“To Remembrance When a Mercy”: On Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah | […] | Milkweed Editions | March 2024 | 100 Pages
When prompted to address the American media coverage of Israel’s attacks in Gaza following October 7, the poet Fady Joudah responded, “There is a collective psychosis in the mainstream language of US media and administration…that is bizarre to the point of ghosting Palestinians, permitting their erasure year after year, decade after decade.” The permission for erasure begins in language and is perpetuated by unexamined rhetoric Americans claim for themselves, regardless of position: not merely the restatement of ideological buzzwords, but the refusal to ask oneself such questions of survival. Joudah continues, “I think that we have not repeatedly asked the question in American media and culture: do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and Jewish lives?” To turn away, or for many, to convince oneself that we’re observing honestly, becomes a self-serving tactic for normalization: death becomes less unspeakable.
The title of Fady Joudah’s sixth volume of poems is a bracketed ellipsis: […]. This set of punctuation marks also gives twenty-seven of the poems their title, as the first of the volume begins: “I am unfinished business.” Joudah’s ellipsis is an approximation of what may not otherwise be verbalized—not just an omission—the condition of being “unfinished business.” This first poem continues:
The business that did not finish me
or my parents
won’t leave my children
in peace.
Note how, as the syntax inverts itself after the first line, the term “business” is given different agency: the more idiomatic “I am unfinished business,” an adjective in the predicate, compared to the subject “business” that can “finish” this figure and his family. The first sentence is nearly corporate until you read the following four lines, which operate under the constant threat of erasure. This figure of “unfinished business” arranges Joudah’s words from behind the bracketed ellipsis, within an intermediary state of telling: this poem is neither the beginning nor the end, but a moment within a disaster. After three stanzas, the poem gives context for the agency of this “business”—“I forget Palestine // has a kind way of remembering / those who mark it for slaughter”—and suddenly we are sent back to the beginning. “The business” is not one actor, not just Israeli policies of genocide or the Western colonial machine; it is a history that creates the terms for a life of being “unfinished business.” One must read to the end. “I write for the future // because my present is demolished,” the poem continues, operating within that present of demolition. “I fly to the future // to retrieve my demolished present / as a legible past,” and one feels, as before, the syntax building on what immediately precedes it: the present is already changing. “To see // what isn’t hard to see / in a world that doesn’t”—because the question, as Joudah points out, is not repeatedly being asked: do you believe that Palestinian lives are equal to Israeli lives and Jewish lives?
If the unexamined rhetoric of American media reinforces such a position—that is, in which one chooses not to ask this question—Joudah’s poetry places his readers beyond the moment of asking. “The collective psychosis of mainstream language” is almost exactly the opposite of how these poems create an effect within readers: a stark emotional experience in time, but idiosyncratic time reconfigured to a figure who lives as “unfinished business.” Unfinished, because the goal of the war machine is to erase Palestinian people, or as Joudah writes under another bracketed ellipsis: “You’re more alive to them dead.” Because it exceeds information, poetry reintroduces a language that resists a collective psychosis, one in which this statement becomes a kind of visceral empathy. While describing the failures of American media, Joudah echoed, “We are not just talking about the numbers of the dead. We are talking about two-million people who are living a life worse than death.” What language can one use to describe a life worse than death? Description is not the goal, exactly, and neither is commentary. The goal of these poems is to create a structure in which a life worse than death becomes a legible experience, clarity on the poems’ terms, or as Joudah prompts in another ellipsis poem, “We need to differentiate / between the dead and the not-here.”
It will be notable for many readers that Joudah’s new volume responds, in real time, to Israel’s latest attacks on Palestinians. No one would be mistaken for turning to these poems as providing a different kind of response, say, one that renews our sense of linguistic urgency against the calculated idiom of American media. It would, however, be a mistake to read these poems as expedient, like the news; neither this violence nor Joudah’s central preoccupations are new, and the urgency with which he writes about Palestinian liberation has charged much of his writing. It’s also true that Joudah’s work, including this most recent volume of poems, resists being categorized as one thing: political poetry written about one subject. For example, […] features a poem titled “Mimesis” that begins:
This morning, I don’t know how,
an inch-long baby frog
entered my house
during the extermination
of human animals live on TV.
The televised conflict is more than spectacle: “the extermination / of human animals” is a private disaster, such that the suburban frog that leaps “into shadows, / under the couch, into my shoe” is more than a frog. The title refers to how context changes the manner of imitation, how one feels the pulse of disparate narratives within the mundane. “I recognized the baby’s dread,” Joudah writes, as son watches father chase after the animal. Yet the frog is not a source of instruction, as would be the case in another poem of Joudah’s—also titled “Mimesis,” from his second volume Alight (2013). A similar situation: daughter refuses to remove a spider who has built a web across the handles of her bicycle; she wants the spider to choose to leave when it’s ready. The spider becomes a vehicle for—at first—father to guide daughter through her expression of intense empathy:
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
Because he’s focused on the potential for instruction, the father doesn’t quite realize the spider stands for something else in his daughter’s mind: “She said that’s how others / Become refugees isn’t it?” What has changed between these two poems if not a father’s reaction (even if one reads them as distinct figures)? The “Mimesis” of […] shows a father whose intuition towards his children is wearily refined, the way a genocidal colonialism impacts their young psyches. Remember: “the business that did not finish me…won’t leave my children / in peace.” The encounter with the frog ends only after father “released it / into the yard, / and started to cry.”
