Between Languages and Selves: Migratory Agency, Fragmentation and Representation in Suheir Hammad's breaking poems

Abstract

For a number of Palestinian-American authors such as Nathalie Handal, Lisa Suhair Majaj, and Naomi Shihab Nye, the configuration of “poetry as homeland” dwells between the unspeakable pain of forced exile and the organic capabilities of language. Their poetry is thus the site of infinite tensions informed not only by this duality but also by their ambiguous location as hyphenated subjects in the United States. Among such authors, Suheir Hammad stands out for her daring, experimental expression of these tensions, which are at the heart of her recent poetry collection, breaking poems (2008). This collection speaks to the process of fragmentation of language, identity, and belonging from within as it tests the demarcation line between word and sound, enunciation and silence. Framed by tensions between forms of breaking and acts of verbal reconstruction, my paper explores experimental poetic strategies of confrontation with the legacy of grief, occupation, and silencing in breaking poems. To this end, it probes the fluid movement of the poetic self between histories, ethnicities, and languages. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Juan Bruce-Novoa's study of interlingualism, and Michael Dowdy's notion of migratory agency, my paper follows the poetic persona in her wanderings in the labyrinth of the poem-body-word, to achieve a better understanding of her transformative practices aiming at creating interstitial and interlingual spaces. Such spaces, I argue, represent hyphenated interventions into what Hammad calls the “emperor's mission” and language, where the exilic self juggles Arab and American cultural contexts to create cross-cultural poetic and linguistic structures projecting silenced aspects of Arab-American culture.