THE EARTH IN THE ATTIC / FADY JOUDAH

Definitions of political poetry are as varied, numerous, and absolute as those of the lyric, with this difference: American poets are eager to define the political in a manner that includes themselves, whereas the lyric will tend to be defined as what the poet has cast off. This was not always so, but in the unstable present, political art seems bold, important, serious, whereas the lyric preoccupations with abiding and insoluble dilemmas seem evasive and frivolous. At the heart of these impassioned realignments is the poet’s anxiety lest his art be considered a parlor art: specialized, over-refined, the amusement of privilege.

Underlying these disputes and conversations is a devotion to categories: where there are categories, there are hierarchies.

A problem, of course, is that this language of categories is a language of absolutes, opposing the wholly inward-turning gaze to the wholly outward-turning, although such distinctions are, rather, a matter of degree. In the fiction of such oppositions, at one extreme is a poetry preoccupied with rarified inner states, with perception, a poetry inclining to the fretfully solipsistic, as though the world were an irritant. And at the other extreme, a poetry that mistakes holding opinions for thinking, a poetry determined to right wrongs, self-consciously immersed in what George Oppen called “the certainties / Of place / And of time”—at its worst, bombastic and sentimental, dutifully unbeautiful. But the extremes are rare, and poets both politically alert and spiritually attentive have always existed; I think, in recent years, of Oppen—others will find other examples.

The Earth in the Attic confuses these rituals of classification: Fady Joudah is, in one sense, a deeply political artist (though never an artist who writes to manifest or advance convictions) and, in another sense, a luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements. He is that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession (as distinct from will and fashion) have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas. Under other conditions, one could imagine this elegant austerity, this precision, this dreamy inwardness absorbed entirely in the natural world. But the sky and earth here are the sky and earth of an imperiled country, or the haunted landscapes of a lost homeland. In either case, the present is experienced elegiacally, the atmosphere of legend already permeating it:

The end of the road is a beautiful mirage:

White jeeps with mottos, white

And blue tarps where the dust gnaws

At your nostrils like a locust cloud

Or a helicopter thrashing the earth,

Wheat grains peppering the sky.

For now

Let me tell you a fable:

Why the road is lunar

Goes back to the days when strangers

Sealed a bid from the despot to build

The only path that courses through

The desert of the people.

The tyrant secretly sent

His men to mix hand grenades

With asphalt and gravel,

Then hid the button

That would detonate the road.

These are villages and these are trees

A thousand years old,

Or the souls of trees,

Their high branches axed and dangled

Like lynched men flanking the wadis …

—“ATLAS”

“A fable” the poem calls what it retells, but the events, the vocabulary, are recent. The landscape is saturated with a narrative violence, but the poem more closely resembles lyric pastoral than contemporary political action poem. Violence has passed, but the earth is changed, its lunar stillness at once beautiful and appalling.

Joudah’s position here is that of the outsider, but a particular outsider, his method less interrogation than identification. What in other sensibilities might replicate the colonial gesture here seems spontaneous, necessary, exact. As a Palestinian in the West, as a doctor who practices emergency medicine, as a poet writing in English: for a number of reasons, in a variety of situations, Joudah finds himself not at home, not among his people. The Earth in the Attic is a book of exile, its biblical resonances less motif than echo. The poet makes of exile not a special case, a perverse snobbery, but rather a metaphor for current psychic reality, as though that reality were indeed displacement, if not geographically, metaphysically: we are adrift, in elemental ways, from the past with all its theoretically useful lessons; the sense of groundedness, of continuity it sustained has vanished. The perception is not new; the treatment is. Of displacement, in these poems, a kind of community is made. “Atlas” ends on a recognition, a tacit gesture of welcome, cautious but potentially inclusive—of the poet, obviously, but also of the reader:

This blue crested hoopoe is whizzing ahead of us

From bough to bough,

The hummingbird wings

Like fighter jets

Refueling in midair.

If you believe the hoopoe

Is good omen,

The driver says,

Then you are one of us.

At the deepest level, the fissure cannot be repaired, though human connection—in friendship, in the ministries of medical aid, in love—does what it can. But the sense of deprivation and longing persist: when Fady Joudah dreams, when he falls in love, nearly always the simile involves the word home, a restoration and an arrival. One of the most moving poems, “Proposal,” is such a dream:

I see Haifa

By my father and your father’s sea,

The sea with little living in it,

Fished out like a land.

The poem ends:

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,

Becomes a bird to see of the land

What it otherwise wouldn’t.

And the wind through the trees

Is the sea coming home.

A longing for community may enact itself as curiosity, even as self-protection re-creates distance. Many figures move through these poems, some familial, some strangers, some briefly but intimately known: the men and women who move through a clinic, a population characterized by crisis and transience. In Fady Joudah’s quick portraits, each is utterly individual, stark, occasionally comic. These portraits share a refusal of the lingering analytic rumination (which might change them from living people into narcissistic projections)—“Not why, but how,” Joudah says elsewhere, “A humility of science”:

One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks

The neighbor demanded compensation

For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates

Do you know what it’s like

To drive on roads occupied

By animal farms: you cannot tell

Who killed who or how

Many ducks were there to begin with

—“MOON GRASS RAIN” (6)

Today, I yelled at three old women

Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need

One wanted extra

For her grandson who came along for the ride

—“MOON GRASS RAIN” (8)

Or this, like many similar moments in the shorter poems:

The carpenter

Dying of cancer in a hospital bed

Saying, god, I know

You’ve given me misfortune

But when I get up there

There’d better be a damn

Good reason for it,

I’ve got nothing against trees.

