Iman Mersal’s These Are Not Oranges, My Love
Born in 1966 in Mit ‘Adlan in the northern Egyptian Delta, Iman Mersal begins to write poetry early in her life, during her high school years. She soon adheres to the independent feminist group Bint al-Arḍ (Daughter of the Earth), a collective that had provincial origins and organized periodic meetings in private homes and local cultural centers in Lower Egypt to discuss dissenting books and articles relating to gender and class equality.1 Starting in 1985, and during a period of seven years, Mersal is coeditor of the independent feminist magazine Bint al-Arḍ (Daughter of the Earth), which published works by young female writers and essays on feminism and Islam.2
A member of the so-called 1990s generation, Mersal starts to write poetry in free verse (shi‘r ḥurr) and to experiment with the form of the prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr) early in her career, thus openly deviating from the strict rhyme schemes and metrical measures of classical Arabic poetry as well as from the vernacular poetry of the 1960s and 1970s.3 As Huda Fakhreddine writes, prose poetry had been “launched in Arabic with the founding of Shi‘r magazine by two poets and theorizers of Arab modernism, Yusuf al-Khal and Adunis, under two major influences: Baudelaire’s poèmes-en-prose and Jubran Khalil Jubran’s experimental compositions, which blurred the boundary between poetry and prose.”4
Still, in opposition to the “hyperbolic valorization of the individual” that, as Robyn Creswell has recently shown,5 marks the poetry of the Shi‘r group, Mersal’s poetry manages, in Khaled Mattawa’s own words, “to preserve the integrity of individual experience while keeping an eye on their turbulent surroundings.”6 Like other rebel poets of the 1990s, such as Ahmad Taha, Mohamed Metwalli, and Osama El-Dinassouri, who were initially rejected by the literary establishment and had to publish their experimental poems in personally founded magazines, Mersal employs a plain and simple language, avoids sentimentalism, and writes about the prosaic details of everyday life.7 Together with them, she develops a gritty and convoluted poetics, stimulating the emergence of what writer and critic Edwar El-Kharrat has called “a new sensitivity” (al-ḥasāsiyya al-jadīda), forcing readers to find new ways to engage with, decipher, and interpret the poetic text.8
These poets, who combined a variety of influences ranging from classical Arabic poets to bohemian modernist forerunners à la Baudelaire, appropriated a derogatory term, Locusts (al-Jarād), that had been used to scorn them in a way similar to the members of the Art et Liberté Group (jamā‘at al-fann wa al-ḥurriyya), who had turned the degrading label “degenerate art” on its head. As Marina Warner notes, these artists, who came from different cultural and religious backgrounds, employed an international artistic language—that of Surrealism—to address local issues.9 As expressed in their manifesto “Vive l’art dégénéré!,” these artists countered the rise of fascism and British colonialism, rejected ethnic and religious labels, and cultivated the dream of a global camaraderie. Pioneering female painters such as Inji Aflatoun, Amy Nimr, and Natalija Tile together with photographer Étienne Sved, cartoonist Kimon Evan Marengo, and caricaturist Kamel El Telmissany are among the members of this group, founded by Georges Henein in 1938. Mersal’s poetry, which expresses a biting yet covert social critique and presses, although cryptically, for political change through the elaboration of a poetics that is rough, obscure, and most of the time unpalatable, bears among other influences that of this long-neglected artist collective of the 1930s and 1940s that was based in Egypt, addressed local concerns, yet was internationalist and cosmopolitan in spirit.10
A cosmopolite herself deeply rooted in the local, Mersal operates a re-vision of the nostalgic and sentimental paradigm traditionally employed by exilic poets to describe their homeland, while at the same time avoiding any celebratory representation of the host country. Her speaker feels out of place both in the busy streets of Cairo as well as in the quiet suburban alleys of a North American metropolis. These two apparently distant spaces—Egypt/Canada, homeland/host country, here/elsewhere—converge most of the time in her poems, destabilizing neatly compartmentalized spatial and temporal divisions and showing that these supposedly antithetical geographical places are in fact not fixed and isolated, but rather shifting and overlapping.
The exhibition “Here and Elsewhere” (Hunā wa Hunāka), opened in 2014 at the New Museum in New York City and displaying artworks from the Arab world, had a similar scope: to destabilize familiar outlooks and conventional angles, call attention to multiple places and perspectives simultaneously, while also inviting visitors “to look ‘elsewhere’ to understand our ‘here.’”11 I contend that a similar heterogeneous treatment of space and alteration of given confines is also at play in Mersal’s poetry.
One of the most distinctive voices in the current Arab (diasporic) literary panorama, Mersal’s poetry is frequently obscure and puzzling. As Stanley Moss rightly notes, “the beauty of her poetry is often in shadow, often hidden from the reader, suddenly revealed in bright Egyptian sunlight that hurts the eye and challenges the mind.”12
Like Egyptian melodramas, Mersal’s poetry is concerned with the minutiae of everyday life and features common characters that are neither heroic nor “universally known.”13 In contrast to Egyptian serials, however, which are generally imbued with clear moral codes and very sentimental, Mersal’s poetry utterly refuses to morally educate and mobilize readers both sentimentally as well politically along conventional lines. As Mattawa observes: “Mersal shows the failure of ideologies—Marxism, Islamism, and Nasserism and other forms of Arab nationalism—as she refuses to buy into the vagaries of liberal democracy. We see the serious, heroic, fake, tiresome, and ineffectual attempts to overcome such pressures.”14
The tension between individual integrity and the pressure exerted by an oppressive sociopolitical environment is crucial to understand Mersal’s often dissonant and recalcitrant poetics. In her poetry, short-lived moments of gaiety and elation interrupt an otherwise desolate and claustrophobic everyday, while creativity and the imagination are the only available tools to counter situations of crisis that erupt in the everyday. I suggest that her poems are very personal and at the same time obliquely political, since the malaise to which the speaker alludes is both existential and sociopolitical. The environment in which she operates is indeed uncooperative and therefore draining, as the poem “Not Likely” makes patently clear:
قد لا يحدُث
قد لا يحدُث
أن آخذ أبي في آخر العام إلى البحر
لهذا
سأعلِّق في مقابل سريرِه
،صورةَ مصطافين
.وشطوطاً ممتدّة لجهاتٍ لا أعلمها
قد لا يحدُث أن يراها
لهذا
سأكتُم صوت تنفُّسي
،وأنا -أبلِّل- أطرافَ أصابعه بمياهٍ مالحة
سأُصدِّق بعد سنواتٍ
:أنني سمعتُهُ يقول
أشمُّ رائحةَ اليود”15”
Not Likely
It is not likely
that I will take my father to the sea at year’s end.
