{"id":29040,"date":"2023-10-23T09:15:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T07:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=29040"},"modified":"2023-10-23T09:15:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-23T07:15:49","slug":"what-we-write-about-when-we-arabs-write-about-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/what-we-write-about-when-we-arabs-write-about-love\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Write About When We (Arabs) Write About Love"},"content":{"rendered":"
Eman Quotah reviews a new anthology of love poems of Arab poets writing in English, either in diaspora or in their home countries \u2014 many of whom are born in 1980 or later. “That overwhelming youth reflects more than patterns of Arab migration to Anglophone countries.”<\/h5>\n


\nWe Call to the Eye & the Night: <\/em>Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage
\n<\/em>Edited by Hala Alyan & Zeina Hashem Beck
\nPersea Books<\/a> 2023
\nISBN 9780892555673<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eman Quotah<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
We Call to the Eye & the Night<\/em> is published by Persea<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the college I attended, one poetry professor famously asked students to, \u201cWrite a happy love poem\u201d as their first assignment in her poetry-writing class. Most students considered the prompt tricky. Writing about unrequited love, unhealthy ardor, broken hearts, and failed passions seemed so much easier to jaded 17- to 22-year-olds than writing about love that completes us and bathes us in contentment.<\/p>\n

But of course, love poetry offers more than two registers; experiences of love encompass much more than happiness and sadness. In their new anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage<\/em>, editors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck have assembled poems that tackle a striking range of leitmotifs: desire and betrayal, heartbreak and healing, passion and possession, crushes and obsession, beginnings and endings, lust and loss, butterflies and self-doubt, steadiness and serendipity, nostalgia and regret.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Hedy Habra\u2019s \u201cThe Camisole,\u201d the feel of silk fabric suggests yearning for a lover who may or may not arrive. In Rewa Zeinati\u2019s \u201cthe ways we learn about love\u201d\u2014which begins, \u201cMother \u00a0 \u00a0 wants to break\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 father\/in half\u201d\u2014we learn the origin story of traumatic familial love. Marlin M. Jenkins\u2019 rollicking and humorous praise poem \u201cOde to my Uni-brow,\u201d centers self- and ancestor-love in a world that does not guarantee either.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jenkins, who was born and raised in Detroit to a Black father and Lebanese mother, writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026 praise to the hairiness my Lebanese
\n<\/span>family shares, praise be to owning what may keep
\n<\/span>the TSA\u2019s eyes on us, though god-willing not their hands
\n<\/span>(and fuck the TSA while we\u2019re at it), and praise be
\n<\/span>to pride and to the Muslim man at the gas station
\n<\/span>who asks if I am Muslim, too, and though I am not, praise
\n<\/span>to being seen as a brother \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Featuring work by dozens of living writers with Arab roots \u2014 both those living in diaspora and those living in the lands of their origin \u2014 <\/span>We Call to the Eye & the Night<\/span><\/i> was conceived by Alyan and Hashem Beck as \u201ca record of and a tribute to some of the wonderful Arab-heritage poets writing in English today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some contributions, like Jenkins\u2019, wear identity on their sleeves and others do not, a testament to the diverse ways contemporary poets lean into their Arabness or choose not to, in individual poems and in their work as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

Diving into the book, I wondered if its focus on love was truly central or merely incidental \u2014 a way to streamline the selection of poems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As the editors explain in their introduction, they quickly agreed, over WhatsApp, on their theme. \u201cWe were both at moments in our lives that called for the sustenance of love poems,\u201d they write.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although, or because, the anthology\u2019s authors are all poets of Arab descent, Alyan and Hashem Beck refuse to draw a line between \u201cArabness and love,\u201d or between <\/span>who<\/span><\/i> is in the anthology and <\/span>what<\/span><\/i> they are writing about.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, we realize there are endless expressions and words for love in Arabic \u2026 but we\u2019d be forcing it, pandering to an Orientalist gaze, if we proselytized about love and Arabic,\u201d they write.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their instinct not to pander is noble and correct. But in their succinct (just a page and a half) introduction, the editors miss an opportunity to contextualize the contents of the anthology for the reader: Why this group of poets, why now, and why love poems?<\/span><\/p>\n

Not out of a need to justify their decisions \u2014 it\u2019s fine for editors to publish what they want and what they personally love. But rather as an attempt to put forward a unifying theory about the power of the love poem in the hands of these specific poets, a theory with which the reader may agree or disagree but might serve to guide their reading of this eclectic collection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naming <\/span>We Call to the Eye & the Night<\/span><\/i> a book of <\/span>love poems<\/span><\/i> (rather than poems <\/span>about<\/span><\/i> love) does more than suggest a theme; it suggests a connection to poetic tradition. Love poetry\u2019s family tree, in both Anglophone and Arabophone literature, casts a large shadow. Its many branches stem from the poetic traditions that have influenced English and Arabic verse over centuries (French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, to name a few).<\/span><\/p>\n

In her ghazal \u201cA Lover\u2019s Quarrel with the World,\u201d contributor Deema K. Shehabi writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

