Reading Suheir Hammad’s ZaatarDiva and Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque

This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side. I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization—not Israeli, but Jewish—who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.)

Almost ten years separate Born Palestinian, Born Black from ZaatarDiva, and the poems are correspondingly more mature, more subtle, more emotionally complex and more technically accomplished. The anger is still there, but it is tempered by sadness, by regret, by a desire not to have to be so angry, as Hammad says in “palestinian ‘98.”

i did not want to write this
type of poem again poem
places political before beautiful
but swallowing anger burned
a hole in my soul this poem
has kept me up this poem
will not lend itself easy
to revisionist history
nor to sleep

this poem begging to be
beautiful poised
articulate this poem
palestinian and too late

Most of all, though, the anger in ZaatarDiva is tempered by love. Suheir Hammad has written some gorgeous love poems. Here is the last stanza of “whole hands”

and his hands cupped
have caught me as
i fell drop by glisten
fingers coaxing my
arrival whole

Not all of ZaatarDiva hits the mark, though. At times, Hammad relies too heavily on technique. In “land,” for instance, the syncopated rhythm created by her enjambed lines cannot mask the fact that the language goes no deeper into the metaphor from which the poem is supposed to emerge than its rather cliché surface:

his approach
to love he said
was that of a farmer

most love like
hunters and like
hunters most kill
what they desire

he tills
soil through toes
nose in the wet
earth he waits
prays to the gods
and slowly harvests
thankful

Suheir Hammad is in many ways a poetic daughter of June Jordan, who was one of my earliest teachers and has remained a profound influence on me throughout my own writing career. One of the lessons I learned from June was that a poet cannot write political poetry without being responsible and accountable for her or his own position in the politics he or she is writing about. Towards the end of “The Bombing of Baghdad,” from Kissing God Goodbye, a poem that is relentless in it critique of the US bombing of Iraq during the first Gulf War, Jordan writes the following:

And in the aftermath of carnage
perpetrated in my name
how should I dare to offer you my hand
how shall I negotiate the implications of my shame?

In “no cover up,” a poem in which she accepts responsibility as a member of the human community for “what we have/done” to each other, Hammad gestures in the direction of the kind of responsibility Jordan takes in her poem. Jordan, however, takes responsibility for belonging to a specific nation that has committed horrible and horrifying acts in her name, despite the fact that she has stood against those acts with everything she has in her. Hammad, on the other hand, universalizes her responsibility, and while “no cover up” is a powerful poem that speaks a powerful truth, the lumping together of all the atrocities people have visited upon each other throughout the ages into one mass atrocity inevitably dehistoricizes and therefore renders invisible the individual experiences of the people who lived through and died from those atrocities.

Though she was born here, Hammad claims for herself a place in Palestine as a Palestinian—as well she should—and she writes passionately and persuasively in her poems against the dehistoricization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, especially the way supporters of Israel try to represent the Palestinians as ahistorical, but with one exception, which I will get to in a moment, she does not claim for herself a politicized place here, in the United States, as an American, in the way that Jordan does in the quote above. And let me clear that I am not talking here about patriotism or nationalism, at least not in any simplistic sense, but rather about how poets situate themselves in their poetry in relation to the place where they live, the place that formed them as they grew up, the place that gave them the language they use, and so on. She begins to think along these lines in “first writing since,” her poem written in the aftermath of September 11^th

yet when people sent emails saying, this was bound to happen, lets
not forget u.s. transgressions, for half a second i felt resentful.
hold up with that, cause I live here, these are my friends and fam,
and it could have been me in those buildings, and we’re not bad
people, do not support america’s bullying.
can I just have a half second to feel bad?

