Tag: Fady Joudah

When no words can be found: [. . .] by Fady Joudah

How will I go on living
with orchestras that conduct my thirst?
It’s been done before.
There are precedents, always will be,
and there will be Gaza after the dark times.
There will be gauze. And we will stand
indicted for not standing against the word
and our studies of the word
that dissect what ceases to be water.

– from “[. . .]” p. 16

When we talk about a literary work being timely, it often means that a piece from the past holds a new relevance in our current world. [. . .], Fady Joudah’s sixth poetry collection, is not simply timely in that sense, it is of this exact moment as it is occurring. Most of the poems here were written between October and December of 2023, during the first three months of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The grief, the anger, and the defiance is palpable. But so is faith in the persistence of love. And, in keeping with the explicitly wordless title of this volume, more than half of the poems share the same title—[. . .]—an expression, as Joudah indicates in an interview with Boris Dralyuk in The New Inquiry, of silence, silencing, and an invitation to listen “in silence to the Palestinian in their silence.”

Joudah is a Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician who lives in Houston, Texas. He draws on all of the facets of his identity, personal and professional, in his poetry, but from the earliest days of the current assault in Gaza he has also been called upon by certain American media outlets to provide the “Palestinian perspective,” even as many of his own family were being killed. Now that this new collection has been released, he continues to respond to interview requests, but the focus has shifted (and if not, he changes the venue).  One senses that it is important that he continually protect his very human ordinariness from a culture that wants “to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more.” (Yale Review)

The poems in [. . .], composed, for the most part, during a condensed period of great political and emotional distress, carry an urgency that commands attention. Palestinians have long responded to the ongoing attacks and displacement they’ve endured for the past seventy-five years through poetry and prose, with the recurrence of the same images, themes and situations affecting a sort of echoing tradition. A piece written decades ago, feels like it was written yesterday. But over the last six months, as we’ve witnessed the intentional destruction of universities and libraries, and the targeted killing of potential record keepers—poets and journalists. Joudah’s response, to this intensified attempt at erasure is, like that of his contemporaries, to keep talking about what is happening, as it is happening.

When did the new war begin?

Whoever gets to write it most
Gets to erase it best.

The new war has been coming for a long time.
The old war has been going for a long time.

Coming to a body near me, and going on in my body.

– from “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams, # 6”

Is it possible, then, to effectively answer genocide? The International Courts and a steady stream of horrifying images delivered straight to our phones do not seem to be making a significant difference. It seems that any formal declaration will only be made, as we’ve seen too many times before, long after the fact. But that is no reason to stop writing—and not just to document, but to be able to acknowledge the small moments of truth and beauty that keep hope alive:

In Gaza, a girl and her brother
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle

its tiny bowl
didn’t shatter.

– from “[. . .]” p. 33

A review, especially of an important collection like this one, can only go so far. Joudah offers very interesting insights into his work that are worth seeking out. I have linked two interviews above, but others can be found, including a free online event as part of the Transnational Literature Series that I’m looking forward to on April 11, 2024.

[. . .] by Fady Joudah is published by Milkweed Editions.

The wisdom of madness: The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi

Blue is a colour with multiple manifestations and meanings in various contexts and traditions—the light of the sinful self for the Sufis, the colour of creative energy in Tibetan Buddhism, the destructive enemy of the God of Wisdom for Zoroastrian Persians. Blue is also said to be an antidote to sexual excitation and it is said to calm the nerves. That may explain some of the hold that the colour has on Hussein, the narrator of The Blue Light and a man beset by questions about his own sanity, but the roots of his attraction run much deeper:

For me, blue is the color of estrangement, the unknown, and of the childhood sky. And there is, also, blueness to all my ill wishes. When I learned to play the piano, I composed a short magical piece, played it for a while, day after day, without knowing the secret of my love for it, until one day I read a book by a Black musician who claimed that each note has a specific color to it. And each composition, too. One of Mozart’s sonatas arouses in the listener green or blue or . . . anyway, I looked around for the color of that magical note of mine and was astonished to find that it was blue.

This posthumously published novel by Palestinian poet, writer and essayist, Hussein Barghouthi (1954 – 2002) walks along that troubled path between fiction and autobiography, arriving at what might best be described as a memoir with hallucinations. It is a delirious account of a man desperate to make sense of himself and his unusual way of thinking. Or, as Mahmoud Darwish says, on the blurb on the back cover: “[a] peculiar mix of confession and contemplation, hallucination and mythology, reality and the unrevealed. A mix of personal stories and mystic leaps, of madness that claims wisdom, and wisdom that only madness can transubstantiate.”