History gallops over the margins of your page, what\u2019s a story, but its plural all over the world?
\n<\/span>Arabic lulls ageless in your ears, but to you what most matters is temporal in this world.
\n<\/span>The Sheikh with a gold pen in his pocket, the girl lathering her father\u2019s head with musk
\n<\/span>And you\u2014pearling over Whitman\u2019s poems\u2014all have a lover\u2019s quarrel with the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would not be Orientalizing or essentializing to point out that the ghazal form Shehabi employs, an important and beloved poetic form in English today, wended its way to Anglophone poetry from Arabic via Urdu. In Arabic, the ghazal is a poem of love; the word derives from a root that can mean \u201cto flirt.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And it would not, I think, be explaining too much to discuss how love poetry\u2019s lineage in Arabic brings to mind, say, Darwish, Adonis, Nizar Qabbani, Qays wa Layla, Umm Kulthum\u2019s interpretations of Ahmed Rami\u2019s lyrics, and even the elegies of Al Khansaa. Or how the love poem\u2019s roots in English are firmly planted in, for example, poets as varied as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, not to mention translations of Sappho and Rumi, to name just a few predecessors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Each poet in this anthology, to be sure, writes from and within their own idiosyncratic literary heritage. But readers\u2019 understanding of many of the poems can deepen if we are given an opening to see how the poets simultaneously root their verse in established traditions of love poetry while carving out new ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, Mariam Gomaa\u2019s provocative \u201cTell My White Boyfriend I Will Always Leave\u201d is a love poem to an imaginary, fleeting lover, an Arab man who is \u201call nose, thick lashes, stubborn hair\u2014\/who in the sunlit afternoon will call out ya\u20193asal.\u201d It\u2019s a poem about leaving \u2014 and the constant threat of loss that comes with any love \u2014 that is also about staying true to double-edged cultural expectations and oneself. Gomaa writes, \u201cWhen I reach for him, I reach for everyone\/who loved me once.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We Call to the Eye & the Night<\/span><\/i> doesn\u2019t claim to define the modern love poem. And it\u2019s definitely not \u2014 and I mean this as a compliment \u2014 a book from which engaged couples might easily select readings for their wedding ceremonies. For good or for ill, the burden of supplying love poems for Western weddings remains firmly on Rumi\u2019s broad shoulders.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, as Alyan and Hashem Beck intended, the anthology works well as a roll call of some of the exciting Anglophone poets of Arab heritage writing and publishing now \u2014 in numbers far greater than there were just a decade ago. While I was familiar with the work of many of the poets here, a few others were new to me. Collected in one volume, the poems create a lively conversation, whether one reads them in order or by dipping in and out of the book.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Take the concrete poems \u201cAnanas\u201d and \u201cQalb,\u201d respectively by poets Hajer Almosleh and Silvia El Helo, who use the limitations of the shapes they\u2019ve chosen to very different ends. Almosleh\u2019s pineapple, though prickly, comes to define romantic love. El Helo\u2019s modified heart shape distorts memory and feeling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Based on the birth dates in the contributors\u2019 notes, I estimate that about three-quarters of the poets were born in 1980 or later. That overwhelming youth reflects more than patterns of Arab migration to Anglophone countries. Because of the spread of English-language media and the Internet, we\u2019ve also seen, over the past decade or so, more non-diasporic Arab writers writing in English. The past five to 10 years have also brought sea changes in Anglophone literature and publishing \u2014 which, while it remains very white, has shown greater interest than ever before in nurturing, publishing, and championing Arab writers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anthologies of Arab writing in English published in the early aughts and the 2010s exclusively featured Arab Americans or a mix of Anglophone and translated work. Today, editors like Alyan, Hashem Beck, and Elias Jahshan of <\/span>This Arab Is Queer<\/span><\/i> can bring together a large number of writers of Arab heritage from all over the world who write primarily in English.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what makes putting Arab-heritage writers in a volume together necessary or compelling?<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, the answer comes from an open mic I attended last year in Dearborn, Michigan, following the Arab American National Museum\u2019s Arab American Book Awards ceremony. Attending with my husband and kids (then ages 11 and 14), I wondered what they would think of the format. At open mics in the past, I\u2019d heard both amazing poetry and some real clunkers.<\/span><\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t have worried. The level of excellence was high in that room full of mostly people of Arab heritage. Every reader and musician performed from the heart, creating a pitch perfect, beautiful, and thrilling celebration of Arab and SWANA voices and community in the English-speaking world.<\/span><\/p>\n

We Call to the Eye & the Night<\/span><\/i> feels as affirming as that open mic. The book does not attempt to survey living Arab writers, as past anthologies have done. (See: <\/span>Post Gibran: An Anthology of New Arab-American Writing<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Dinarzad\u2019s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction<\/span><\/i>, and Nathalie Handal\u2019s classic <\/span>The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology<\/span><\/i>.) Instead, Alyan and Hashem Beck have invited writers to an open celebration, a haflah or \u2019azumah, a place where they can be with other writers with whom they have this one thing in common, and to whom they don\u2019t have to explain themselves. Where they can be themselves on the page, with no expectation that they will \u201cperform their identities and otherness,\u201d as, the editors say, writers of Arab heritage are often asked to do in an Anglophone publishing scene.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where they can write about love, a supremely human and universal topic, however they want to.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Leila Chatti writes in \u201cWhile You Are Shaving, It Rains,\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026 I have come four thousand miles
\n<\/span>To love you better. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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