Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Last week, I reviewed a number of essays in the recently published Arab Women's Lives Retold, edited by Nawar Al-Hassan Golley. This week, I take up the same volume to concentrate on Arab poetry as discussed in Keith Feldman's essay "Poetic Geography."

This deals with " [i]nternal insurgency in Arab American autobiographical space" and explores the particular production of one form of confrontation - an articulation of Arab American autobiographical poetry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Feldman focuses on two women poets, Etel Adnan and Suheir Hammad.

Adnan's poem, "The Indian Never had a Horse" is about the western regions of the United States. She tries to write "through the images of her own geographical location" which is California where she now lives. But such a location serves "not only to represent Adnan's own particular life experience. It also works as a setting for the movement" between the destabilising "surrealism of the cosmos and a genealogy of interracial insurgency in the face of national exceptionalism and imperial violence."

The American frontier, the author suggests, becomes the site where the dwindling Indian population and the exiled Arab woman can come together. From the standpoint of an interracial insurgency, Feldman claims, "the violence running rampant in the Arab world can be confronted concurrently with localized American-based history of racial violence."

Feldman analyses Adnan's poem "The Indian Never had a Horse", using musical forms. The first movement describes a group of cowboys in Arizona, rubbing "each other's/ tales against their boots and throwing / their dead in the creek."

In contrast to the violence the cowboys are celebrating, we read about a chief of an Indian tribe during the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century and Malcolm X sitting "having lunch on / riverbanks / throwing stones..."

The second movement draws together counter- national concerns into the interracial framework. It comes at the end of one of the poems in collection:

from the persistent Mediterranean
to the persistent Pacific
we cut roads with our feet
share baggage
and food
running always one second
ahead of the running of
time.

Feldman then goes on to Suheir Hammad's work and explains that whereas Adnan and her generation lived through the violent history of Palestinian displacement after 1967, Hammad's poetry emerges in a contemporary context where social and textual strategies have been refashioned to confront US policies of minoritisation and infringement on civil and human rights.

Like Adnan's work, Hammad's poems grapple with the diasporic Arab experience recontextualised in a nation where the Arabs are minoritised. Like Adnan's, Hammad's poems articulate a feminist politics around notions of women's voice and representation, the privileging of sexuality in the midst of the main stream subjugation, and the unequal power structure in relations between men and women.

In her collection Born Palestinian, Born Black, published in 1996, Hammad writes:

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?