So
I will hang in front of his bed
a poster of beach-goers
and beaches that stretch to places I do not know.
He may not see it at all.
This is why
I will silence the sound of my breathing
as I wet his fingertips with salt water.
And I will believe years later
that I heard him say:
“I smell iodine.”16
Through the use of plain language, disturbing repetitions, and a slowly paced rhythm, Mersal expresses the misery and lack of prospects experienced by the speaker at her father’s hospital bed. The poet addresses here both personal and universal themes relating to filial love, human precariousness, and mortality. What is unique in this poem is therefore not the theme per se but rather the strange atmosphere—simultaneously frantic and paralyzed—that surrounds the father-daughter duo and the disconcerting impression that what readers witness here is a deceitful pantomime, in the tradition of the shadow play theatre (khayāl al-ẓill).17 In particular, the poet’s emphasis on physical sensations (yarāhā, sami‘tuhu, ashummu) as well as her insistence on the unreliability and illusory nature of these impressions qualify the actions as senseless and the two performers as delusional. The dissonance between the speaker’s inventive tricks to extend her father’s claustrophobic room and her father’s actual confinement to bed is accentuated formally by the disproportionate relationship between the long, mellifluous verses and the brusque turning points produced by the isolated expression “so” (lihādhā) as well as by the use of three different verb tenses intricately entwined in the final lines (sa’uṣaddiqu, sami‘tuhu, ashummu). Accordingly, the poem appears to be disharmonious and disrupted, reinforcing feelings of confusion and estrangement in its readers.
Feelings of disorientation and dissimulation can also be found in “House of Mirrors.”18 Here, the speaker retracts from a painful reality marked by privation and loss and finds a temporary relief from a bothersome everyday, by escaping into a house of mirrors, where reality is distorted, thus rendering it more bearable. The hilarity expressed in the first lines, however, lasts only briefly and is soon replaced by a deep sense of disillusion and discouragement:
بيت المرايا
سنذهب معاً إلى مدينة الملاهي
وندخلُ بيتَ المرايا
لترى نفسَكَ أطولَ من نخلة أبيك
.وتراني بجانبك قصيرةً ومحدَّبة
سنضحك كثيراً بلا شك
وستمتدُّ الرحمةُ بيننا
،وسيعرف كُلٌّ منا
أن الآخر يحمل فوق ظهرِه
طفولةً حُرِمتْ من الذهاب
إلى مدينة الملاهي.19
House of Mirrors
We will go together
to the amusement park
and enter the house of mirrors.
You will see yourself taller
than your father’s date palm
and I will stand beside you
misshapen and dwarfed.
No doubt, we’ll laugh a lot
and mercy will spread between us.
Each of us will realize
that we carry on our backs
a childhood without
amusement parks.20
The speaker and her friend enter the house of mirrors together, thus coming in touch with a world of happy deformations and disproportions that is absurd yet soothing. In this poem, Mersal once again creepily introduces incongruity, dissonance, and rupture, where one would expect symmetry and wholeness, thus making readers experience firsthand the bitterness and burden of a childhood marked by deprivation and interdiction. The conflicting division of the poem into two parts suggests that reality is two-faced, while the disjointed syntax and a lexicon emphasizing opposition and otherness (al-marāyā, aṭwal, qaṣīra, al-ākhar) reinforce feelings of estrangement and unease. The harsh tone of the closing lines and the strange pair (ṭufūla ḥurimat) leaves no space for innocence.
In Life as Politics (1995), Asef Bayat explores Islamism and its struggle over fun, noting the following: “Sorrow, sadness, a somber mood, and dark, austere colors defined the Islamist public space, media, and religious rituals. In such a state of virtue, the shape and color of clothing, the movement of the body, the sound of one’s voice, the level of laughter, and the intensity of looks all become matters of intense control and discipline.”21 The initial excitement and genuine hilarity expressed by the speaker in “House of Mirrors” is clearly at odds with a public mood afflicted by economic hardship and social interdictions.
One encounters again the everyday as a site of weariness, tribulation, and discomfort in “Wards.” The whole composition reads like a detached inventory of the habitual objects and people one can find in hospitals. Despite the familiarity of the scene, however, the reader senses that behind this façade of apparent normality hides in fact a worrisome reality. The anaphora that opens each stanza (‘ādatan) and the repetitive parallel structure of the poem rather than being reassuring are perturbing:
خانات
،عادةً ما تكون النوافذُ رماديّةً
،وجليلةً في اتساعها
بما يسمح للموجودين داخل الأَسِرَّة
،بتأمُّل سير المرور
.وأحوالِ الطقس خارجَ المبنى
،عادةً ما يكون للأطبّاء أنوفٌ حادّةٌ
،ونظاراتٌ زجاجيّةٌ
تُثَبِّتُ المسافةَ بينهم و بين الألم.22
Wards
Usually the windows are gray
and splendid in their width
allowing the bed-ridden
to view the traffic below
and the weather outside.
