Polynational Affairs of the Heart

Abstract

TevíevT Polynational Affairs of the Heart Kevin Prüfer So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 Taha Muhammad Ali Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin Copper Canyon http://www.coppercanyonpress.org 280 pages; paper, $18.00 During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, when he was seventeen, Taha Muhammad Ali's rural village came under heavy bombardment. Like many, he and his family fled to Lebanon, where they lived for a year. When they returned, they found their village leveled by Israeli forces and the neighboring lands handed off to Jewish collective settlements. Since then, he has lived in Nazareth and, with his sons, now runs a little souvenir shop near the Church ofthe Annunciation, selling trinkets to Christian tourists. He's only informally educated, having studied classic and modernArabic texts at night when he got off work, acquiring along the way enough English to read closely the works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Poe, and the English Romantic poets. Unlike much Arabic poetry, Ali's work mixes both high and low diction, offering seemingly direct free verse narratives in crafty, deceptively plainspoken lines. This spare series of poems deals in recollection and allegory, always confronting the troubles of recent Israeli/Palestinian history and the difficult position ofthe artist, who must both witness and find truth in war, loss, pain, and atrocity. One gets the sense in these poems thatAli writes not merely from his own recollections, but tries, instead , to couch within his phrases and memories a sort of collective sadness, frustration, and sometimes self-defeating rage that belongs to the masses ofdisplaced Palestinians. When this approach works, it's harrowing, as in "Exodus," which begins: The street is empty as a monk's memory, and faces explode in the flames like acorns— and the dead crown the horizon and doorways. No vein can bleed more than it already has, no scream will rise higher than it's already risen. We will not leave! This poem continues through a series of images of destruction—cars loaded "with honey and hostages ," the pounding of guns—always returning to the poem's refrain: "We will not leave." Even as the village falls into min and the "air itself has been seized, Ali's dead voices hold fast. At last, sadly, inevitably, they're blocking the exits and offering their blessings to the imposter, praying, petitioning Almighty God for our deaths. Elsewhere, Ali writes in a more confessional, elegiac mode, as in "Fooling the Killers," where he remembers Qasim, a ten-year old childhood friend he hasn't heard from since the war in 1948. The poem begins innocently enough, the poet asking, Qasim, I wonder now where you are... Are you alive with your poise, your cane, and memories? Did you marry? Do you have a tent of your own, and children? The poem quickly makes a surreal, then a tragic tum, however, at first suggesting Qasim may still be unchanged, a perpetual youth, a boy who managed to hide from the decades ofviolence "behind [his] mere ten years." Of course, by this point, we expect the worst has happened to Qasim, and Ali turns what at first seemed a romantic, possibly sentimental, poem into something deliberately unflinching: If, shamelessly, they killed you, I'm certain you fooled your killers, just as you managed to fool the years. For they never discovered your body at the edge of the road. It's Qasim's ability to die in hiding, his body never displayed to others as an example of victimhood, defeat, and the cost of war, that is, finally, his dubious victory. Such nuance, in which our common understanding of victory and defeat are called into question, finally characterizes much of this book. Ali's work mixes both high and low diction, offering seemingly direct free verse narratives in crafty, deceptively plainspoken lines. Curiously, this book gets its title not from one of Ali's many poems, but from the single short story included almost as a postscript at the back of the collection, a piece that comes as something of a surprise in a book which calls itself a "New and Selected Poems." The story is curiously...