The Reader Will Not Be Saved: On Palestinian Poetry (in Translation)
Olivia Elias, transl. Kareem James Abu-Zeid | Chaos, Crossing | World Poetry Books | 2022 | 192 Pages
Mosab Abu Toha | Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza | City Lights Publishers | 2022 | 144 Pages
What should a poem do? It seems, honestly, silly to ask, especially because I think Aristotle, not Plato, was right on this count. Instead of assuming some ideal exists elsewhere which all things are striving and failing toward, the things themselves will tell you. Which is to say, the poem will tell you what it should do, and that’s enough. But in reading Najwan Darwish’s introduction to Kareem James-Abu Zeid’s translation of Olivia Elias’s collection of poems Chaos, Crossing, I found myself at a crossroads. Darwish asserts—forcefully, and convincingly—that “poetry . . . is a form of salvation.” But if I agree with him here (which I do), how do I square this with my revulsion at versions of this same statement elsewhere? (I’m remembering, among other schlocky instances of this kind of poetry sermonizing, a certain poetry anthology-cum-memoir from 2017 called Poetry Will Save Your Life, which one reviewer likened to being “imprisoned in a poetry theme-park.”) Is poetry the life-preserver we all need as we’re tossed on the white-capped shallow seas of a crowded sped-up algorithmically curated world? Is it really the thing men die for lack of everyday, as William Carlos Williams had it?
I thought about this a lot as I was reading Chaos, Crossing, Elias’s English-language debut, along with Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, two recent collections from Palestinian poets in languages that are neither their first, nor their shared, language: Arabic. Both poets are motivated by a palpable urgency which grows out of their disparate experiences of the violent and continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, as well as from a deeper belief in the value of poetry, not merely as an aesthetic playspace (there are flashes of play amid heavy subject matter) but as a kind of lyric technology that can short circuit or bypass the kinds of AI-driven surveillance and PAC-funded mindmeld that continue to allow Israel to maintain the current apartheid state of affairs when it’s not actively expanding it. The stakes in both collections—poetically, politically, personally—are high. And the choice by both poets to write in languages that face a different audience than their “home” one suggests that both are turning to a wider congregation, not just the choir. This makes some sense. Srikanth Reddy notes, in a recent introduction to an issue of Poetry Magazine on exophonic poetics, that “[the] work [of exophonic poets] asks us to think deeply about language and identity, assimilation and acculturation, and the histories of collective violence, trauma, and displacement that have shaped our modern world.”
But consider the following three things: 1) the flashy vein of voyeuristic gawking running through contemporary poetry (Ken Chen likens the reading experience of these kinds of poems to “watching an ontological CSI episode where the poet has clicked ‘enhance’ too many times”). 2) the way that poets from marginalized intersectional positions have been encouraged, through certain publishing and award systems and neoliberalism’s commodification of the atomized self and the marketing lure of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of the single story,” to present via poems certain kinds of experiences and perspectives that jibe with certain permitted subversions, but not too subversively or tangentially, lest the contracts and prize money and readers go away. And 3) the frequent positioning, by the translation and publishing market, that presents writers, poets, and experiences external to the typical US experience as both perfectly representative of the culture and time period from whence they hail, and as curiosities that allow US readers a window onto the different, the foreign, the oppressed and displaced so the reader’s worldly pity can be whetted and honed. When Darwish mentions salvation, what kind is on offer in these poems? Am I being asked, by the poets or their placement within a specific reading public, to read them in order to save myself?
Thankfully, no. These poems are not defined by a desire to save me or you, or even themselves, necessarily. A US readership may be seeking the right kind of palatable challenge to their aesthetic and intellectual views, a challenge that will change them, utterly, but these poems, aimed though they are at English- and French-speaking readerships, are after something different. For Darwish, as well as Elias and Abu Toha and many other extraordinary Palestinian and Palestinian-American poets, what is being saved is not the reader, but the experience of a self, which can stand in for or helpfully represent, though not totalizingly so, the experience of a people. “[Poetry] may not make pain tolerable, but it keeps the pain from becoming trite, banal. By turning pain into art, we protect it from lies and from being disgracefully forgotten, thereby preserving the dignity of its victims.” It feels important to note this. These poems want to save what it feels like to be a specific you, in a very specific context, so we can understand a personal moment and how it can resonate beyond the confines of its bodily, temporal, historical, limited experience.
Resonant moments like this abound in both books, but especially Abu Toha’s. A Gazan-born teacher, writer, and librarian, Abu Toha spent his childhood in the Gaza Strip but after founding the Edward Said Library there, he has more recently been studying in the US, first as a Visiting Poet, Librarian, and Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow at Harvard, and lately finishing an MFA at Syracuse. His poems, generally speaking, are spare, imagistic, and bear the occasional whiff of irony. At his best, he reads like Charles Simic doing Deep Image, albeit whittled of the leaping flourishes and of Simic’s epicureanism. Musing on the familial fallout of the Nakba in “My Grandfather and Home” Abu Toha writes:
my grandfather tried to count the days for return with his fingers
he then used stones to count
not enough
he used the clouds birds people
After a loss this large, only the entire world is big enough to measure it.
