{"id":9230,"date":"2022-07-04T08:43:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T06:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=9230"},"modified":"2023-12-10T16:27:43","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T14:27:43","slug":"poems-of-palestinian-motherhood-loss-desire-and-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/poems-of-palestinian-motherhood-loss-desire-and-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Poems of Palestinian Motherhood, Loss, Desire and Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

You Can Be the Last Leaf<\/em>, selected poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
\nTranslated by Fady Joudah
\nMilkweed Editions<\/a>, 2022
\nISBN 9781571315403<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eman Quotah<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat claims she left metaphor behind years ago. \u201cNow I betray the metaphorical with the real and direct,\u201d she told the website Laghoo<\/a> in 2015.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
You Can Be the Last Leaf<\/em> is published by Milkweed Editions<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Translated into English by Palestinian American poet, physician and translator Fady Joudah in the new collection You Can Be the Last Leaf<\/em>, Abu Al-Hayyat certainly overstates her literary infidelity. In her poems, the authorial relationship to the imagistic and the mundane feels more like coexistence or polyamory. The everyday seeps into metaphor and vice versa, a poetic register that distinctively conveys the truth of a woman, mother, and artist living under Israeli colonial rule. The reader encounters checkpoints and house dresses, loud children and gossiping friends, mosquitos and cooking shows, a tin of sewing supplies and an empty laundry basket \u2014 as well as death, hope, and fear; a woman growing like a tree; horses carrying a house; pockets full of seashells and madness.<\/p>\n

You Can Be the Last Leaf<\/em> gathers poems from three of Abu Al-Hayyat\u2019s Arabic collections, The Book of Fear<\/em> (2021), House Dresses and Wars<\/em> (2016), and That Smile, That Heart<\/em> (2012). We start in the domestic sphere then quickly abandon it, in the collection\u2019s first poem, \u201cMy House.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of the many houses I lived in
\nconcern me. After the third house
\nI lost interest, but lately my organs and body parts
\nhave been complaining of unexplainable ailments.
\nMy arms extend higher than a tree.<\/p>\n

In Arabic, house<\/em> means abode<\/em>, family<\/em>, poetry verse<\/em>, but not necessarily home<\/em>. For Palestinians, the house is a site of displacement, and the verse is a locus of both grief and power. The poem continues, moving into the realms of literature and engineering:<\/p>\n

I read several texts I took for houses
\nand stayed in them a while: \u201cLiquid Mirrors\u201d
\nwas a crazy abode in which I forgot
\nmy first love. There were magazines, too:<\/p>\n

Al-Karmal<\/em>, Poets<\/em>, and Aqwass<\/em>,
\nthen I studied engineering,
\nspecialized in earthquakes
\nto build houses whose foundations
\nresist climates and the unpredicted.<\/p>\n

The poem ends with a declaration of possibility for the idea of the house, its mobility and mutability: \u201cI will raise my house on the backs of horses\/that will carry it to the fields,\/there my legs will pause.\u201d<\/p>\n

The house is metaphorical, and also very real.<\/p>\n

In the four-part poem \u201cReturn,\u201d Abu Al-Hayyat takes on another symbol of Palestinian desire and dispossession \u2014 the roads that lead from a lost past to present Israel, from Palestine to not-Palestine, and from one part of historic Palestine to another.<\/p>\n

On Highway 6
\nbetween Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,
\ndrivers pay a toll for the well-paved road,
\nbusses on either side
\ntransport passengers who\u2019ve returned at last
\nto Ramleh or Lod, the latter in peace, with jars
\nfor the holy festival of Prophet Saleh.
\nJustice was walking on the shoulder
\nof the rod outside the yellow line
\ngiving back to the streets their names.<\/p>\n

