Twice a River
After studying our faces for months
My son knows to beam
Is the thing to do
He’ll spend years deciphering love
The injustice or the illusion
Having been brought into this world
Volition is an afterthought
What will I tell him
About land and language and burial
Places my father doesn’t speak of
Perhaps my mother knows
In the movie the dispossessed cannot return
Even when they’re dead
The journalist felt
Rebuke for not having thought
It mattered or for having thought it mattered too much
Will I tell my son all nations arise after mass
Murder that I don’t know
Any national anthem by heart can’t sing
‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’?
I should turn to flowers and clouds instead
Though this has already been said well
It is night
When he gazes
Into his mother’s eyes at bath time
Qais and Layla she announces after a long day’s work
He giggles with his shoulders not knowing
He’s installing a web
In his amygdala or whichever
Places science thinks love dwells
Even love is a place? O son
Love no country and hate none
And remember crimes sometimes
Immortalise their victims
Other times the victimizer
Remember how you used to gaze at the trampoline
Leaves on their branches?
Don’t believe the sound of the sea
In a seashell believe the sea
The endless trope and don’t say
Much about another’s language
Learn to love it
While observing silence
For the dead and the living in it
FADY JOUDAH
****
I first read this week’s poem in A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, edited by Naomi Foyle. This dual-text anthology makes a fine introduction to the range and depth of the poetry being written by contemporary Palestinian writers of all genders and from across the globe.
Many poets in A Blade of Grass will be new to anglophone readers, with the exception of the much-loved and mourned national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, whose words provide the anthology’s title, and Fady Joudah himself. The latter’s work as a translator has been central to bringing Darwish and others to wider attention. While 30 years younger, Joudah accesses in his original poetry a similar tone of quiet, generous authority – which doesn’t rule out an interest in technical experiment. You can appreciate the innovative dimension of his craft in the riverine, unpunctuated syntax of Twice a River, and in the series Textu.
The title Twice a River has many associations, famous philosophers and actual rivers included. I connect it with Joudah’s fording of Arabic and English languages, and with “the dead and living” (and the dead who are living?) evoked in the poem’s richly ambiguous last line. Identity itself might be imagined as a doubled river. The American-born, variously travelled son of Palestinian refugees, Joudah has described his exile as “a lineage”.
Because the speaker’s little son, and his bright, trusting, responsive face and body are evoked throughout the poem, we get a strong sense of the familial sources of the moral values explored. Psychoanalytical convention is revised and reborn through the pictorial representation of the loving looks mirrored between parent and child. These encounters unite familial and erotic love, as when the mother introduces the story of Qais and Layla – another doubled river. Perhaps it asks the question, tacitly, how the forces of love’s opposite could become so prevalent in human affairs.
There are many themes woven together in these stanzas: Joudah is a poet who combines scholarly disciplines, medicine and literature, besides the national cultures he traverses. Neuroscience complicates his interrogation: what of “free will” if the brain decides on the action before we begin it?
But perhaps the dominant theme is an interrogation of allegiance to place. How do the dispossessed honour their origins? Is repossession possible? What memories should be passed on to the next generation? “What will I tell him / About land and language and burial / Places my father doesn’t speak of / Perhaps my mother knows …” These are not simply questions about historical knowledge, of course, but its place on the moral spectrum.
I asked Joudah about the movie in stanza four. He told me it was Shadow of Absence. The journalist mentioned, responding to the screening at a small film festival, had thought in his own confident sense of place and home, “the longing to be buried in a land you call your own a bit excessive”.
If empathy is one of the poem’s moral essentials, as this incident suggests, understanding across frontiers can be problematic, too, with inherent interpretative dangers: “And remember crimes sometimes // Immortalise their victims / Other times the victimizer …” Perhaps the lived experience, the firsthand witness of what is frail but resistant and tangible, like the “trampoline / Leaves on their branches”, might provide anchorage?
There’s a particularly significant turn in the poem a little earlier, where the reference to the amygdala provokes the anguished-yet-humorous rhetorical question, “Even love is a place?” and then the achingly felt advice, which seems also a plea to the speaker’s self, “O son / Love no country and hate none …”
Could that be possible, I wondered, hoping that the beginnings of an answer might simply be to open up whatever we mean by “country” and introduce the more easily accepted, pluralist conception of the sea into the interpretation. Rivers are parochial, but the sea into which they run is global – there is only one. Towards the end of the poem, the sea has become attainable, provided it’s not the illusion created by the shell and the ear, their limited and actually false interpretation.
- Fady Joudah’s latest collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, is newly published by Milkweed Editions, and is reviewed here. Twice a River was originally published in Joudah’s collection Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).