use of negation”— and we know whether ours or not/ no trees, no fruit, no birds nesting. Zionist/colonial work seeks to claim land and erase the Palestinian people and their history. Abu Hawwash answers the echo of colonial ideals, by unraveling those ideals, with the depth of violence colonialism inflicts. Fakhreddine adds, “The string of negations which makes up a Palestinian life ends with preparations for reunion somewhere ‘in the same darkness’ beyond this horror.” There is an intimacy at the end of the poem with the words gaze, touch, and hope, bringing an expansive, far reaching desire for life (now or in the eternal), for the continuance of love planted between a parent and child.
Towards the end of the interview Fakhreddine reminds us that “Palestinian poetry is not only poetry for times of crisis. It is not breaking news or soundbites for the media. It is poetry for all time…” This is a reminder for myself as I come back to these poems again and again. A great thing about poetry is new revelations come up every time I read it. There is brevity, and time rearranges.
Mizna’s Palestine Issue:
Published in 2018, this issue contains poems, stories, photographs, and speeches looking at one’s relationship to Palestine.
In Gaza, the people impose their own reality on the reality Israel imposes on them.
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Dancing against a backdrop of smoke and tear gas, Gazans have time and again taken control of the image, transmitted their own take on the dynamic between them and their enemy: life fighting against death. And none of them is looking for the world’s pity; what they demand is justice—and life.
- Ahdaf Soueif from Sanctuary
Tell me about invincible summers. tell me what you know about unraveling. Is this a practice in forgetting?
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I want to know who you consider in the distance your blood travels, to ask you how many names gather around your own.
- Janan Alexandra from the poem sleep for forgetfulness
You can read the digital version for free here.
Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen:
What of me begins to rot, and what will burst right through it?
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Anywhere there is a hole there are traces of arrival and departure. The wind becomes a palimpsest of the creature no longer here, and a song—or is it a cry?—emerging from nowhere, on its way to nowhere, passes through until the textures of the earth absorb it entirely. Sound: a body’s way of making itself known. Silence: a way of knowing.
- from Đổi Mới
You can listen to an interview about Diana Khoi Nguyen’s new collection here.
The Arab Apocalypse by Etel Adnan:
You can read a review by Summer Farah here.
Border Wisdom by Ahmad Almallah:
Ahmad Almallah is a Palestinian poet from Bethlehem. His most recent collection, Mirene Arsanios says in a recent review, “Written in the wake of his mother’s death, Border Wisdom stages the clash between English & Arabic on the page… It embraces the fissures between language, identity and ownership, as well as the brittleness of their ideological alignment.” The “clash between English and Arabic” reminds me of what Fady Joudah says in the Boston Review, “Through art, in a time of genocide on livestream, I am leaving a record of a Palestinian’s words beyond the documentary and outside the audition of my humanity in English.” The relationship between English and Arabic is an encounter of colonialism, and to write beyond the frame, a space in time or moment [the documentary] is to write beyond the enclosure created by colonial violence. English creates a frame, what it means to love, communicate, say, or not say.
Does the now of the moment, define what it means to be human? This may seem like a strange question, but I ask this within the context of seeing or hearing and who has control over what is seen or heard.
Right in the beginning of the collection Ahmad Almallah asks, “Is death a mistranslation? What about her language, her sounds?” The distance or fissure between English and Arabic is ever present on the page. The now is another fissure when power imposes its own interpretation or translation. Her death, the meaning, the grief can’t be cohered into a language where sense is made, where time is placed. Her body is an extension of her language.
The long multi-page poem, The Name Elegy, introduces to us what elegy can be. Elegy is often known as a poetic form honoring those who died. Almallah unravels the elegiac form, the reader may question whether elegy is a noble endeavor, and whether the act of remembering itself will bring healing or any sort of coherence. Beginning with ‘Every moment is an image’. One way to remember is through visual form. Images blur what is real and what is imagined, or they blur time, ever present, ever alive. The image of a sunrise can represent a beyond we can’t quite reach. Sunrises also bring forth the present day, but in this poem it brings up the past.
Grief is spread open by caesuras, spaces speaking to the cut, the forming of space between utterances, words, comprehension of language. Here again we see body as an extension of language.
cut cut/ cut again/ the only slice/ of air is that body/ the language that you mastered
The speaker does not witness the death of his mother, one must ‘create an absence’ to try and understand death and its relationship to time.
To gain/ some understanding of that thing we call death I fly/ back home/ to where/ I no longer know
Being away from home, not witnessing his mother’s death, creates a complex grief. There is the physicalness of return when the speaker encounters the space left behind in her absence, ‘the empty bed’, and relates this image to his body as a presence within organized space, such as the plane or taxi.
