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Washington Report, April 2006, page 78 Books ZaatarDiva The Lives of Rain The Neverfield Poem Unfortunately It Was Paradise:
Selected Poems Reviewed by Matt Horton
IF “a nation is as great as its ode,” as Mahmoud Darwish writes in “Mural,” one of many poems included in Unfortunately It Was Paradise—a masterfully translated collection from Palestine’s most famous poet that also includes selections from Fewer Roses, I See What I Want To See, Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? and A Bed for the Stranger—then Palestine is a great nation indeed. Darwish expresses the pain of millions of refugees who live “a present not embraced by the past….who travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing.” He embodies the spirit of the intifada, where “we flash victory signs in the darkness so that the darkness may glitter,” embraces the prisoner who is “accused of what is within us,” knows “what the dove means when it lays eggs on the rifle’s muzzle,” dares to speak of love in the face of tragedy, and exclaims “you are my reality, I am your question.” In the tradition of Darwish, young Palestinian women in the Diaspora are taking up the mantle of modern Palestinian poetry. Nathalie Handal, a “poet in violet solitude” riding “sailboats across the world’s heart,” beautifully describes the continuing agony of exile of her generation of refugees, who should “no longer be sheets flying to nowhere.” In “The Neverfield Poem,” she exudes beauty in the face of exile and finds a homeland in poetry. There, despite her uneasiness as a refugee, she obviously is at home in her language, so natural in describing her shifting state that she seems at peace. The poem reads like a love song to Mahmoud Darwish, conscious of his influence and ready to inherit the weight of responsibility she is assuming. Her mad and frantic verse exhibits a unique sanity in an insane world. In The Lives of Rain, Handal stands, weeps and celebrates as her poems “travel and move from one continent to the next, move, to be whole.” The poet seamlessly weaves her experiences in Europe, Latin America and the Arab world through this “love song in the back pocket of a martyr.” Her travels revolve around her current home, New York, where the rain gathers in puddles, ebbs, flows and disperses into lives of love, beauty and pain. Having traveled the world via her poetry, Brooklyn-raised and Tony-Award winning poet Suheir Hammad has published the long-awaited follow-up to her 1996 collections, Born Palestinian, Born Black and Drops of This Story (Harlem River Press). In the minimalist ZaatarDiva, a deeply spiritual and maternal Hammad wastes not a single word in tightly wrapped flower bud poems that blossom in the reader’s mind, where her words give voice to unconscious thought. With roots as a spoken-word poet, Hammad’s use of popular language to describe and connect complex subjects and express the intimate can only be described as genius. Strong in her weakness, her raw intimacy defeats armies. The endless love that provides the backbone for Hammad’s work transcends and eclipses simple politics to pure and beautiful revolution. Matt Horton is communications director for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. AET RATING SYSTEM*
*AET will not carry any books with a rating of fewer than 3 coffeepots. |
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