Poem as Measure: With Poems by Fady Joudah and Māyā Mazen Murry

Abstract

This special issue of Diacritics includes poems from two extraordinary Palestinian-American poets who remind us what, in the face of tyranny, poetry is for. In their poetry, we encounter not only a verse in witness, but also a record of a life, of a living that resists its violent interruptions, the attempts at its annihilation.

The great Somali poet Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame Hadraawi begins his famous poem, "Sirta Nolosha" (Life's Essence) the following way:

Saaxiibkayow heedheSafar baan ka imi dheereMarka hore salaan diirrranMarka xiga samow heedheHa ka nixin si-dalagtaydaSacab fara-madhnaantaydaSuugaanta yaabkeedaSalka iyo fadhaa keenaMarka xiga sugnaanteedaSocodkiyo falkaa sheegaXeerkeedu waa saase.

Say you'll pay heed, my friend,I have returned from a long journey.First, warm greetings,Second, Rashid, listen to me:don't be alarmed that I rush inempty handed, lacking a poem,poetry delivers its wonderswhen we're seated and settled,its full grace revealedwalking and watchfulness—such are its laws.¹

In the second stanza, the poet-speaker tells his friend he was in battle that morning, drawing attention to his gun, his worn body, his tattered uniform as an explanation for his lack of poetry. That is, of all that the violence of the civil war endangered and destroyed, the poet-turned-revolutionary curiously singles out poetry as a register for the kind of sociality and reciprocal relationality that is rendered impossible in war. At the same time—because this lament about the impossibility of poetry in war is itself uttered in a poem—poetry emerges as a form of communal practice that, after all, cannot be vanquished by war. Indeed, "Sirta Nolosha" remains one of the most recognizable, recited, assigned, and adopted poems in modern Somali literature. In the poem's six hundred lines, which are addressed to his friend's daughter, the poet-speaker articulates a comprehensive ethico-political philosophy of life, from issues of political theory and environmental justice to matters of aesthetics and everyday life, including the question of how to find the best material for sleep, prepare for the dry season, ward off pride and impatience, treat leather, attend to ambition, wear adornments, compose a poem.

I have always been struck with the formal organization of this poem, which announces its structural impossibility only to enact an expansiveness that defies the totalizing regime of war. The poet-turn-revolutionary, still in guerrilla uniform, takes leave to visit a friend and deliberate leisurely and rigorously about the task of life. "Sorta Nolosha" includes instructions for a "well-made poem," which the poem insists "mirrors the people's needs / and bears their well-being worthily." This special issue of Diacritics includes such poems from two extraordinary Palestinian-American poets who, like Hadraawi, remind us what, in the face of tyranny, poetry is for. In their poetry, we encounter not only a verse in witness, but also a record of a life, of a living that resists its violent interruptions, the attempts at its annihilation.

Fady Joudah is an award-winning Palestinian-American poet, translator, and a physician based in Houston, TX. A prolific poet, Joudah is the author of several books of poetry, including The Earth in the Attic (2008), Alight (2013), Textu (2014), Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018), Tethered to Stars (2021). His most recent collection […], published by Milkweed in 2024, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to his many critically acclaimed books, Joudah has also translated numerous award-winning works of poetry and fiction. His translation of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's poetry won the Banipal Prize, the PEN USA Award, and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In 2014, he was selected as Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and in 2024 was awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize. He had also volunteered for Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan.

Joudah is a poet of great humanity and an exacting eye. His verse and prose give voice and form to the plight of the Palestinian people with a searing clarity and a sense of urgency. Joudah has reported that over one hundred members of his family have been murdered in the ongoing genocide in Palestine whose official death toll had reached 62,000 by February 2025.² How does one write about this chasm, the chasm of the last two years, the chasm of the last one hundred years, of the ways in which the unimaginable has become routine and livestreamed? We can interpret the pictographic title of Joudah's most recent book as well as the first poem included in this special issue as a compressed version of these questions. "The book title refused to be written. It insisted on being wordless," said Joudah in a recent interview with The Yale Review.³ The poems printed in this issue as well as the entire collection can be read as a record of what emerges when the poet attends to that silence. An ellipsis typically marks the presence of an absence, a sign of speech suspended or incomplete, its potentiality holds a promise even as it frustrates. Encamped in its brackets is a version of the future, one that is yet to be delineated but nevertheless born in and out of this present.