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The poem moves through complex relationships with his family in the midst of Israeli violence. The loss of his mother is also connected to the historical and continual loss Palestinians experience due to Zionism:
Sometime in May another war in Gaza is on its way—
in the room we save for the living, I watched the buildings
leveled to the ground
Perhaps the body is a language for time. To carry time as much as the body—
I came and carried her to her last hours, it seems.
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I had come at that hour, and
carry her, carry her with both hands
Witnessing the physical and often emotional suffering of a loved one creates a new language for grief and brings me back to what Christina Sharpe said after the death of her mother Ida Wright Sharpe in her incredible book Ordinary Notes:
When people called to offer their condolences, they’d say, “ we heard that your mother passed” and “we are sorry.” I thought, that’s how people speak about death who are far from it. People who have never watched someone they love die a painful death. Those people said that someone passed. but if passed was a euphemism meant to soften death that softening couldn’t have been for me. I knew passed was too inactive, too easy, too subdued. Passed skirted the hard work of dying. My mother didn’t pass. She struggled and her death was not easy on anyone. Least of all on her. So, what would be the right word? What word would capture the mix of resistance, suffering, will, dignity, reserve, love, regard, and more that was my mother’s dying? And what word would capture the difficult and the privilege of sitting with my mother as she died?
-From ‘Note 131’
The elegy becomes the sight of recognition. The poem ends with a memory of his mother and an interaction she has with somebody else’s child. With this memory we see what it means to be a mother and live the language of mother and the speaker places this understanding within the possibility of an otherwise.
You were not my mother anymore. Not a
mother at all. I saw you. I saw you then
that person you could have become
without us all—
Perhaps there is an inability to grieve and honor his mother the way one might expect from an elegy. The name itself represents the fracture between language. To name something, such as elegy, recognizes the limits of elegizing, moment by moment [the documentary], memory by memory. To end the poem with the possibility of an otherwise, moves beyond the elegiac time. Perhaps this possibility is also a way of remembering.
You can read the entire review from Mirene Arsanios here.
You Can Be The Last Leaf: Selected Poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat translated by Fady Joudah:
You can read an interview with Maya and an excerpt from her new manuscript.
The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan:
You can listen to an interview about Hala’s new collection here.
Premonition by Etel Adnan
…but I have a childhood that still haunts me, prevents me from being contemporary to anything that is. I don’t mean that it constitutes any obstacle to whatever, no; it’s rather my Single certitude: an uninterrupted solitude.
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That’s what it means to be lonely…a familiarity with the essential loneliness of other forms of life.
My Friends by Hisham Matar
My Friends is the first novel I’ve read in months and I absolutely loved it. It addresses the messiness and beauty of friendship. The three friends are Libyan exiles living in London during the Qaddafi regime. Khaled and his friends Hosam and Mustafa are brought ever closer by a traumatic event, both expected and unexpectedly. We learn how each of their lives evolve when the Qaddafi regime falls, ushered in by the Arab Spring in 2011.
“I regret attending,” I said, and meant it, but was also wishing to absolve myself. “It’s not true what some say, that dying, when it comes, brings with it its own acceptance. The opposite, if you ask me. It brings rebellion. Because you realize then that you’ve spent every day of your life learning how to live. That you don’t know how to do anything else. Certainly not death. And I could see it, the blackness. And could see also how endless it was. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. What horrified me was I knew then that part of me, a spot of consciousness, would survive and continue even after death, trapped within nothing and silence for eternity.”
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“The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. Where hate and affection, bewilderment and clarity, are braided so tightly that they form an unbreakable cord, a rope fit to lift a nation.”
I’ve come to love novels focusing on friendship. Another novel that comes to mind is The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li.
Palestinian by Ibrahim Nasrallah (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
I’ve read this poem many times since first encountering it. Please read the entire poem at Protean Magazine.
I woke up not missing my hands or feet or reflection in the mirror
or the thing I call my soul.
I died and lived. I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes,
and nothing came of it.
[…] - Fady Joudah
You can listen to a podcast interview about this collection here.
You can watch a video of Fady reading one of his poems here.
Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi
Sparrow, what took you so long? How was it that they could speak the rippling language of my childhood?
from Bridges of =
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In the future, every hour is grievable.
from Miami 18.5.1980
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The veil of unreasonableness. My twoness is born out of national division. My other is perpetually Red, ready to nuke or be nuked. My twinness manifests within unreasonable destiny, vast homesickness. My twin self has my comb. She remembers my flowered shirt and shorts, a hairpin in my hair. She remembers me as a child. She instructs me to return. She forgets that sparrows can’t return.
from Berlin 30.11.2019
On Execution by Abdelrahman ElGendy
The conversation around empathy is always engaged during times of extreme violence. I really appreciate this article by Abdelrahman ElGendy who recalls how empathy played a part in his experience in the United States and how it intersects with the genocide happening in Palestine. ElGendy draws on the work of Solmaz Sharif and her newest collection Customs, by including the poem Social Skills Training where the final line says, Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?