Usually the doctors have sharp noses
and eyeglasses
that secure the distance between them and pain.23
The detailed description provided by the speaker is sound and realistic, yet what reveals the sordid character and double nature of the whole scene are imperceptible bodily signs and well-camouflaged subterfuges, such as the clutching of X-ray sheets in the fourth stanza and the doctors’ use of eyeglasses as immunization against pain. In “Wards,” mourning and loss have become habitual and recurrent events, with new bodies simply replacing previous ones. Mersal’s surgical description contrasted with a lexicon that is generalized (al-khānāt, al-nawāfidh, al-mawjūdīn) contributes to desentimentalize the scene, showing that the public specters of privation, immunization to pain, and falsification under authoritarian rule have grown intimate. What readers witness here is indeed a slow agony from which there is no escape, as the tension between inside and outside (dākhil vs. khārij) that pervades the poem implies.
The political character of Mersal’s poetry, so far largely implied in her compositions, becomes more explicit in the poems she published in 2006, after her relocation from Egypt to the United States first and to Canada next. In “The State” (al-dawla), for instance, the poet condenses, in one single sentence made up of nine lines with no punctuation, the sense of nausea and disgust that overwhelms the speaker, as she watches a military parade from the window of an anonymous building. The poem opens with the reference to “one head” (ra’s wāḥida), orchestrating a series of spasmodic actions involving an army of mutilated soldiers, which the speaker can only see as “hearts, limbs, and genitalia.”24 This obscene army, which calls to mind the crude bodies of Coups de batons (1937), painted by Mayo, one of the most prominent members of the Art et Liberté Group, is juxtaposed to a hopeless “generation that no one needs.”25 Both are represented against a deafening and repellent background, in which nationalist songs flow out from public bathrooms into public squares uncontrolled as diarrhea.
The speaker observes the scene while biting her nails, a bodily action that clearly communicates her nervousness. Her affective misrecognition of the monstrous head that monopolizes the scene and darkens the street is evident, and so is her affective dissonance with the (fake) public mood of national unity and the ear-splitting noise produced by the bombastic ceremony. Mersal’s insistence on the speaker’s disgust, expressed through a convoluted syntax, obscene words, and repellent images, leaves the reader unsettled. The frustration they both experience—note the use of the pronoun “you” that may refer either to the speaker or, alternatively, to the reader—interferes with the public mood of unity and festivity. The domineering “one head” portrayed in this poem is neither a beneficial nor an amiable political creature; rather, it is a disgrace for the people it rules. Accordingly, the “you” in this poem is not a cheerful participant but a distant and disgusted observer, not yet crushed but nonetheless “curved” (munḥan) by the burden this one head represents.
Mersal’s critique becomes even stronger in “The War” (al-ḥarb), a poem that opens in medias res with the speaker confessing: “As for me, I have been standing on tiptoe for years behind his window spying on him. But I cannot see the screen he’s pegged in front of.”26 In this strange game of mirrors, the “fat creature” (al-kā’in al-samīn) mentioned in this poem appears to be closely surveilled by the speaker, whose torment is once again expressed through an uncomfortable bodily posture. The speaker observes the creature and explains that he “chews [French fries] slowly” while sitting comfortably on his sofa, watching the show, and commanding to a heedless pilot to detonate his bombs. The sarcasm hidden between the lines communicates the speaker’s unwillingness to allow the fat creature, with its greed, immovability, and disregard, to go unnoticed. As the speaker explains, “he has not left the sofa for years” and has consumed French fries in great quantity.27
Although written before the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, “The War” undeniably captures and finely reproduces the tense atmosphere, growing sense of frustration, and repressed anger that led to the uprising in Tahrir Square. As Farida Makar rightly notes, humor and the use of caricatures were among the instruments that the protesters used to affectively belittle the power of someone who was in fact very difficult to physically remove. Among the many jokes through which the protesters expressed their exhaustion with the state of things, the ones they cracked about the immovability of their political leader clearly stand out. “Irhal!” (Leave!), for example, was one of the most repeated slogans that people cried out during those days, of which the demonstrators offered translations into many languages and even a reverse version “Lahri!” (“Evael!”) in the hope that the addressee would finally understand and depart.28 As we all know, the state media slandered the protesters in the square as Western puppets fueled by dollars and American fast food, which is highly ironic if we consider Mersal’s description of the fat creature in this poem, who is voraciously eating French fries and being fed by a worldly “substance most delicious and beyond compare.”29
In Mersal’s poetry then, the here emerges as a site of tribulation, deception, and paralysis. Quite surprisingly, perhaps, Mersal’s depiction of the elsewhere is equally bleak and dismaying.
Mersal refuses to rewrite the Arab homeland within a nostalgic framework, while also avoiding to market the multicultural nation as a purely “happy object.”30 Her representation of the life of the migrant as sorrowful, for instance, breaks the myth of the arrival in the so-called New World as necessarily good and thriving.