A similar move occurs in “Shrapnel Looking for Laughter.” It starts like this:
The house has been bombed. Everyone dead:
The kids, the parents, the toys, the actors on TV,
characters in novels, personas in poetry collections,
the I, the he and the she. No pronouns left. Not even
for the kids when they learn parts of speech
next year.
There is the historical devastation of the initial founding of the Israeli state on captured land, but then there is the continuing, rippling devastation of the maintenance of that state. And then there is the equally pernicious quenching of life around the moments punctuated by explosions, whereby language and culture, present and future, are maimed if not destroyed.
And then of course there are the actual, physical destructions. Violence is not an abstract concept but a constant companion in Gaza, as Abu Toha recounts, and not one to be aestheticized either. In “Olympic Hopscotch Leap,” after a “missile [falls] into farmland nearby . . . dust tops off our tea, / like latte foam.” This image, with its flat tone, its quaint banalization of an explosion’s effects, could be read as a kind of mock-innocent presentation of the dailiness of these kinds of events. But Abu Toha finishes the poem with “Angels get hold of my infant niece. / We look around and find only / her milk bottle.” The flatness now, the bluff and skewed observations, reveal themselves as the products of shock and exhaustion, not the fruits of an ironic and palatable truth.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is almost uniformly uninterested in palatability. This is not to say that the poems are not enjoyable, because they are, but it isn’t because they take their base materials of agony, fatigue, fear, pellucid images, and the occasional twist of wit and try to alchemize them into false hope or squeeze them into anodyne platitudes. There is an unwaveringness in the poems’ tone, and in their sequencing. One after the other, they recount—with occasional wryness, rarely varying flatness—daily experiences of bombs, tanks, death, power cuts, loss, and fear. In an interview with Ammiel Alcalay included in the back of the book, Abu Toha describes his poems as “returning devices”: they help him see the reality that is actually there. And what is actually there is frequently bleak. It might be “seashells . . . filled with the sound of lapping waves, / our feet running on the sand, / and the stories we heard from our grandfather. / There is no space for the noise of a drone”—a moment where hope—unvarnished hope!—pops up. But it can also be the feeling, on a walk to a rescue station, that “I hated death, but I hated life, too, / when we had to walk to our drawn-out death, / reciting our never-ending ode.” If this book were interested in saving you, in satisfying some benign desire of witness, it would modulate more, reach occasionally for the transcendent or sublime, the indomitable tenacity of the human spirit, but it doesn’t— if we boiled it down to a hope-to-despair ratio, it might be something like 1:9.
“It’s not about numbers,” though, as Abu Toha states in the astonishing opening abecedarian “Palestine A-Z.” “Even years, they are not numbers.” The poem embodies Darwish’s assertion about poetry as a way of preserving suffering from triteness. Here, Abu Toha lays out his tools, brandishing narrative waypoints that the rest of the collection will guide by, as well as the tones and iconography that will shape and buff and brace it. It is a stunning, standout poem. It’s interesting, too, that it starts the book. In one way, it’s audacious to begin a book with a poem that’s so long and formally conceived, but it also betrays a canny awareness of the poet’s audience and their expectations—the US-based reader who comes to this text as much as for anthropological or historical reasons as they do for aesthetic ones. Does this damage the book? No. In fact, though elsewhere I think this readerly lens is damaging for how it constricts ‘the market’ and the poets trying to survive inside it, it helps to draw out a quiet thread of anxiety that runs through a book that is otherwise impressively assured of itself. Aware as the speaker is of how poems in general, and these poems in particular, are a performance for a certain audience (there are references throughout to theater, stage, and acting), there is also a worry about “add[ing] to the silence in the room.” Since these poems aren’t designed to save a reader, they don’t offer the tidy assurances one may want. They are the unflinching products of pain, loss, apartheid, and despair, and it is almost–but not completely–beside the point if they are read, believed, or felt. That they exist, as a record of what has and is happening in Gaza, is enough. Or, it should be. If they only save, and do not change or move, are they sufficient?
Olivia Elias does not seem too concerned by this particular anxiety. Older (born in 1944) and also distant from the day-to-day atrocities and debris of life on occupied land (she was raised in Beirut after the Nakba, moved to Montreal, and eventually settled in France, where she lives now), her focus is the abstract pain of exile and the larger system of thought and action that in some places she calls “conquest.” In her poem “War,” from Chaos, Crossing, she calls it differently:
The experience of war
I long liked to believe
I’d been spared it (contrary
to parents grandparents)
…
the other wars I’ve known them
in all forms love
(always a little not at all)
money power knowledge
have I forgotten any?
