Private Language Shared: On Nathalie Khankan's "quiet orient riot"

Natalie Khankan | quiet orient riot | Omnidawn | September 2020 | 80 Pages

“my ovaries have been in the hands of men on both sides,” Nathalie Khankan writes in this extraordinary debut, which depicts the experience of conceiving a Palestinian child using Israeli assisted reproductive technology. In everyday, understated language, Khankan precisely renders the paradoxes of empire, technology, and survival that define this experience. The poems take form mostly as prose blocks in fluid lowercase, syntax broken by vertical lines, their tone marked by attentive irony and moving directness. In “My Body Is on the Way,” for example, Khankan addresses her unborn child and confesses her body’s border-crossing ability, its intimate indeterminateness in this militarized contested place:

& peace will be on you the day you will be born | we saw bodies along the way | how does it feel to live where history is made | where demographic intifada | how does it feel to conceive where birth counts

In an interview, Khankan describes her children as “Palestinian children born on Palestinian soil but they can’t be recognized as such.” The details of her family’s situation, visa status, profession, and backgrounds (they lived in Ramallah for eight years and “didn’t leave willingly,” she reports in that same interview, from her current home in San Francisco; she herself was born in Denmark, her parents Finnish and Syrian) mostly don’t appear here. Rather the book attests to the possibility, goodness, justice, and fruitfulness of daily living in Palestine, life known as Palestinian. Poetry may be a means to address a collective historical violence—Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory—using only and always the small personal technology of a thinking, reproducing, caring, writing body. “human beings are plenty | hostile the turnstiles | soon i’ll break into a fact on the ground,” one poem expresses, calling up the checkpoints and settlements that dominate Palestinian landscapes and life, as refracted through the lone fact of the self, vulnerable witness, contingent agent.

quiet orient riot offers the everyday thinking of an unthinkable situation. The availability and subsidization of fertility treatments in Israel exist both as medical care for people in need and as part of a settler-colonial concern about Israeli birth rates and Palestinians as “demographic threat” (thus above, the ironizing invocation of “demographic intifada”). These dual realities meet in the poet’s body and manifest as the gift of her children. The collection begins with the death in 2008 of Mahmoud Darwish, “national poet of Palestine,” as he was often called. Darwish died after a heart operation, in Houston, Texas, far from home. Khankan first uses the phrase “quiet orient riot” to name the public gathering in al-Manara Square, Ramallah, that occurred to mourn him. When in need Darwish traveled to the US and its technically advanced healthcare, which may be used to try to keep the national poet of Palestine alive even as US military technologies are vital in the suppression of the nation of Palestine. These paradoxes proliferate, the politics of surviving among “the hands of men on both sides.” 

Seeking fertility treatment, the self is in a state of profound need and transformative possibility, of desperation and choice, privileged to be subjected to medical regimes, precarious and generative. In this state, the poet attends to and appreciates “little justices” and forms of “tiny goodness”: the goodness and justice of her child’s birth, of poetry as testament to everyday life, “a little justice: this chirpy printed sound when i leave the library with kifah | every day a tiny goodness aggregates.”

This “little” quality isn’t minor, just as the “quiet” of the book’s title is essential to its “riot” (a wink, too, to the metal band of this name). I want to say Khankan’s style offers the feeling of thinking, a quality I love. This quality exists in the rich interstices of documentary poetry: when we readers feel the writer’s subjectivity encountering the stuff of history, the writer’s vulnerability in this encounter lent to us in turn. quiet orient riot is conversant with recent documentary poetics, though it looks to the close feminist work of a diary more than that of a public archive. The book takes place in 2009 and witnesses Israel’s assault on Gaza of that time, Operation Cast Lead. Horrors from that assault are recorded throughout these poems. For example, the tragedy of the Samouni family, who “lost 23 members of its extended family in two days” to Israeli attacks, as Khankan notes in the backmatter; the Guardian puts the number of family members killed at 48.

In the poem “They Lie Square & Altered,” an image of a girl in Khan Younis, Gaza, arrived to me with a sense of palimpsest—hadn’t I glimpsed an image like this, once, somewhere, mediated, in some internet window?—but perhaps that was only an effect of the poet’s careful writing, the impression of her thinking, over years, of this image, her drawing near to it becoming a warm knowledge of distance from it and the irrevocable distance of the dead:

i see only the girl in khan younis cupping a small thing | i dismiss all culture outside this wound | me part wanting what words plenitude | what completes & combines concern for her | all the measures we take & hold for a while | in those eyes which overture or ritual of care suffices | she has a brother & a brother | they lie square & altered | doesn’t one of her loved ones | i see only the girl’s hand’s small cupping | a function of the memory of pleasure & warm content | language is a perpetrator | define dearly sentence in khan younis today | fresh beginning young house | now my members make themselves everyone

In this last line even Khankan’s own family, the ongoingness of life, “fresh beginning young,” are also what obscures and replaces the dead—as the living inevitably do, no matter our mourning. The fragmentation of this poem’s syntax—its phrases interrupting, departing from, and doubting one another (“language is a perpetrator”)—seems both a lived and made thing, a seemingly casual but exquisite achievement. Khankan has created (by seeming to reproduce) a notebook’s deep sense of the fleeting. The poet knows that a parent’s sacred knowledge of birth and death is also wholly mundane, already passing. So, too, the existence of a fertility clinic can be caught up in nationalist ideology, while the work it does cannot be thus finally determined. Birth and death occur in the terms of this world—“hostile the turnstiles,” indeed—yet form the transcendent passage to what’s beyond those terms. Somewhere there is possibility; an opening; it may be known quietly; a “little justice” exists. What is merely cells in the body, gathering together, may still be a miracle. 

This ordinary, extraordinary hope—for a little justice, here and now—is something riotous: growing, beyond our control, with a beautiful frightening energy, “a tiny goodness aggreg[ating],” like a child on the way, a child making their own way, like people when they come together, in the public square, in private language shared.