The sense of loss, disorientation, and estrangement that overwhelms the speaker in the new homeland and her failed attempts to fit are expressed emblematically in “Why Did She Come?” The poem is built on a series of tiny accounts, each one disclosing one facet of the migrant’s dim life abroad. As Youseff Rakha rightly notes, these vignettes read as “humorous and wrapped up miniatures epic of the self,” since they condense in a thumbnail sketch the (mis)fortunes of a single migrant, who becomes representative of an entire national community condemned to expatriation.31
In opposition to the classical heroes of both ancient and medieval epics, such as Odysseus and Antar, who traveled widely, fought valiantly, and were often received as revered guests, the traveler this time is a woman, who cannot count either on the benevolence of the Gods or on the hospitality of the people she encounters. The opening lines of the poem in particular recreate the distrust and open hostility that the speaker faces once she embarks on her hijra to the West and lands in an unfamiliar place, where she finds only suspicion and resentment: “Why did she come to the New World, this mummy, this subject of spectacle / sleeping in her full ornament of gray gauze, / an imaginary life in a museum display case?”32 As in an ancient Greek tragedy, a chorus of people comments on the deeds of the heroine, yet the aim is not celebratory, and the tone is neither benevolent nor compassionate. Mersal subtly derails the use of Pharaonic mythology by the Egyptian state’s propaganda, with its tendency to resurrect ancient symbols to celebrate the grandeur of the Egyptian nation.33 Under the scrutinizing gaze of a collectivity that disapproves of her arrival, the Egyptianness of the speaker is reduced to an unattractive vestige and, ultimately, to a corpse. Her mummified body is equated to a kind of Oriental mirabilia, whose life is preserved and exposed publicly as if it were an object of curiosity, an extravaganza to be exhibited “in a museum display case.”34
Mersal develops here a queer epic that does not follow the norms of the genre but openly deviates from its normative system. The speaker has indeed no quest to accomplish or any heroic exploits to boast. On the contrary, she is in a state of inertia and apathy, limiting herself to coldly register the differences between the here and the elsewhere:
هنا أيضاً أشجارٌ خضراء تقف تحت ضغط الثلج، وأنهارٌ لا يتعانق
بجانبها عشاقٌ خلسة، بل يجري بموازاتها رياضيون مع كلابهم
.في صباح الأحد، دون أن ينتبهوا للمياه التي تجمدت من الوحدة
ومهاجرون لم يتدربوا على محبة الطبيعة ولكنّهم يصدّقون أن
نسبةَ التلوث أقل، وأن بإمكانهم إطالة أعمارهم بمضغ الأوكسجين
قبل النوم عبر كبسولاتٍ هوائية.35
There are trees here too, standing under the weight of snow, and rivers where lovers do not sneak an embrace. Instead, there are joggers who run along the banks with their dogs on Sunday mornings not noticing the waters that froze from solitude. There are immigrants who were not trained in loving nature, but who believe there is less pollution here, and that they can prolong their lives by chewing on oxygen capsules before going to bed.36
The female speaker in this scene coldly registers both similarities and differences between the old and the new country; her list is scrupulous yet disheartening because, although things may on the surface appear similar, as the expression “here too” (hunā ayḍan) suggests, they are in fact awkwardly different. In particular, the trees that hardly bear the “weight of snow” convey a sense of fatigue, while the representation of the self-absorbed joggers replacing the clandestine lovers back home communicate feelings of human neglect and emotional detachment. Despite the invigorating cold and salubriousness of the air, readers are pushed to think that life in the new country is reduced to a prolonged agony. The image of the immigrants “chewing on oxygen capsules before going to bed” suggests feelings of claustrophobia, artificiality, and existential anguish.37 Rather than listing the wonders (‘ajā’ib) of the New World, as was often the case in medieval travel accounts, the speaker compiles here a stock of apparently familiar yet in fact totally foreign/strange (gharīb) images that inspire in the reader desolation rather than astonishment.
The speaker’s contemplative attitude and her being oriented toward the past, her being turned both inward and backward are clearly in contrast to the neoliberal imperative to be “healthy” and “fit,” which the above-mentioned joggers clearly embody, as well as to the “happiness duty” that the multicultural nation expects the migrant to perform.38 A veritable misfit, the speaker not only refuses to follow the prescriptions imposed by the neoliberal health, food, and fitness industries; she also reveals what is not good in the multicultural nation, thus cracking the myth that depicts it as purely benevolent and well-disposed toward outsiders:
ولكني منذ ساعة أتأمل صورة أمي organic food يجب شراء
،جالسة على عتبة دار أبيها التي لم تعد هناك؛ أقصد العتبة
.رغم أن أمي نفسها لم تعد هناك
لا أحد يمرّ في الشارع لأن العربات تدخل وتخرج بالريموت
كنترول. كنتُ قد اشتريتُ هذا البيت الذي لا يمكنني الجلوس على
عتبته من أرملة نحاتٍ أسبانيّ, كان قد بناه على أرضٍ تؤول إلى
مهاجرٍ أوكرانيّ أعطتها له الحكومة الكنديّة بعد نزعها من الهنود
الحُمر؛ لكي تقيم مدينةً فيها عدة جامعات وعشرات من الشوبنج
مول وآلاف مثلي يعرفون االفوائدَ الصحيةَ للأورجانيك فوود
ويمتلكون عربات تدخل وتخرج بالريموت كنترول.39
One must buy organic food, but for an hour I have been
contemplating a photo of my mother
sitting on the doorstep of her father’s house which is no
longer there. I mean the doorstep,
even though my mother too is no longer there.
No one passes by on this street because the cars enter and
leave by remote control.
I bought this house on whose doorstep I cannot sit, from the widow of a Spanish sculptor who built it on land that belonged to a Ukrainian immigrant given to him by the Canadian government after it was filched from the Indians to build a city with several universities and tens of shopping malls and to house thousands like me who know the health benefits of organic food and who own cars that enter and leave by remote control.40
The speaker’s meditative mood and static posture reveal a lifestyle that is at odds with the dynamic and goal-oriented logic that governs neoliberal societies such as the one portrayed here. The verb “must” (yajib), in particular, suggests an idea of prescription and obligation, while the reference to the remote control, wittily transliterated into rīmūt kuntrūl, expresses a subtle critique of an automatized way of life, where humanity has been replaced by technology. Furthermore, by retracing the genealogy of her house, the speaker indirectly discloses Canada’s colonial crimes, thus raising serious doubts about the construction of Canada as a purely benign and hospitable nation-state moved by multicultural love. Through speculation and innuendo, the speaker reveals another threat lurking in neoliberal societies: the risk of conformity.