The Blue Light is inspired by Barghouthi’s time in Seattle, Washington where he pursued graduate studies in Comparative Literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As someone who had long felt different from others, he finds himself, in this foreign land, frequenting three establishments—Grand Illusion Cinema, Last Exit Café and Blue Moon Tavern—attracted by their names and by the company of the mad, eccentric and disenfranchised characters he finds there:

Strange how a place seems like a ruse, sometimes. I found myself wandering these three joints looking for myself, not among books, I was sick of books, but among the shady and the crazy, the homosexuals and the punks, where maps are clearer, more precise, and more exciting, or where at least I, as one of them, didn’t have to talk to anyone. For a whole nine months I talked to no one. I knew no one.

Terrified of madness and hiding his fears beneath a mask of sanity, Hussein does begin to engage with some of the offbeat, often homeless, regulars and even falls, briefly and cynically, into the bizarre world of the Church of Dianetics, but his search for his real identity changes course dramatically when he meets Bari, a Turkish-American Sufi from Konya. Introduced through a mutual friend, he is dynamic and given to loud laughter, strange stories and odd mannerisms. From their first encounter, Bari’s intensity and sea deep voice, “free as a roar,” reminds Hussein of an early experience of  his near drowning that birthed a recurring dream of being chased by a giant wave from a beach in Beruit to his childhood mountains in Ramallah. Among other memories, the Sufi’s laughter woke up the sea.

But Bari is elusive. He responds indifferently to Hussein’s questions and speaks little about his past. The two men often play chess at Last Exit Café, an environment where most of the patrons are mentally ill and he is thought to be just another “space case.” Yet Hussein becomes convinced that his madness “was something more than the usual madness.” He is drawn into Bari’s world even if, or perhaps because, it seems inaccessible. The secret he thinks is one of language, reasoning that: “Words meant something entirely different for him than they did for me.” So, he dedicates himself to deciphering Bari’s meanings and falls into a strange project to create a dictionary. For example, one day Hussein is confronted by the Sufi who says: “Man, your blue bird came to me last night. Stop him.” Caught off guard, Hussein fashions a response that appears to satisfy him, but the question remains—what does blue mean to Bari? What about his odd chants and expressions?

After much reading and exploration, an endeavour tinged with as much madness as those of anyone else around him, Hussein discovers what he believes is a key, a phrase he’d heard from the Sufi before. Waiting until the right moment presents itself at the end of a chess game he exclaims: “Return the blue light naked to its house.” The arrow strikes its target. Bari demands to know what he wants. Hussein holds his own, and in response confesses that he is afraid of losing his mind. The door is opened, Bari invites him in.

Thus begins a closer relationship. One damaged soul to another, Hussein seeks answers from the enigmatic, often volatile, Turkish American through what unfolds very much like a game of riddles that forces Hussein into a closer examination of his own past and a dissection of the history of his own fear of madness. Memory, mythology and cultural heritage merge as he engages with and responds to Bari’s mystic pronouncements. His Palestinian identity and experiences living under occupation have only heightened the estrangement and alienation he cannot escape, no matter where he has lived. In Seattle, this Sufi who proudly claims to belong nowhere, may finally trigger Hussein to loosen the tangled threads of thoughts threatening the clarity of his mind. Consider an early discussion about physical bodies and the mental bodies—spirits—that can visit one over great distance, during life or after death. This reminds Hussein of the culture of the dead in Palestine where death is so readily at hand. The ghosts or mental bodies of the dead are frequent household guests:

These spirits visit me long after their bones had turned to eyeliner dust in a land where the dead dominate the living, the past governs the future. That’s the authority of memory in a region whose depth is measured not by centuries but by millennia. Memory is a dangerous thing, a laboratory of ghosts. Didn’t Ishtar, a few thousand years ago, in the epic of Gilgamesh, didn’t she threaten to “open the gates to the underworld” and let the dead share their meals with the living? We can’t live with this kind of deep memory and can’t live without memory either, so what’s the solution?

The community of outcasts and assorted spiritual personalities, Bari included, that Barghouthi brings to life in The Blue Light, a rich, sometimes wild, creation of fiction and memoir, is a brilliant backdrop against which he, through his narrator, is able to navigate a personal crisis of identity within the cultural and historical crisises of his people. In a foreign country, with a foreign language, and a sage with a vocabulary of mysterious provocations and commands, he inches toward self-understanding. Along the way, there’s a plenitude of wisdom and insight for anyone travelling alongside him.

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah and published by Seagull Books.