I think about this duality of execution we cannot escape: performance and death. Executing for the executioner and being executed by them.
Like ElGendy, I’ve grown wary of empathy and the positional/power dynamics it requires. The conversation brings me back to an interview between Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Saidiya Hartman in Bomb Magazine on the republication of Saidiya Hartman’s book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America.
Iman Jackson says, “Empathy is defined in Scenes as “a projection of one’s own personality into an object with attribution to the object of one’s own emotions.”
When placing oneself within the other person’s experience, where is the other person in that moment of imagining?
Do you feel for yourself in that moment of imagining?
Iman Jackson adds, “There is a risk of extending a phantasmic humanity”
Empathy is the possibility of defining humanity through displacement and subjectivity, as mentioned above.
Saidiya Hartman responds by saying, “Yes, it is the violence of incorporating the other, whether its obliteration of the other takes place via standing in the place of the other or making their suffering your own through assimilation and identification or utilizing the captive body as a vessel for one’s feeling and self-awareness.”
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Iman Jackson says the book, Scenes of Subjection, “Introduced a new framework for thinking about/of the foundational structure of racial slavery and the ongoing past set in motion.”
The interconnectedness of subjectivity from 19th century to today, brings into question the understanding of what it means to be human. The ever-presentness1 of slavery is connected to the ever present colonial foundation of America and Israel, and the genocide happening against Palestinians.
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ElGendy writes, “It was my first year in the country, and I hadn’t yet learned, in this new context, how to recognize the transaction of execution in exchange for empathy and its proponents as an extension of imperial violence.”
In order to be seen or imagined as human in the minds of often white Americans, one tries to empathize, but only reinforces the same power dynamics. The work of empathy comforts whatever feeling that arises, by inserting oneself within the performance of people who are subjected to systemic violence. I see this happening in the context of Palestinian and Black liberation struggles, in the United States and abroad, and through the experience of Egyptian writer Abelrahman ElGendy.
‘Can you lean more into the abuse?’ The well-meaning white American had asked.
Imagination itself plays a dangerous role of displacement and leads to a “culture of surprise.”2 The surprise, shocks, and awe due to the performance of one’s execution, ignores colonial and racial violence. Fady Joudah says in his newest collection […], “I wanted to ask questions about the empathy of convenience, the silken kingdom of eureka. ‘Eureka’ itself was a pronouncement of the law of displacement. The displacement of others activates empathy for what it had been all along: an idea.”
Eureka in Ancient Greek means “I find” or “I found it”.3 What has been found? The submersion of the self to which there is a scattering?
I started thinking about the process of empathy towards the end of my time in graduate school in 2019. The more I read about it, the more it showed up in my own poetry. I was interested in the relationship between the one who is telling and the one who is listening or seeing and how that interacts with the spectacular of violence or trauma. The spectacular often being at the forefront of attention and engagement.
How does one empathize when the act is more subtle, moving within the everyday of one’s body and memory?
I also want to engage with empathy because I easily fall into this framework. I instead want to be critical of its legacy and how I am a part of this legacy as a white person in the United States.
It is within this rhizome of love linking us and alienating our executioners what we now situate ourselves. A love that is enraged, engaged, and revolutionary.
They fear nothing more than the revived memory that another world was—and therefore, is—possible.
Let us understand that revolution, like love, is a perpetual act of remembrance.
ElGendy concludes the article by looking at love as the foundation in which one lives. This may seem obvious, but love does not contain any desire for performativity. For me, there is self-examination, deep, long-held griefs to bear. Moving beyond the imagination of colonialism. Love is to honor the memory of those who experienced and continue to experience systemic violence, to see their memory as possibility, liberatory, ever expanding, ever alive.
What I’m Currently Reading:
Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins
Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
To learn more about the presence of slavery in the U.S. and the world today I highly recommend reading the works of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Dionne Brand. The books include:
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America - Saidiya Hartman
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being - Christina Sharpe
A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging - Dionne Brand
From Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe, “The machinery of whiteness constantly deploys violence—and in a mirror-register, constantly manufactures wonder, surprise, and innocence in relation to that violence. That innocence-making machine rubs out violence at the very moment of its manufacture.” - From ‘Note 217’
from Wikipedia