In the stanza before the one I just quoted she talks about “dead iraqi children, the dead in Nicaragua. the dead in Rwanda,” but she does not take on the complexities of what it means to her that she lives in the country she holds responsible for many of the things she writes against, where the aforementioned dead “had to vie with fake sport wrestling for […] attention.” Nor, frankly, does she have to. It is neither my place nor my desire to tell Suheir Hammad what kinds of poems she should write. The ones she has written stand on their own and speak for themselves, but it is precisely because they do so with such power that I am interested in what she would make of the complexities I just talked about, and that is why I bring it up here.

Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque is, as I said, a very different book. Quiet and introspective, it takes you on a journey, that begins in “the desert [where you came], illiterate, spirit-ridden/intending to starve” (“Gallery) and ends in the graveyard where “the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me” (“July”). What happens in between the intention to starve and the becoming of that which the sky can drink can perhaps best be described as a search, though the terrain of the search is internal rather than external. Indeed, the terrain outside the speaker’s interior landscape is represented primarily through allusion and the transformational power of metaphor, and is often refracted through the pieces of a fragmented and broken syntax that Ali weaves nonetheless into a music that is quite moving. These are the first four lines from “Agnes Martin”

Wetten to work here seen against the sky sandscape sandbox silent
Alone mind unleashed mouth a close open cave stone breathe
Stone whiten away sharp sky edge dusk blend down dark self edge
Thrown aloft five birds little surface wind lettered and fettered

I will not pretend to know what these lines “mean,” but there is something about the rhythm—no word has more than two syllables—and the alliteration that carries an emotional meaning in much the same way that a melody line does. Then add to that the fact that parts of each line—“Alone mind unleashed mouth,” “Wetten to work here seen against the sky,” “dusk blend down dark self edge”—read as if they were sentences pared down to the bare minimum and you have an impressionistic word-melody-portrait of what it feels like to be alone and feel yourself become one with nature.

I read The Far Mosque immediately after I finished ZaatarDiva and I was struck by what I saw as similarities not in the content of the poems, but in their technique, and this intrigued me. I have always found it unfortunate when writers, or artists of any sort for that matter, mistake technique for ideology or essentialize any given technique by insisting that it belongs irrevocably to any given ideology. Much of the free verse vs. formal verse debate, and all of its various permutations, has always seemed to me to be rooted in that mistake. Anyway, it struck me as I read The Far Mosque that, in terms of technique, there wasn’t much difference between these lines from Hammad’s “glitter girl”

know how a mirror breaks
seven years bad luck
breaks into shards sharp edge
glitter like blood
if you touch it
bleed bad luck

that’s what happens to girls
too when they get touched
get broken they break
i broke
into shards flowers into thorn
sharp edge pretty
blood and all

And the lines that I quoted from Ali’s “Agnes Martin” above, which I am going to relineate so that my point become clearer:

Wetten to work here
seen against the sky
sandscape sandbox silent

Alone mind unleashed mouth
a close open cave
stone breathe

Stone whiten away sharp sky edge
dusk blend down dark self edge

Thrown aloft five birds
little surface
wind lettered and fettered

My point is not that the techniques in the two poems are identical, but merely that they echo each other: the same paring away of articles and other function words, the same jamming together of words to create meaning through juxtaposition, the same grouping of rhythm and meaning into two and three beat units. And yet the poems themselves are so radically different in so many ways—though I suppose it is also possible to argue that the poems echo each other in terms of substance as well: each book is in some way about a search for wholeness, though Ali’s is much more explicitly spiritual, while Hammad’s focuses more on the physical and political.

Most of the poems in Ali’s book are less obscure than “Agnes Martin,” and several are ghazals or variations on the ghazal form, or they make use of the free-associative discontinuity that is one of the conventions of the ghazal form. Indeed, the whole book can be seen as a meditation on the relationship between unity and discontinuity that is at the center of the ghazal form. Since I have been for the past two years translating classical Persian poetry, I found this aspect of The Far Mosque delightful and intriguing and so I’d like in closing to offer you the poem “Rain,” which is the poem that comes closest to following the rules of the ghazal form:

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.
No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:
“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.
The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.
If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.
The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.