The elsewhere in Mersal’s poetry is not, as readers may expect, an idyllic place providing the migrant with comfort and protection. There is yet another danger concealed in the apparently pristine character of the elsewhere: slumbering peacefully into political atrophy and complacency. As the speaker explains: “What you learn here is not different from what you learned there: / You read to absent reality.”41 The poem ends with the following words:
Nothing here deserves your rebellion.
You are content and dead
and life around you appears like a merciful hand
that lit up a blind old man’s room
so that he can read the past.42
The interchangeable use of hunā and hunākā and the blurring of the traditional boundaries separating poetry from prose contribute to increase the reader’s disorientation, a bewilderment that is addressed not only lexically and formally but also visually. On the front cover of the Arabic edition of Alternative Geography (jughrāfiyā badīla), Egypt and Alberta are indeed split from existing maps and juxtaposed; on the back cover, the African continent and the Canadian nation are outlined as missing those two fragments. The map as a whole appears to be defective, distorted, and partly defamiliarizing, in that Africa and Canada are adjacent yet flipped.
Ostracized by the community that is supposed to “liberate” her and disaffected from the hasty world that surrounds her, the migrant speaker in Mersal’s poetry appears to be estranged, bored, and politically unmoved. Whereas in the here the speaker’s individuality was marked by a “damaged . . . agency,” in the elsewhere the speaker willfully refuses agency as prescription and emerges as a “diasporic misfit,” to use Heather Love’s apt formulation.43 Both in the here and in the elsewhere, the speaker appears to be an “affect alien,” in Ahmed’s sense of the term, a subjectivity experiencing alien affect and being “out of line with the public mood.”44 I suggest that the underlying pain, which the speaker constantly evokes yet refuses to share, functions as a powerful call for a more sympathetic, humane, and welcoming way of life. To the demand for this different kind of inhabitance we will now turn.
In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown unveils a set of economic and political asymmetries that traverse today’s globalized world generating tension. As she writes: “What we have come to call a globalized world harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription.”45
Mersal’s “Frankfurt Airport” addresses these multiple pressures poetically, by condensing in one tiny scene two intersecting and colliding mobilities—that of the intellectual expatriate and of the refugee—together with two conflicting identity categories: the privileged and the needy.
في مطار فرانكفورت
خمسةُ أطفالٍ تائهين بين قدميّ أُمٍّ محجبةٍ وأبٍ يرتعش
،ينتظرون الرجلَ الآمن خلف جدارٍ من الزجاج
.الرجلَ الذي سيحدّد لهم بأيّةِ أرضٍ سيموتون
خبأتُ جوازَ سفري في جيبي وأنا أمرُّ
هكذا لا يكلّفُ ادعاءُ الإنسانيةِ أكثرَ من تذكّر الطفولة
لا يجب أن يأكلَ الواحدُ حلوى أمام محرومين“46”
Five children lost between the feet of a veiled woman
and a trembling father.
They are waiting for the official, safe behind the glass wall,
the man
who will decide in which land they will die.
I hide my passport in my pocket as I walk past.
This way claiming humanity costs no more than remembering
childhood:
“One should not eat sweets in front of the needy.”47
In this poem, the speaker seems to move at a different speed with respect to the family: she moves fast, while the others are stuck. The contrast is expressed, formally, through the division of the poem into two incongruous parts and, stylistically, through the use of a swiftly flowing line to describe the speaker’s quick and unproblematic passage across the security check opposed to three dense and burdensome lines to describe the family’s halt.
Feelings of impotence and shame surface this poem, raising uncomfortable questions regarding the different distributions of power and the asymmetrical allocation of the right to move that characterize the contemporary age. By carefully selecting her words, particularly “veiled” (muḥajjaba) and “deprived, needy” (maḥrūmīn), Mersal lays bare the two predominant qualities that, according to Brown, activate aversion in neoliberal states: Islam constructed as a foreign and inassimilable presence and destitution as a personal sin rather than a structural form of inequality. By effect of this careful selection, the family appears to embody, in Brown’s own words, “two disparate images that are currently merged to produce a single figure of danger justifying exclusion and closure: the hungry masses, on the one hand, and cultural religious aggression towards Western values, on the other.”48 The poet, however, skillfully bends these stereotypical constructions, by signaling that this is not a threatening mass but just a family and by exposing the father’s own vulnerability through his trembling. The poet, moreover, blocks the activation of strong feelings in favor of more imperceptible affects, such as shame, frustration, and resignation. The speaker’s antipathy and contempt toward the border agent and the blockade he officially puts in place is expressed subtly by the poet through the use of the generic term “the man” (al-rajul), a move that indicates that the officer has lost all credibility and authority in the eyes of the speaker.
Here, Mersal clearly writes back to the postmodern fantasies that celebrate nomadism and cultivate the illusion of fluidity and speed as universal markers of global mobility. The first-person speaker is in fact an impotent spectator in the face of the negative mobility of the family and feels in part complicit in the situation; the rule of law in this scene appears to be suspended and responsibility to be replaced by nonaccountability. The speaker’s final withdrawal rather than overt action, her restraint, silence, and sense of guilt subvert ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege as well as self-centered fantasies of universal mobility, while at the same time calling into question her unwillingness (or, perhaps more realistically, her inability) to intervene. Rather than actively engaging in, Mersal’s speaker appears to publicly disengage; her impotence and shame raise uncomfortable questions regarding the political disempowerment of subjectivities in today’s neoliberal democracies, particularly the real capacity of common citizens to make a difference and have a say in the decisions that different political actors—in this specific case, the European Union—take.