As grief deepens in the body, so does joy. To exclusively read these poems as delimiting a particular response to the deaths of Palestinian people in part reinforces the political rhetoric that they passionately resist. Clarity is generated by the poem, and one abides by the poem’s vision. Later in […], Joudah returns to another of his familiar subjects; here are the final lines of “Ode to an Onion”:
A caramel mount in olive oil,
God has not forsaken you.
For years I laid siege to your sting
to nurture more of your sugars.
I give up. I miss you as you are,
sulfur-heavy,
a throne for water.
To perceive violence in caramelization, the poem glorifies the vegetable as it comes from the earth. Unlike the frog, unlike the spider, the onion extends beyond (rather than deepens) the violence it withstands: “I simply love you / as I cry and dismember you…” Was it this very onion that appeared in Joudah’s first collection of poems, The Earth in the Attic (2008): “Why are there onions the size of swallows in your maple tree? / In the land of cactus wind the one-eyed dwell. // Where is the village whose name holds back the sea?” Where is the village, where is the sea? In sixteen years, the onion has transformed from swallow to caramelized mount to raw vegetable. To live a life worse than death also suggests that life exceeds the terms of death; to read for death seems like a formal enclosure.
In the summer of 2021, following the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in May of that year, Joudah published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled “My Palestinian Poem that The New Yorker Wouldn’t Publish.” The poem in question was written in the wake of these attacks, and in reaching out to the magazine’s editors, Joudah asked for The New Yorker to publish the poem immediately. One acknowledges that publishing the poem at that historical moment would not only make its language seem instructive for the American public, but it would also foreground a Palestinian-American poet responding to an event which impacts his private life. “These were Palestinian days,” Joudah explains, “and I was sharing my work with request for prompt reply and, if the work is accepted, prompt publication, because it is meaningful to honor common decency as an act free of fear.” Silence on behalf these editors, Joudah points out, is connected to an institutional anxiety of ideological polarization—which leads to a decline in subscription sales, public outcry, Twitter denouncement, or having to adequately defend a Zionist-aligned position. The immediate publication of Joudah’s poem would reach a specific demographic of people whose thinking might benefit from reading the poem and from seeing the poem published in a powerful outlet.
At the same time, Joudah’s poetry partially rejects significance grafted onto its language simply for responding to an event as it presently unfolds. To suggest the essay merely responds to an unsolicited poem being rejected does not responsibly paraphrase the emotional and cultural stakes it sets forth, as Joudah explains, “…if you’re still wondering whether this essay is about increasing ‘personal access,’ then understand that the risks most Palestinians take when they speak this way in 2021 are more serious than apple pie…. Can one read what one is afraid to feel?” Featured in that essay under the title “Remove,” the rejected poem is included in Joudah’s new volume as “[…].” The first sentence of this new iteration is different than that which appeared in LARB”:
Without the figurative mole, the “you” is physically immediate, not a stand-in for a more abstract figure. The poem begins in terse apostrophe, an address which reads less like an accusation and more like an observation. If one reads these lines as critical of a specific person, an identifiable “you” who must be addressed as oppressor, they are led through the poem as politically mandated, a response designed to persuade readers about Palestinian resistance. To circumscribe this “you” encourages a reading which has less to do with the fact that “Remove” is a poem, and more to do with who it addresses in the first place. Joudah articulates as much in his LARB essay: “Reading ‘Remove’ through pre-fixed modes of reception limits the experience of many readers. ‘Remove’ does not name names because names sometimes come with canned responses that leave little room for an expansive engagement with the world.” In what Joudah calls “a reversal of double consciousness,” “you” becomes the oppressor who looks at themself through the eyes of those oppressed. While the poem makes clear its language does not depend on external referent—that to misplace this poem in a source-context would bind its language to specific rhetoric—“you” can only be read as an accumulation of what is gathered through the poem itself, how it is designed to be read: “But I’m closer to you than you are to yourself / and this, my enemy friend, / is the definition of distance.” This sentence articulates what Joudah takes and extends from double consciousness: the oppressor in this poem, the “enemy friend,” cannot come to terms with their own double consciousness, cannot fully realize themself, except for through the experience of those they have oppressed.
Yet across “Remove” and “[…],” the very center of the poem is the same: “my catastrophe in the present / is still not the size of your past.” Writing this poem in the present turns into a future record of the past: one cannot write toward the future, neither can one anticipate the longevity of their work, but a poem creates a present that repeats beyond a single moment. The penultimate poem of […] is “Dedication”—a long, anaphoric prose poem that does exactly what its title suggests:
The list of dedications collects every person and object into the recurring and transformed present: the relatable and unrelatable are here, as is the translatable and untranslatable Palestinian flesh. What is being dedicated to these people? Not the book itself; we’re all familiar with acknowledgements pages. The legible silence this book endures is offered to these figures, to those who “are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.”