Lyric Fire

Fady Joudah is a poet gifted with duality of vision and a large empathic voice that is uncommon in American poetry. Like three other important poets of his generation, Nathalie Handal, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa, Joudah has translated tirelessly, and tried to expand our understanding of poetics of Middle-Eastern region by bringing new voices into English each year. These four poets, all of whom came out in early to mid-1990s, are doing a great deal to change American poetics: Handal's anthology, The Poetry of Arab Women (2000), published over a decade ago, is still the classic of the genre. Mattawa is without a question one of the strongest translators of his generation, in any language. Ali's recent essays in The American Poetry Review (many of them collected in his volume Orange Alert [2010]) are as deeply moving as they were instructive.

Fady Joudah's first book was published after the other 3 poets have already been in print for some years, but he has gained momentum quickly, and his passionate voice and lyric attentiveness became quickly apparent to everyone. His most recent project, the translation from the Arabic of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems, is that rare occurrence in the poetry world: a documentary perspective of life in a time of war delivered through lyrical utterance. Zaqtan is not a documentary poet. But his lyric voice sketches in his notebook the bloody events of his country, and the policemen and gunshots become myths, become lyric fire.

Zaqtan in Joudah's versions gives us songs of the drowned, the betrayed: the first patrol, the camp prostitute, eleven brothers killing their only sister, and a house of cactus.

And what time is it? It is Beruit in August 1982 (where one "died in Wednesday raid"); it is Ramallah in 2000 (where the children "loot the night's narrators"). What time is it? "It is noon among the pots."

And where are we? We are in war time.

But the lyric poet sees that "the villages are fruits on the road," while in the slopes, the children "call out to their parents in village accents." Indeed, where are we? In "a narrow street / in the poor suburbs of war."

It is the rare gift to look at injustice and instead of simply pointing the finger write with lyric abandon: "And while we were plowing / they were laughing / and filling our pockets with dirt." For this bravery and lyric skill, I am grateful. And I am grateful, too, for heart-breaking simplicity of poems like "Where She Used to Stand."

Reading these poems, one can't help but think of the poet/mythmakers of Eastern Europe, such as Holan, Holub, and Popa, who also saw violence and wrote the dream-time of their nation. Like them, Zaqtan is unafraid to claim his roots and is able to see the "secret builders Cavafy had awakened / passing through the hills," digging by his pillow.