The \u201creal and direct\u201d language of \u201cpay a toll\u201d suggests the metaphorical toll of Palestinian dispossession. \u201cWell-paved road,\u201d \u201cpeace,\u201d \u201creturned at last\u201d all suggest their own absence. Later in the poem, a girl named Mercy leans on a rented cane. Years \u201croll under the bed\u201d and \u201cneed clips the wings of dreams\/and the legs of the righteous.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this collection, motherhood is both the poet\u2019s daily life \u2014 her habit \u2014 and the lens through which she sees the world. In \u201cA Road for Loss,\u201d she packs her children in a suitcase and wishes for escape. She asks, \u201cDo you know a road for loss\/that doesn\u2019t end\/in a settlement?\u201d The question arises from a specific experience of motherhood, one unique to Palestinians, yet there are universals: \u201cMy children will grow,\/their questions will multiply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, in \u201cWe Were Young, You Gave Us a Home,\u201d Abu Al-Hayyat writes of feelings mothers in any setting may recognize in themselves: \u201cWe became lonely and had children who doubled our loneliness,\/so you gave us more children.\u201d But the specifics of Palestinian motherhood return in \u201cChildren,\u201d a three-stanza one-two-three punch of directness:<\/p>\n

A child\u2019s hand sticks out of the rubble
\nand sends me counting
\nmy three children\u2019s limbs,
\ntheir digits, examining their teeth
\nand eyebrows.<\/p>\n

The silenced voices in Yarmouk
\nturn the volume up on my radio, TV,
\nand drown the songs on my laptop.
\nI pinch my kids in their love handles:
\nlet there be crying,
\nlet there be noise.<\/p>\n

And the hungry hearts
\nat Qalandia checkpoint open my mouth:
\nI\u2019m ready for my extra salty
\nemotional eating to feed weeping
\neyes everywhere.<\/p>\n

The Palestinian mother fears for her children, hovers over them, eats her emotions \u2014 like any mother, but also like only a Palestinian mother can. Everything she witnesses acts on her: the child\u2019s hand that sends her counting, the silenced voices that turn up the volume, the hungry hearts that open her mouth. The concrete and the metaphorical fold in on each other in service of directly conveying the reality of her Palestinian grief.<\/p>\n

In \u201cI Suffer a Phobia Called Hope,\u201d we see the way care and violence go hand-in-hand, how motherhood is vigilance. Of hope Abu Al-Hayyat writes,<\/p>\n

Each time I hear that word
\nI recall the disappointments
\nthat were committed in its name:
\nthe children who don\u2019t return,
\nthe ailments that are never cured,
\nthe memory that\u2019s never senile,
\nall of it hope crushed
\nbeneath its wings as I smash
\nthis mosquito on my daughter\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Beirut-born Palestinian novelist and poet living in Jerusalem.\u00a0She has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children\u2019s stories, including\u00a0The Blue Pool of Questions<\/em>.\u00a0<\/i>Her work has appeared in\u00a0A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry\u00a0<\/i>and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub. She is the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction<\/i> (Comma Press, 2021) and the director of Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution in Ramallah that encourages reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Motherhood lends the poet empathy even for her enemies. \u201cPlans\u201d describes her yearning to \u201csolve the world\u2019s problems\u201d:<\/p>\n

Now and then I lay down plans
\nto solve the world\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

My plans eliminate longing from stories,
\nremove exhaustion from groans,
\nplace full stops in runaway sentences,
\nrescue even soldiers at checkpoints
\nalong with children
\nwho grow up in detention centers
\nand mothers who wear their wardrobes
\nof patience \u2026<\/p>\n

In Joudah\u2019s clean and sparse translation, Abu Al-Hayyat\u2019s poetry is modern in both language and theme. At the same time, by centering her lived experience, she participates in a tradition of Arab women\u2019s poetry stretching back centuries. Elegy was the main poetic form of the earliest Arab women poets; through it they remembered departed loved ones, usually men, most often lost to war. In \u201cElegy for the Desire of Mothers,\u201d Abu Al-Hayyat playfully and sorrowfully updates the tradition for our age, making women\u2019s interior and exterior lives its subject.<\/p>\n