—“AN IDEA OF RETURN”

Fady Joudah’s gift for swift, telling detail, for image-making, shows itself in other ways—as observation of nature, as expanded psychological portrait. In their particulars, if not in their movement, the poems seem analogues for photographs. But images here perform a critical psychological (as opposed to aesthetic) function: each image makes a stable referent, an iconic substitute for what is lost. For the same reasons, toward the same result, Joudah’s model is less the allegory than the folktale, his language a language in which the anecdotal human past is stored, renewed, and affirmed in the retellings. So, too, the chilling testimony of landscape becomes in language fixed, permanent, a means of both affirming and sustaining outrage.

Though an image may suggest (in which sense it is not static), it is neither dramatic nor narrative. It follows that poems made of such building blocks move associatively, from image to image, fixed point to fixed point. But in Joudah’s work, this movement is neither a buffeted reactiveness (which is passive) nor a meditative rambling (which lacks agenda). In their purposefulness and economy, these lyrics resemble scientific proofs, but proofs written in an utterly direct and human language; in their implicit drivenness, their wish to change the reader as the poet has been changed, the poems acquire a dramatic intensity image-making does not usually produce. “Pulse” means to take us beyond naïveté, to equip us with the poet’s informed gaze, or the doctor’s registering of every detail, “collecting evidence” (in Hugh Seidman’s wonderful phrase). Such seeing and recording have moved far beyond the reeling, self-regarding drama of shock into some more profound, more responsive attentiveness. “Pulse” needs to be read whole, but every section gives indication of its accumulative power:

On the night of the accident

That flipped over the military truck

Cracking many teenage bones, there was a wedding.

The family blazed the air,

Bullets came down

Into the groom’s chest.

Last night we heard a Pop.

One of us shouted Wow in her sleep.

Another, awake and laughing, said:

Here goes the bride

And the dowry: cash

That looks like human remains …

—“PULSE (7)”

He fired, they fired, into the air.

By now the slight jerk in the listener’s neck

Is a Rilkean gazelle in her water spring.

Toddlers still take off in terror, besieged

By calm in the mother’s voice.

—“PULSE (8)”

Halimah’s mother did not seem aware Halimah was dying.

You should have seen Halimah fight her airlessness

Twisting around for a comfortable spot in the world.

 …

                                                             … Halimah

Died of a failing heart

Early this dawn, her mother, with tears now,

Was on the road, twenty steps past me

Before I turned and found her waiting.…

—“PULSE (12)”

Certain of the poems here, notably this sequence, seem located in Darfur—impossible to be certain since the place, or places, are not named. This is deliberate, not coy, a way of insisting on the representative or paradigmatic quality of what unfolds. The poems record the survival of the recognizably human under inhuman conditions—in the hands of a lesser writer, this would be unreadable, sententious. But what underlies these poems is fury that the human should be so mercilessly and relentlessly taxed. The tales Fady Joudah tells are the tales of a very recent present, but a present turned, absolutely and suddenly, to long ago:

Between what should and what should not be

Everything is liable to explode. Many times

I was told who has no land has no sea. My father

Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story

Of a sycamore tree he used to climb

When he was young to watch the rain.

Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being

Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.

The tree is gone—only a fluke that the father isn’t. But what he has seen imperils him:

My brother believed bad dreams could kill

A man in his sleep, he insisted

We wake my father …

—“SLEEPING TREES”

A sense of religious intensity or necessity emanates from these poems, as though, in the absence of the authenticating earth—where home was—only language remains, having to take on the work of both earth and spirit. It is, here, the single means by which tradition and history (the constructs in which the personal is rooted) can be kept alive. Even the most specific and local details have a lyric timelessness. On the page, incident and description are freshly perceived, quotidian; an underlying imperative transforms them into parables, the patina of time already half acquired before the poem is even complete. The tales have an incantatory quality; they more closely resemble spells than gossip. They are the elemental messages of sleep and art, charged with omen:

Say I found you and god

On the same day at the border

Of words, better two late birds than

The stone that hit them.…

The poem ends like this:

And in the new country,

Say the hoopoe will still reach us,

Say anything that doesn’t wake me

From my morning sleep,

My dreams take too long

And I must finish them.

—“LOVE POEM”

The improvisational, let-me-tell-you-a-story say of the opening line, the say of just suppose, becomes, by the end, imperious, a command rooted not in ego-need but in the authority of dream. These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception inescapable. Fathers and brothers become prophets, hypothesis becomes dream, simple details of landscape transform themselves into emblems and predictions. The book is impossible to put down, impossible to forget:

In the calm

After the rain has bombed the earth

The ants march out of their shelters

One long frantic migration line

They hit the concrete floor

Of our dining and living

Space then turn into the shadow

The wall makes, a straight angle

To the courtyard wreckage of dirt and gravel:

Did they know the wind

Would airdrop new rations their way?

It’s always two or three

Ants locking their horns to the acid end

Over nothing—it seems

More than an impulse,

The debris plenty for all.

—“PULSE (10)”

2008