The absurdity of the scene witnessed by the speaker and its Kafkaesque quality propels the metamorphosis of the airport, originally conceived as a site of “progressive thinking and utopian planning,” into a penal colony or a penitentiary.49 Following the transformation of the airport into a high-security prison, Alastair Gordon forcefully notes:
Antiterrorism measures turned the airport into an electronically controlled environment rivaled only by the maximum security prison. It was more than mere coincidence that the architects responsible for some of these fortified terminals had also designed penitentiaries. Both the airport and the cell block used similar kinds of logic. Interior and exterior spaces were under 24h surveillance from electronic eyes, motion detectors, and video cameras. Both inmates and passengers moved through a similar series of sealed passageways, automatic doors, and narrow checkpoints, where personal screenings were administered with metal detectors and body searches. Only the duration of incarceration differed.50
The transformation of the airport from a site of progress and radical imagination to a maximum security prison goes hand in hand with the metamorphosis of the European Union from a free union of states, antagonistic to tyranny, social injustice, and war into a fortress. The state confederation imagined by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi in their draft manifesto compiled during their political confinement on the island of Ventotene during World War II is far apart from today’s Schengen Area with its hardened and militarized external borders as well as its “policies of containment that treat migrants as undesirables.”51
Unable to govern the many contradictions, asymmetries, and tensions exerted by globalization—this, at least, is Brown’s argument—states have resorted to a policy of blockading and to the construction of walls, whose function is, however, mainly theatrical, as they project a power that they cannot and do not actually exercise.52 The global proliferation of security procedures mirrors the dissemination of walls, security fences, and barriers in many states that, as Brown rightly notes, “cannot block out without shutting in, cannot secure without making securization a way of life, cannot define an external ‘they’ without producing a reactionary ‘we.’”53 As Mersal suggests in this poem, in a highly securitized political, the erosion of democratic principles and values is a real risk. The political conceived as a military outpost watched over by a high-tech surveillance system and patrolled by guards and warships can only fail.
In “Map Store,” Mersal provides readers with an alternative conceptualization of the political, one in which exterior walls, sealed passageways, and narrow checkpoints have been replaced by confluence, mutual recognition, and the right to self-determination. Before getting to that point, however, let’s first follow Mersal as she retraces the strange genealogy of that curious shop:
دكَّانُ خرائط
بإمكانَك تخيله عائداً من الحرب
تلك الحروب التي تنمو في مكانٍ آخر
ليعود بعضُ أفرادِها بذكرياتٍ قد تبدو كافية
لصناعةِ فيلمٍ شبه واقعي
،المُهم، أنه عاد من صحراء في شمال إفريقيا
وبخبرةٍ في العطش افتتحَ دكاناً لبيع العصائر.54
You can imagine him returning from war,
one of those wars that broke somewhere else
and whose combatants return with enough memories
to make an almost realistic movie.
What is important is that he came back from the deserts of
North Africa,
and with his expertise in thirst he opened a juice bar.55
Mersal’s apparently dispassionate and objective reconstruction of the store’s genealogy hides in fact a sharp critique, as expressed through lexical pairs that express alterity and absurdity (makān ākhar; shibh wāqi‘iyy; khibra fī al-‘atash). With a note of sarcasm, Mersal obliquely addresses here crucial political issues, such as the controversial relation between war and profit, the mystifying construction of the elsewhere as a deserted place available for conquest and occupation, and mainstream representations of the war as a sublime, movie-like distraction or a formative experience that provides training and discipline. In particular, Mersal subtly criticizes America’s “civilizing mission” of exporting justice and democracy to other, supposedly uncivilized countries; this is indeed a theory that has many leaks, as the image of the seeping water in the following lines clearly suggests:
كان يضعُ الثلجَ فوق المشروبات الصحية التي أصبحت في أواخر
الأربعينيات أمارةً على أمريكا في عهدها الجديد العادل
حين اكتشف مياهاً تنزُّ من الصناديق
فتهَيأ له بحر، يابسة، ثم جزيرة
من هنا تولّدت لديه فكرةٌ مشوشةٌ عن الجغرافيا
ثم جاء حفيدُهُ الذي لم يدهب أبداً إلى الحرب
فحوَّل الدكانَ إلى مكان لبيع الخرائط.56
He was tossing ice in the healthy beverages that were, in the late
forties, a symbol of America and her new era of justice when he
discovered water seeping from a stack of boxes
and he imagined a sea, dry land, and an island.
From then on he developed a skewed notion of geography.
Then his grandson, who had never gone to war,
turned the shop into a map store.57
Mersal ingeniously reveals here with striking nonchalance how apparently innocuous items such as juices and maps and neutral disciplines such as cartography have been employed by colonial and imperial power to conquer foreign lands and subjugate foreign people. As David Atkinson notes with reference to European imperialism: “[It] had long used cartography and survey to transform tarrae incognitae into measured and knowable territory: rendering space governable in practical terms as well as capturing it symbolically.”58
Conceived in modern times as tools at the service of colonial and imperial powers to separate, control, and discipline the indigenous population of distant lands, maps are creatively reconfigured in this poem as an instrument through which a variety of displaced people cope with their sense of loss and estrangement and maintain in creative ways their connection with the land they lost. A microcosm set in the heart of Manhattan, the map store evoked by Mersal appears as a place of confluence and collective gathering for a group of alienated strangers. In their hands, geography stops being the usual “totalizing stage” where big powers show off their force, and becomes an effective tool through which forcibly uprooted people reclaim, reconstruct, and make publicly known in very intimate ways their severed relationship to their original land:59
،لو مررتَ من هنا يوماً
في هذا الشارع الذي يشبه شرياناً مسدوداً في قلب مانهاتن
سترى أُناساً ليسوا من هنا
يدخلون ويخرجون ونادراً ما يشترون شيئاً
أنا مرةً رأيتُ امرأةً تمسحُ الترابَ عن جبلٍ
وبنتاً ترسلُ خصلةً من شَعْرها في بحيرةٍ
وسمعتُ آخر يحاولُ أن يصفَ لآخر معه
موقعَ بيته البعيدِ في قريته البعيدة بالقرب من مدينةٍ بعيدةٍ
تظهر مثل نقطةٍ في خريطة بلده البعيد.60
If you come here one day,
to this street that resembles a blocked vein in the heart of
Manhattan,
you will see people not from here
who enter and leave, rarely buying anything.