As I make my bed and my two kids\u2019 beds,
\nI\u2019ll remember. As I wipe one\u2019s vomit off the floor,
\nopen a window to the dust on the road,
\ntrim rose thorns in a pot that doesn\u2019t bud,
\nand as I read a recipe for authentic mansaf<\/em>,<\/p>\n

mend a white gown that little fingers
\nhave ripped holes through,
\nI\u2019ll remember. As I balance winter\u2019s budget,
\nsniff a quilt for ammonia,
\nflip through the six children channels
\nlooking for Tom & Jerry per request,
\nand as I search in my supermarket of a purse
\nfor a stray pad, I\u2019ll remember.
\nAs I bathe a body the size of my palm,
\nremove green boogers from tender nostrils,
\nuntangle hair that chocolate, lollipop,
\nand apricot jam have invaded,
\nand as I read stories about vibrant ants, lazy lions,
\nand migrant seals, degum my heart
\nand the sole of my shoe,
\nsearch for the best method
\nto remove oil stains from fabric,
\nclip twenty nails after a long quest for clippers,
\nI\u2019ll remember…<\/p>\n

Motherhood is a quiet war that erases the desires of the past self, but in it there is solidarity: \u201cAnd when I mine\/in my friends\u2019 stories for living desires,\/I\u2019ll remember to mention them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

What gives Abu Al-Hayyat\u2019s poems so much of their power is her attention to both the details of everyday life and the emotions and desires that make us human, even and especially those among us who are dehumanized daily. There is a strong sense of community in her writing, too \u2014 a sense that she speaks not for<\/em> other Palestinians or other women, but with<\/em> them. A writer who addresses herself to Palestinians of all generations \u2014 Abu Al-Hayyat directs the Palestine Writing Workshop, which works with students and teachers to encourage reading, and she writes novels and children\u2019s books \u2014 she\u2019s not afraid to condemn the failures of the powerful and the revolutionary. In \u201cRevolution,\u201d she writes,<\/p>\n

Those who win by killing fewer children
\nare losers.<\/p>\n

A land that promises heaven
\nis an impoverished land.<\/p>\n

Translator Joudah does his best to preserve the Palestinian-ness of Abu Al-Hayyat\u2019s poems even as he renders them in English. As he explained in an essay for Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Palestine in Arabic does not need to explain itself. Despite setbacks, disasters, revolving conspiracies against it, Palestine in Arabic is self-possessed. It is exterior to English yet born internationalist and shall remain so \u2014 neither thinking it is the center of the world nor surrendering to the imperial center as the primary source of its future liberation. Palestine in Arabic is where the overwhelming sacrifice is made. Palestine in Arabic dreams, lives in and with more than 15 hundred years of literary, intellectual, and ecumenical traditions, belongs to 10 thousand years before that. History does not end for Palestine in Arabic.<\/p>\n

The reader of Abu Al-Hayyat\u2019s translated poems, then, must make a concerted effort to go to<\/em><\/a> Abu Al-Hayyat \u2014 to read her alongside other contemporary Palestinian poets<\/a>, translated and not, and to understand her poems within the context of that long history as well as in the context of the past century, the ongoing Nakba, and the current reality of Palestinian life.<\/p>\n

When Abu Al-Hayyat writes, \u201cThey will fall in the end,\/those who say you can\u2019t,\u201d she does so as a Palestinian, with all the weight and baggage her reality brings. But she is also addressing anyone who has ever despaired when she says,<\/p>\n

Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.<\/p>\n

You can be the last leaf.
\nYou can convince the universe
\nthat you pose no threat
\nto the tree\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

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

Eman Quotah reviews the new poetry collection from Palestinian poet Maya Abu-Alhayyat, translated by Fady Joudah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":9247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,34,51],"tags":[406,526,807,944,1291,1367],"coauthors":[1938],"class_list":["post-9230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetry","category-tmr-weekly","tag-children","tag-dispossession","tag-home","tag-jerusalem","tag-palestinian","tag-poetry","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoems of Palestinian Motherhood, Loss, Desire and Hope - The Markaz Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Eman Quotah reviews the new poetry collection from Palestinian poet Maya Abu-Alhayyat, translated by Fady Joudah.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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