A mindset, in other words, that through its focus on scarcity and competition construes everything as a contest. A mindset that reduces the world, its lands and people and all they produce, into commodities that can be extracted and streamlined. This system and other people and peoples it’s touched are as much her subjects as her experience as an “absentee,” one of “those who left [Palestine] as a result [of the Nakba] and were denied any possibility of returning” according to Israeli law, as Abu-Zeid helpfully explains in a note on the poems at the rear of the book. This is distinct, of course, from “present absentees,” “those who remained within the territory[, who] were often forbidden from returning to their native villages, and [whose] family homes were frequently handed over to the land’s new residents,” an experience that Abu Toha writes with such vivid sangfroid about.
What should a poem do? is a far less interesting question to ask than What questions does the poem rise, like steam or stink, from? The absurd legal dichotomy of absentee / present absentee helps, to illuminate the questions driving Abu Toha and Elias. What does it mean to be an “absentee” in one’s own land? What does it mean to have a home but no right to return to it? To think of home as a “territory of banishment” and one’s life as led by a “destiny that grows / like weeds on a minefield,” as Elias puts it in “In the Kingdom of Bosch and Orwell”? Things become, fundamentally, strange, estranged as one is from the roots they grew from. In this way, both Elias’s and Abu Toha’s collections of exophonic poems feel especially apt, and suggest that the choice to write in a different language isn’t necessarily one about audience, or one only about audience, but about how one phrases the ontological experience of deracination and state-sponsored gaslighting. Not in Arabic, which Abu Toha says is “sick,” and whose words Elias suggests “the grown-ups had gagged.” She “entrust[s] them to the desert,” the better for her to search for “a form / that speaks / as immediately / as [Yves] Klein’s / International Blue,” and which “screams / refusal.” The poems themselves do this, yes, but the move into another language does this too, more quietly and continuously. It allows these poets to tell a wider cross-section of the world, with less translated mediation, that Palestinians “cannot be defeated,” and it reminds us of a fact that Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine has highlighted elsewhere, namely that “the true writer is always a stranger in the language he [sic] expresses himself in.”
Where Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear feels like a staring contest, daring the curious ethnographic reader to look/look away, Elias’s Chaos, Crossing has a diffuse, modulated feel. In part, this is the format of the book—it is a selection of poems from her first two collections, as well as a smattering of new poems, chosen, arranged, and translated with exceeding care and a natural touch by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. This is a consciously determined introduction to her work. But her poetic scope tends toward the more capacious anyway, especially as compared to Toha’s. Many factors can help explain this: her writing in the French poetic tradition which has a higher tolerance for the abstract; her geographical and temporal distance from Palestine; her interest in tracing and speaking with a larger, international lineage of dispossession (Syrian and African migrants crossing the Mediterranean, victims of US police brutality) and voices that cry out against it (most prominent in the collection James Baldwin and Derek Walcott); and her life stage (she began writing and publishing poems in her sixties). One of the most affecting poems in the book is “Such Slow Birth.” On the one hand, it notes the transmission of wisdom across generations:
sitting on their doorsteps
surrounded by beauty [the village elders] offered
their faces like old cats in the sun
time now to drag my chair out
in front of the door
On the other hand, as affirming as it is of the poet’s recent ascendance understanding that “’[t]o attain complete emptiness is to settle firmly in rest,’” it only highlights the rupture in the chain of inheritance. She is ready to make herself and her wisdom available to the village, but she has no access to the village.
These moments in the book, where a certain valedictory quiescence, even in the face of continued dispossession, are among the most powerful, for their poise and subtle juxtaposition. And they serve as an illuminating counterpoint to the centripetal power of Abu Toha’s, returning as he does again and again to the anvil to hammer out a sharp edge, a fleeting spark. There are times in the collection when Elias’s centrifugal desire, to spread out and map the many nodes where “conquest” wreaks its lethal havoc, leads her into sentimentalizing. In the poem “I Say Your Name,” for instance, George Floyd receives the kind of wince-inducing treatment that calls to mind Nancy Pelosi in kente cloth kneeling in the Capitol. Sometimes only outraged action is the right response; sometimes the right response isn’t yours to have.
If the project leads her astray, though, this doesn’t necessarily damn the project. It reveals a surplus of compassion, but a lack of understanding that compassion doesn’t confer a right to speak to or for. Though Elias’s poems may falter when they take up subjects they lack a nuanced historical understanding of, they do, along with Abu Toha’s, offer a welcome, quiet, steady corrective to the US-centric reading mindset that a poem is meant to save the reader, not something larger than or somehow beyond the reader. But that’s not why you should read them, nor was it why they were written. If you come to them, all the better for you. But they’ll go on doing, as Larkin’s poem “The Mower” does, what lots of poems want to do: remind us, as Elias does in “Archaeology,” that “work is needed”
to dig & extirpate from the strata
of blood mud & dust
the debris of the present
& from these bits rebuild
an abode open to tenderness