I once saw a woman wipe the dust off a mountain
and a girl dipping a tress of her hair into a lake
and heard someone trying to explain to someone else
the location of his distant house in his distant village near
a distant city
which appears like a dot on the map of his distant country.61
In this singular shop, where nobody seems to buy anything, maps are not reduced to consumer goods but reimagined as performative tools to exchange shared stories and experiences of loss, recall meaningful details, and pinpoint distant locations. Traditionally employed by colonial and imperial powers as an instrument to speed up the occupation of foreign lands and explain away the removal and dispossession of its native peoples, maps are reconfigured here as an empowering rather than coercive tool. They are the practical means through which ordinary men and women develop a sense of their own location and translate it to others with the help of narration. I argue that these oral tales do not simply contribute to locate a small village on the map; rather, they recompose it, refound it, publicly reclaim its importance, and thus authorize its existence despite its smallness. As Michel de Certeau claims: “The story’s first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found.”62
In the final stanza, however, the speaker reveals to be irresistibly driven to this place also for another—this time more disquieting—reason:
انا أمرُّ من هنا
لا لأشارك هؤلاء الغرباءَ حسرتَهم
ولا لأضع الماءَ في النيل الذي يبدو مثل ثعبانٍ نائمٍ
في الرسم المعلق في مواجهة الباب
ولا حتى لأتأمل ذلك البهاء الذي لابد كان هناك
في أعلى الرّكبة اليمنى لصاحب الدُّكان الأصليّ
الذي أرى الآن صورتَه في زيّ الجنديّ ونيشانه
دون أيّ ذِكْرٍ لرِجْله الخشبيّة
.أو للماءِ الذي نزَّ من الصناديق
أنا لا أعرفُ لماذا أمرُّ من هنا حقيقةً
لكني الآنَ أشهدُ بعينيّ
بائعَ الخرائطِ
مرعوباً ربما للمرة الأولى
في حربٍ لم يجد وقتاً ليذهب إليها
الحرب، هذه المرة، جاءت إليه.63
I come here
not to share with these strangers their sorrow,
or to pour water into the Nile which appears like a sleeping
snake
in the drawings hung facing the door,
not even to witness that glory that must have been there
above the right knee of the store’s original owner
whom I see photographed in army uniform and medals
with no mention of his wooden leg
or the water that seeped from the boxes.
In truth, I don’t know why I come here.
But I see now with my own eyes
the map seller
frightened, possibly for the first time,
in a war he had no time to go to,
a war, this time, that had come to him.64
In the closing lines, the speaker sees her own fear and puzzlement reflected in the eyes of the young owner, who cannot get used to the idea that the war is not happening this time in an elsewhere disconnected from the here, but has instead already moved to Manhattan and thus to the heart of the United States.
As in Mona Hatoum’s installation Hot Spot (2009), the planet is outlined in the poem’s closing lines as being in a permanent state of alertness, traversed by a red grid signaling the omnipresence of danger and pointing to hot spots of conflict everywhere. Placed against this tense global background, the map store functions as a space for hope, a gathering place, a stronghold against colonial/imperial violence and the loss produced by it. In this miniaturized world that contains multitudes, where the actual scale of “things” is distorted and the Nile has the size of a sleeping snake, everyday men and women engage in nonviolent, creative practices to reclaim, refound, and ultimately reauthorize the existence of small, neglected places and of their indigenous peoples that maps (and the imperial powers that commissioned their drawing) have erased from public imaginaries.
In line with the members of the Mahjar Group, such as Jibran Khalil Jibran and Amin Rihani, who arrived in North America at the end of the nineteenth century and articulated in their literary works their experience of dislocation and alienation, Mersal resorts to the prose poem to recount her own and her speaker’s hijra to North America.65 The poet’s personal journey and poetic trajectory, however, is fundamentally different from that of her famous literary predecessors. Mersal clearly dissociates, for instance, from what she considers Jibran’s tendency to respond to Orientalist expectations and transform his identity accordingly.66 In opposition to Jibran’s prophet, her speaker has no wisdom to share, keeps sentimentality at bay, and remains willfully a misfit, positioned on a precarious edge. To quote Mersal: “Diasporic misfits who avoid a kitschy position reside neither at the center nor at the margin as constructed by the center; they reside in a margin unrecognized by the center.”67
Whether set in the obstructed streets of Cairo or in the uniform suburb of a Canadian metropolis, Mersal’s poetry shifts unevenly between the here and the elsewhere, poetry and prose, individual experience and its turbulent social and political surroundings. The global in her poetry appears to be intricately bound together with the intimate. This is why the collection zooms in on intimate scenes of everyday life—at a hospital bed, in an amusement park, and on the steps of a family home—while at the same time offering broader shots of a high-security international airport, a strange map store located in the heart of Manhattan, and a monotonous suburbia where nothing happens except the opening and closing of automatic gates.
