[...]. Fady Joudah. Milkweed Press, 2024. 100 pages.
I forget Palestine/ has a kind way of remembering/ those who mark it for slaughter,/ and those who mark it for life./ I write for the future/ because my present is demolished./ I fly to the future/ to retrieve my demolished present/ as a legible past. To see/ what isn’t hard to see/ in a world that doesn’t.
So opens [...], a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry and Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize by critically-acclaimed Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah, who wrote and completed the book in a period of about ten weeks, between October and December of 2023. “In November I knew I had a book, and surrendered to it,” Joudah disclosed in a February 2024 interview with The Yale Review: “It kept me somewhat sane, hopeful to dive into a future where the words I write would outlive the powers that wanted them dead.” And, justly and rightfully said, this is the true effect of Joudah’s urgent new book. The collected poems reveal themselves, without obscurity or ambiguity, to be direct confrontations of the ongoing genocide enacted upon the Palestinian people, and the century-long history of violence, suppression, settler-colonialism, grief, and terror. “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 on for a long time./ Coming to a body near me, and going on my body,” Joudah writes in his long-form poem, I Seem As if I Am: Ten Maqams, which arrives a little less than halfway through the book. It is through these poems, the majority sharing the collection’s titular ellipses, that Joudah resists the silence of the colonizer’s historical record and transcribes, in articulate language and beautiful image, the heart of Palestinian life, survival, strength, and love.
Artfully done in just over a hundred pages, Joudah’s language masterfully oscillates between the scathing and the tender; flowing freely into the vacuum between violence and joy where human life finds itself: in small, intimate beats, like a breath to fill the lungs. His attention to the close, daily details of being alive allows the book to feel as though it itself is a living object. It is not only a book about war and destruction but a book about radical love and hope, about the longevity of the Earth in the face of complete destruction, about language and liberation: ”Who here has not lived/ the passing/ of all thinking/ through the language of love?” This love is desperately vital to be witnessed, known, and remembered.
Joudah wields metaphor like a mirror, reflecting to the world undeniable humanism. He imagines his dead dog coming back into the world as a person who is unable to afford their insulin. He recounts an experience in which he returns a frog who had wandered into the house to the garden and then cannot stop crying. He evokes loving with our feet; being reborn like cicadas; he writes an ode to the onion. He imagines the daily life of children currently in Gaza: “In Gaza, a girl and her brother/ rescued their fish/ from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle/ its tiny bowl/ didn’t shatter.” The delicacy of this small glass fish bowl, still intact despite the magnitude of devastation that surrounds it, creates a pinnacle and memorable image of perseverance. Joudah’s juxtaposition and use of dichotomy– whether it appears as the violent/fragile, the child/empire, glass bowl/airstrikes, garden frog/grief– presents to the reader the utter and jarring absurdity of understanding that war/life happens all at once and all around us, all the time, articulated in careful poetic strokes of image.
Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and spent his adolescence growing up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, before returning to the United States to study medicine. He currently works and lives in Houston with his family, practicing internal medicine. In 2007 he was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and has since been a recipient of a PEN award, a Banipal Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. In addition to his own work as poet and writer, Joudah has translated several poetry collections of Palestinian poets from Arabic. He is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. [...] comes as his seventh poetry collection after The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, and Tethered to the Stars. And it is in […] that this seasoned poet explores and prods the edges of language in the face of insurmountable suffering—the openings where language can no longer bear to continue to repeat or explain itself. The importance of trying to write it anyway. The importance of reading it anyway—of reading, and listening, and hearing those openings where silence cannot be, or should not be, translated into something digestible. “I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination,” Joudah says. “The text of the poem already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”
Throughout the course of the collection, Joudah speaks to a variety of figures. He utilizes the ‘you’ in constant metamorphosis. Sometimes to a sole figure: a lover, himself in the past, a fictitious child who very well may be real at this very moment; sometimes to a vast audience: a people, a country, a media outlet, a government, a military, a world. There is no looking away from Joudah’s words when he speaks to you. There is no speaking through the ellipsis:
Why don’t you denounce
what you ask me to denounce.
We can do it together on the count of three.
Or you should go first
on account of your obsession
with my going first, your grand inquisitor role
isn’t for doves, your better angel
is calling you
to let go
of holding on and to hold on
to letting go: your misguided vengeance,
your unequaled pain,
why on my body?
Joudah articulates here an addressee that all at once transforms itself into a complacent audience, into Western media, into a willingly ignorant populace, into an empirical regime, into a ‘you’ figure implicit in perpetrating violence through false empathy and false-martyrdom. We as readers and perhaps as addressees feel the curtain come down between the figures on both sides of these pages as Joudah begs the essential question that critiques a particular cultural self-effacing guilt of the passive witness; striking and successful in its change of address and pronoun as the book transforms its conversations and participants over its scope.
The speaker transforms from one poem to the next: the power of the ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘we’ moves in parallel lines to the evolving recipient, like the dance of two magnets whose flipped sides have created an invisible sphere of energy between them, at times reckoning and resisting the other. Inside the macro-scale of apartheid and suppression, Joudah’s speakers identify the love stories that appear through intimate or micro spaces—a bedroom, a kitchen, a window. These elements then build themselves back up again into a great plea, or song– now transcending the containment of simply ‘I’ and ‘you’ into a cosmic reckoning to the Earth itself upon which we live; upon which this book and its context occurs. This yearning can only be articulated through clear and absolute insistence on the necessity of language. On the hope of clarity and truth expressed through language. A collective song is whispering beneath the writing on the pages, ringing vibrations into the hands of the reader holding the book. In the hands of the world from which the conditions were created, art, song, and poetry must persist. “Love. life. Language./ Life. Love. Language./ Language. Love. Life./ Musical chairs./ The love I wanted to be, I wanted to be/ the questions my heart no longers asks./ The language I wanted to be, I will be/ after I’m done talking./ The life I wanted to live/ as one and not only,” Joudah writes, in the tenth maqam of I Seem As if I Am: Ten Maqams. Joudah asserts with lyrical integrity the beating heart of his work is life, not death; not acceptance of an ending or conclusion, but an insistence of survival-hood, of all that may come next; of what has yet to be said, to be born, to grow out of the earth. It is a work that perhaps will never be finished or completed, but instead moves and breathes as a document; another layer upon a palimpsest for Palestinian future.
Despite the ceasefire deal announced in January of 2025, still at this very moment Israel is relentlessly continuing its bombardment and starvation of Palestine. It is set to be completed in three stages, ending in a reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, which could take decades, whilst negotiations are only continuously delayed by Israel, aided by the American government. As the future unfurls forward, we are tasked, as people alive and living in this world, with our witnessing and listening to this present, to this past. To the past that will soon belong to this future. “Our bodies are real,” Joudah writes. “Our ghosts are here./ Where did you leave your ghosts?”
Alana Craib (they/she) is a writer and artist from upstate New York. Her work is often concerned with matters of love, green burial, queer bodies, mothers and grandmothers, ghosts and memory, the kitchen, and the bog. Their writing has most recently been featured in Cleaver Magazine, the 2024 Brooklyn Poets Staff Picks Reading, The Plentitudes Journal, and Motif. Alana is a recipient of the 2024 Andrea K. Willison Poetry Prize. They hold a BA in Creative Writing and Literary History from Sarah Lawrence College. Alana currently lives in Providence, RI, where she is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Brown University. In their free time, Alana enjoys playing on the guitar, collecting sentimental objects, collage, and dozing. You can find more work at alana-craib.com.