Also included in this special issue are two poems by Māyā Mazen Murry, who is a senior at Cornell University studying computer science. Murry is an artist, poet, and scientist passionate about decolonizing and reindigenizing creative and scientific works to uplift and serve her communities. She has been active in the student-led protests on our campus, often at a great personal and professional risk. I first met Murry last winter at a protest in front of a Board of Trustees meeting, where she spoke eloquently and movingly about the importance of dissent on our highly policed and surveilled campus. This is where I would often run into Murry, at a rally, a protest, a teach-in, donning a mask and a keffiyeh (sometimes the keffiyeh as a mask) to protest injustice and resist the depoliticization of the university. In Murry's poetry, we see how an ethics of love can become the basis for profound and engaged political commitments. In "Let the Dead Go Home," one is struck by how the poem's refrain—"I did not know"—registers a certain fervor for the ordinary, where the intimacy of the mundane encases immeasurable grief and loss. "The weeping uncles that did not / know where the children went" begins one stanza that recounts fathers and mothers looking for their children's limbs, who "could not find their daughter's thumbs underneath the love-sunk rubble." But the stanza that immediately follows this one evokes the limbs of different children, or perhaps the same children whose limbs, before they were "underneath the love-sunk rubble," felt weightless floating on the dead sea. "I did not know I loved to dream, / the swimming bodies of childhood / friends in the neon horizon of the dead blue sea, her ancient quiet." Here, memory negotiates with itself as the mundane and the catastrophic intermingle with striking intimacy.

In his translator's introduction to Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden, Joudah quotes a few lines from A Siege to the Eulogies of the Sea, where the great poet addresses his assassinated friends:

My friends, do not die the way you used to dieI beg you, do not die, wait another year for meone yearjust one more yearwe might trade ideas for walking on the streetfree of the hour and the banner …we have other tasks beside searching for graves and elegies⁴

In the last two years, as the genocide in Gaza raged on, as Israel blew up hospitals and flattened schools, as we watched on our phone screens children being burnt alive and elders being starved to death—a suffering that is funded with our tax dollars and given rhetorical cover by our mainstream media—, I have often found myself thinking of Darwish's elegy to his murdered friends and the measure of a life. The speaker begs his friends not to die, to hold off for "just one more year," so they may go for a walk, so they may be in conversation, in company, in communion. A walk, a measure of life.

When I teach "The Tea and the Sage"—a poem from Joudah's first poetry collection The Earth in the Attic (2008)—I try to get my students to reflect on how the long history of surveillance, occupation, state violence intersects with the simple quotidian act of offering another a cup of tea. A state agent brings the speaker's father a cup of tea in a ruse to get his fingerprints; the speaker's mother makes tea with sage and tells the story of a groom who turned up late to his own wedding "wearing only one shoe." When his bride asks him what happened, "he tells her / He lost it while jumping / Over a housewall. / Breaking away from soldiers." In response she offers him a cup of tea and asks whether he would like it with mint or with sage. "With sage," he says. "She makes it, he drinks."⁵ A cup of tea is an offering, it is memory work, it is inheritance, it is history, it is an insistence on the small pleasures of the mundane, which is to say resistance to bare life.

The task of the poet, then, is to affirm the essence of life, which is not merely to survive death but to remain on the realm of the living. A poem is a reminder that we have other tasks beside running for our lives, away from killer planes and the mouth of a gun—we have friends to swim and trade ideas with, we have a betrothed to meet, we have tea to make with sage, we have poetry to consider.