Distant geographical spaces such as Canada and Egypt, global metropolises such as Cairo and New York City, and minuscule places that maps have either promptly erased or cut off and isolated condemning them to a slow death are redrawn by Mersal’s poetic imagination as contiguous places belonging to the same bizarre planetary map made of odd couplings—beachgoers and patients, dwarfs and palm trees, fat creatures and spying women standing on tiptoes—twisted geographical notions, and unexpected changes of scale. Egypt, in particular, is outlined in Mersal’s poems as a place where the street is overshadowed by a domineering presence, a monstrous “single head” that scrutinizes everything; Canada, too, is Cyclopean in size, and the migrant, as a recalcitrant Ulysses, must ingeniously survive in order not to be devoured by the terrible creature with one eye that assimilates everything.
At times disturbing, the alien affects that Mersal mobilizes, such as frustration, aversion, nervousness, and impotence, force readers to take notice and to witness perhaps against their will things they were not supposed to see. This is why the poems become simultaneously intimate and creepy. Mersal, as we have seen, expresses her political discontent by mobilizing “ugly feelings” and by performing a politics of retreat, disengagement, and withdrawal, which is at odds with the political imperative of neoliberal democracies: engage, act, change.68 This awkward political project, that dodges participation in the traditional sense, goes hand in hand with a defamiliarizing aesthetics, which privileges the use of dissonant tones, disturbing repetitions, unexpected changes of scale, and strange lexical pairs, which the reader experiences as disconcerting and disorienting.
Far from being showy, Mersal’s art is obscure, introverted, and secretive. The poet introduces questions of embodiment into the analysis of politics and outlines modalities of action that deviate from the usual political vocabulary. Mersal’s original conceptualization of political action is instead grounded in practices of negation, refused agency, and withdrawal. Since it has, politically speaking, the size of a Lilliput, Mersal’s speaker is unable to fight back against the political perceived as Colossus; she can, nonetheless, make persistent, small breaches in the walls of this entrenched titan. As Mersal explains with reference to the political quality of her poetry: “You play and enjoy not just creating something, but deconstructing things and the rhetoric that surrounds them.”69
To keep her individual integrity hale, Mersal’s (anti)heroine continually opts out from existing systems and refuses to adopt stereotypical categories of womanhood. Hers is a feminist politics as defined in Judith Halberstam’s words, one that “issues not from a doing or becoming woman but from a refusal to be or to become woman as she has been defined and imagined.”70 Accordingly, Mersal’s speaker defies conventional representations of womanhood. She is neither virtuous and modest, as Islamic standards would dictate, nor sexually loose and socially defiant, as a stereotypical feminist line would prescribe.
Both in the here and in the elsewhere, the political in Mersal’s poetry is revealed for what it really is: a space of atrophy, alienation, and oppression. Since it is intrinsically rotten, the speaker cannot but disengage from it. Faced with a crumbling political, the poet nonetheless cultivates the dream of an alternative, perhaps utopian, political as a space of genuine flourishing for all.
In opposition to her predecessors, particularly to the nahḍa intellectuals who were seduced by and rushed to adjust to Europe’s ideas of progress and modernity, Mersal is not trapped by the lures of the elsewhere. She strongly criticizes, for instance, Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi’s “desire for modernizing and revolutionizing stagnant societies in the East by borrowing Western civilization.”71 Her uncompromising look dissects and disfigures both Egypt and Canada, the EU and North America, revealing their coimbrication and manifesting political stagnation as an endemic global problem, although with different degrees of gravity.
By powerfully detaching herself from the yoke of a politically engaged poetry that she perceives as having imprisoned Mahmoud Darwish, among other Arab poets and intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, Mersal develops what she herself calls an indirectly political poetry. Her art aims to pierce the darkness and let the truth emerge; its political force relies precisely in its capacity to illuminate what would otherwise remain in the dark. Terms such as “homeland,” “belonging,” and “citizenship,” for instance, which have been coopted by the nationalistic authoritarian state and hollowed out of meaning, have been washed, in Mersal’s own words, from “the rust of the dictatorship,” finally acquiring a new shine.72
Because she alters given confines and overlaps places traditionally regarded as being at the antipodes, Mersal intervenes in what Edward Said once called the “struggle over geography.”73 This is not a neutral discipline but one complicit with power and imperial crimes, since, as he convincingly argues in Culture and Imperialism, “just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. The struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”74
Mersal draws an alternative, outlandish cartography of planetary size, where global metropolises and small villages are horizontally aligned; she further gives priority to oral narratives, indigenous knowledge, and the memory of ordinary men and women who repeatedly reclaim the existence and consequently refound and reauthorize the presence of places and people that official maps and imperial powers have wiped out from their land and the public imaginary. This is clearly a creative act of re-vision that has deeply political implications since it reinscribes, as in the case of Hatoum’s Routes (2002), “new, imaginary cartographies upon and within those already established.”75 Undeniably, this is also an act of civil disobedience and a counterpolitics that, by granting recognition to all—even to the most neglected place or people on earth—makes an irrevocable step forward toward equality, recognition, and justice.
Mersal’s poetry offers the gift of an alternative point of observation that is simultaneously rooted in the here and gliding over the elsewhere. In her altered, bottom-up geography remote, supposedly negligible, places and people are brought near and leave a lasting impression on us.
From the heights of her far-reaching wire, the funambulist Mersal shows readers that to imagine a planet liberated from the yoke of violence and war, dispossession and loss, one needs first to acknowledge, rejoice with, and honor a vanishing village that manages to strenuously survive, and only afterward marvel at the magnificence of the cosmos and eventually help the woman in the map store wipe off its dust.