Echo has no compass: Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah

Echo has no compass: we trace each other’s dermatomes

No ecstasy without betrayal: not all who live in flames are saints

Great art needs no nation: in memory country size is one

Great nations need great art: soliloquy a mother tongue

— from “Footnotes to a Song”

It was not until I sat down to write this review—in so much as I yet feel myself capable of calling my scribbled thoughts about poetry a review—that I realized I’m following a piece about Ghassan Zaqtan’s latest novella, Where the Bird Disappeared, with a look at the latest collection of poetry by Fady Joudah, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. I came to Joudah first as a translator of Zaqtan’s poetry so I was not unaware of the concurrence. But I am typically reading at least two books of poetry and two books of prose at any given time, so the crossover is never so obviously bound, thus it is only now that I’ve become aware that the titles of both books include a form of the verb to disappear. A timely happenstance. However, although it is impossible to underestimate the importance Ghassan Zaqtan’s influence on an entire generation of Arab poets, Joudah included, the experience offered by the latter’s work is distinctly his own.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator and physician living in Houston, Texas. If I was conscious of the fact that he is a doctor, I don’t think it really registered or made its presence known in scattered poems I’ve encountered in the past. But his medical profession and scientific curiosity comes through in his work, along with a love of art, literature and nature. So does the legacy of war, destruction and conflict in the Middle East, and the varieties of experience of exile. His poetic territory is wide; his passage through it is intimate and acutely observed. As poet Mary Szybist contends in her praise for this “intensely vulnerable book,” Joudah is:

forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth, and dream where false imagined boundaries—of gender, nation, family—fray and unfold, and there are possibilities other than ‘to go mad among the mad / or go it alone’. . . (his) gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage, and grief are fully alive here.

The physician’s attention is very much evident in the early poems in Footnotes. “Progress Notes,” for instance, opens with the poet’s assessment of his own asymmetrical visage:

My left eye is smaller than my right,
my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly
aligned like Muslims in prayer.
My lips an accordion. Each sneeze
a facial thumbprint. One corner
of my mouth hangs downward when I want
to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps
or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting
that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush
in a young beauty’s face without thinking
it could be a fever, a malar rash,
a butterfly announcing a wolf.

before moving on to find a future echo in noted in one of the cadavers in his anatomy classroom:

But the colonel on table nineteen
with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through
his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit
were there skull cracks to condemn the house
of death, no shattered glass in the brain,
only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed
in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely.
He had the most beautiful muscles
of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged,
zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred.
Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling
had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed.
Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance,
he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war.
I had come across that which will end me, ex-
tend me, at least once, without knowing it.

Medical and medicinal imagery continues to resurface routinely throughout the collection, woven into both the political and the personal (which are never mutually exclusive here) infusing both with an intimate humanity:

The hour of the grackle, and a mother
not menopausal, solitary with endgame lung

tumor in a foreign country
and what makes one foreign:

she hasn’t seen her son for three or five
exilic or immigrant years,

citizen or national stints, a keyword
a thrombus dislodges

in heart or head
for infarction’s infraction

—from “The Hour of the Grackle”

Although much of Footnotes reflects the poet’s specific experience in America (“Palestine, Texas” is a telling, gently ironic send-up of the tendency of the same place names to occur so ubiquitously across the American landscape that they lose resonance with any original roots), his concerns reach far beyond national boundaries. This is rendered most explicitly in the central section of Footnotes, “Sagittal Views” which is the result of a collaboration between Joudah and his friend, Syrian Kurdish poet and translator, Golan Haji, who now lives in Paris. Drawing on their meetings, phone and email communications, all conducted in Arabic, Joudah translated and formed their words into chilling evocations of loss, sorrow, and resignation:

Over dinner we spoke of the game of recurrence dissolving into an old dog’s tail, loquacious desire far from the borders of the body, yet is the body’s. What’s inside and doesn’t come out to skin or what’s outside and doesn’t touch us. Victims, we told ourselves, will inherit the future one day, but souls will linger distant from redemption. Don’t follow the signage and keep your eyes on the phrase. News of the explosion will hang around. The hell of pictures on the web. Faces of the dead on Facebook will wait for your walk home. A woman who awakened your first lust when you were a kid was killed in the morning while talking to her sister on the phone. First a blast then stillness. You were late to dinner. You had lost your way to the restaurant. You couldn’t have known she had just died, and what you thought were Klee’s paintings in the gallery clawing your afternoon nerves was her calling your name one last time.

—from “After Wine”

Poetry, at its best, invites re-engagement. Demands it, even. I was so enamoured with the anatomy of Joudah’s wordplay that, on my first passage through Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, I was so intrigued to see where his wonderings would lead that I did not linger as I might have on another initial journey. I read this book with an unexpected urgency. But as I returned to it with an eye to sorting out my responses, I encountered new depths, new heights of emotion. And at times in the seemingly simplest passages. For me, the prose poems—“Horses,” “An Algebra Come Home,” and “Alignment” to name a few—hold a particular power, but the entire collection is so strong, so varied, that there are boundless rewards to be found in the generosity of Fady Joudah’s pained and passionate poetics.

Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is published by Milkweed Editions.