DEHISCENCE, n. This is a word for a ripe pod or fruit—or wound—splitting open. I had to look it up because it’s in one of the poems below.
Etymologically, it’s a straight line back to Latin dehiscentia, which also means splitting open. From there, you can track it to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *ghieh-, which gave rise to the words chaos, chasm, gap, gape, gasp, gawp, hiatus, and yawn. That’s such an excellent collection, it’s almost a poem in itself.
Normally in this section, I’d write notes on what small-r romance novels I’ve read (or, occasionally, what Capital-R Romance language stuff I’ve read), but lately I’ve been reading mainly poetry and nonfiction by Palestinian (and Palestinian diaspora) writers. I would like to share some with you.
First, to be clear, I have not only been reading—as a citizen of the United States, which is arming and funding Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, I have also called and emailed (and called and emailed and called and emailed) my elected representatives to demand a ceasefire and humanitarian aid for Gaza. If you are a citizen of the United States, or another country supporting this slaughter, I encourage you to wield your power and do the same. Killing Palestinians will not bring back the Israeli dead. It is only more death, more grief. Of the two million people who live in Gaza, nearly half are children.
Bearing witness is heartrending, but it is urgent. For a clear-eyed analysis of current events in Gaza, I recommend No Human Being Can Exist by Saree Makdisi at N+1. For history, I recommend this excerpt of Edward Said’s 1979 essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” which connects Zionism and Western imperialism and is true and bracing.
(Brief aside for two non-Palestinian writers: Ben Lorber’s “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A Partial History” was also important to me. So was Arielle Angel’s “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” in Jewish Currents—that’s from October 12 and focused on current events, so some of it is already out of date. The messaging from Israel and the United States that they are doing genocide in Gaza for me, a Jew, is horrifying to me. I do not want this. It is wrong. It has always been wrong. Suffering one atrocity does not give you the right to commit another.)
Anyway, I promised you poetry.
I’ve been reading Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, an anthology of essays and poetry by Gazan writers that is currently free as an ebook at Haymarket Books. The anthology is primarily essays, and they are all powerful, but too long to share. So here is one of the poems. (Apologies if I have introduced errors into the Arabic—all the line breaks vanished when I copied and pasted from my ebook. I tried my best to restore them, but I don’t know Arabic.)
A Rose Shoulders Up
Mosab Abu Toha
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.
In Arabic:
وردة تبزُغ
لا تتفاجئ أبداً
عندما ترى وردةً تبزغ
:بين ركام البيت
.هكذا نجونا
I also read the collection Tethered to Stars by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. He’s a physician as well as a poet so there’s a lot of medical terminology and bodily imagery in the collection, intermixed with language about astronomy and astrology—as well as simple, powerful language about, say, the neighborhood in Texas where his family lives, or hiking in Peru. Here’s one of the poems, “Dehiscence,” which is about parenting and growing up and time and loss, among other things. (Hey, that’s the word in this newsletter!)
Dehiscence
Fady Joudah
I forgot to say goodbye to the kids.
I knelt into my weeping until my heart
broke me awake. My forehead
touched the floor. If dream is memory
I was captured in a van, incarcerated. I was
and wasn’t a leader. The prison
was a camp in the wilderness. Its warden
was kind. Unkindness came
from the rules, which came from behind
desert mountains. I didn’t say goodbye
to my kids. We were watching a soccer game
when it happened. My boyhood
team is a city’s that was steeped in shipping
slaves, but that’s long ago now. Two
of the goal scorers were Muslim.
One Senegalese, the other Turkish
who would have us believe he’s German.
I didn’t say goodbye to the kids.
I sobbed, I shook. I woke up with a dry face
and a cloven heart. I uttered the Arabic word
for it. There’s a world out there, people
no less beautiful than you are.
I stayed in bed for an hour, less water
with time. I recalled the moment
I no longer let my father touch me.
No more his little boy I parted
with a tenderness that wouldn’t
visit me the same again. I felt
his acceptance unaware he’d begun waiting
for mine. It was after lunch. We were
on the couch. He stroked my hair, neck,
and forearm. It felt good, then I felt older.
Slowly, I got up, walked away, his fingers
trailing the air of my wake. Both of us
wordless. I didn’t say goodbye to my kids.
There’s a world out there, people
who don’t ask me what I’m about to say.
You’re not time. I served with time
and you’re not it.
And here’s Joudah writing about and translating Mahmoud Darwish. I love translator’s notes so, so much, and that is an incredible one.
To switch genres once more, I wanted to mention Hannah Moushabeck’s beautiful children’s book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine (illustrated by Reem Madooh), which I bought and read this spring and did not write about in this newsletter because I rarely talk about picture books. But I wanted to include it today. Moushabeck’s father was a child in Jerusalem who fled during the Nakba. The book is a celebration of Palestinian life and culture and storytelling and memory, albeit a bittersweet one. Homeland is lovely and moving and I highly recommend it.
Lastly, I also read The Tiny Journalist, a volume by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The poems are inspired by Janna Jihad Ayyad Al-Tamimi, the “Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” who lives in the West Bank and began taking videos at age 7 (she is now 17), after Israeli forces killed two of her family members. Here is one of the poems:
No Explosions
Naomi Shihab Nye
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life.
I will be back in your inbox on Sunday, November 12, and I will talk about romance novels next time, I promise.
