Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa was born in 1964 in Benghazi, Libya, immigrated to the United States in 1979, earned Bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and received an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthology and such journals as The Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry. He is the author of two books of poems, Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow, 1995) and Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable, 2003), as well as the translator of five books of Arabic poetry and the coeditor of two anthologies of Arab American literature. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a NEA Translation Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry in Translation Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. Mattawa teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

I Was Buried in Janzoor

is what I keep telling them, but they hook me

up to monitors, point to screens and show

flashes of my pulse. They draw blood from my arms,

smear my face with warm dabs. I say, listen:

June, two years after the war, a hundred

and four degrees in late afternoon, they prayed

for me without kneeling, arms lifted to the sky,

chanted “God is great.” A plain cedar coffin,

unvarnished, used, the shroud made of Egyptian gauze.

Six cousins settled me on cool dirt,

and a man, the son of a slave, the one

who washed my body placing a rag on my waist,

the one who did not want to insult the dead,

he heaped the world over me, pressing dirt

with small feminine feet. I’d like to say that

my wives mourned my death for years, that my children

did not fight over my inheritance—forty hectares,

two houses, seven cows, a mule. I’d like to say

that when my name is mentioned in the village

teahouse, no one spits on the sidewalk, no one

curses the day of my birth. I’d like to say

that a grandson is named after me, my picture

on his desk as he eyes foreign words. He thinks of me

rarely, but always as an example of the decency

and apathy that made us prey to strangers from abroad,

that I’m remembered by a woman from Milan, who as a girl,

pressed me to her in her father’s tobacco shed.

We stared at each other knowing no words

for the misery that bound us, the nuances

of skin that tore us apart. I’d like to say

I feared or betrayed no one, that I taught

my children all they deserved to know,

that I did not desire the neighbors’

daughters and sons. I’d like to say that you

made me happy, that I would love to return.

I looked at the sky on holy nights and saw

no palm fronds flaming copper gold, no pit for me

to shake Satan’s hand. I visited a thousand weddings,

gave rice and pearls; I fed beggars from my table

and helped the blind find their way home;

I sacrificed she-goats and roosters

for local saints; I built a mosque. Stupid

were most of my thoughts, listless most my days.

I loved nothing more than my mother’s coffee,

I loved a spoon of her lentil soup more than

I loved the truth. I’m still buried in Janzoor.

Growing Up with a Sears Catalog in Benghazi, Libya

Omar pointed to a pink man

riding a red lawn mower,

rose bushes, yellow tulips,

orchids framing slick sod.

Owners of villas in Jilyana,

my brother’s friends

desperately needed

“the grass machines.”

He planned to charge triple

his cost, build a house

by the sea. Eyes half-shut,

cigarette clouds above him,

he snored leaving unfinished

a recitation of truncated schemes.

In my room I gazed

at the pink man again,

marveled at pictures

of women in transparent bras.

How I loved their black nipples

and full gray breasts!

I fancied camping

with the blue-eyed one

in the $42 Coleman tent,

the two of us fishing

at a lake without mosquitoes,

sailing the boat on page 613.

After watching soaps

on our mahogany-cased

(27 inch) color TV,

we galloped lime green scooters

on “scabrous terrains,”

returned to our 4-bedroom home,

mud up to our knees,

to make love on the mattress

on page 1219.

***

One morning,

my brother and I landed

in New Orleans, in the heat.

The city’s stench nauseated us,

mosquitoes slipping through

our window screen.

At the Lake Shore Sears

he caressed lipstick

red fenders, sank fingers

in the comfort of seats.

The smallest model

was striped with silver,

and he hugged it

like a long lost niece.

In a patois of his own,

he bargained, told

universal dirty jokes.

We rode two on a nearby lawn,

sunshine, cool morning breeze.

We parked them outside

Morrison’s where our waitress

said she bought all

her clothes from Sears.

That night I undressed her

gently, stroked her breasts

with my cheeks.

She sighed, and I heaved,

the air in her room

scented with my dreams.

In the morning she said

I talked in my sleep,

raved at someone,

kept asking

“What kind of flower

you want planted

next to your grave?”

Echo & Elixir 1

It shines through clouds and rain.

It dyes the streets with its pink blossoms.

The day crawls through its tunnels.

The roads are long and long.

City without words. Night without night.

Somewhere I remember

these clothes are not my clothes.

These bones are not my bones.

I forget and remember again.

Ships in the harbor which is the sea

which is the journey

that awakens a light inside my chest.

Look at the hands turning the knobs.

The hands that haul the machine.

The man on the phone calling,

hanging up, calling again.

Dust and twisted nails, pebbles

and pieces of broken china,

and all the sweeping that goes on in the world.

No help.

No use saying “I will wait.”

It flowers into decades of May.

It shines the windows with your passing gaze.

Echo & Elixir 2

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English.

I answer, and they say your Arabic is good.

How long have you been with us? All my life

I tell them, but I’m never believed.

They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek,

and I answer with mountains of gold and silver,

ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas.

And when they speak to me in Spanish,

I say Moriscos and Alhambra.

I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats.

And when they speak to me in Portuguese,

all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa,

Indians and poisoned spears.

I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing

Manuel to free his enslaved sons.

And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me

your Arabic is surprisingly good.

Then they speak to me in Italian,

and I tell them how I lay swaddled

a month’s walk from here. I tell them

camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives

and daughters dying, camels frothing disease,

the sand stretching an endless pool.

And they say so good so good.

How long have you been with us?

All my life, but I’m never believed.

Then they speak to me in French,

and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley,

baskets of severed hands and feet.

I say the horror, battles of Algiers.

And they speak to me in English

and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo,

Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea.

I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke

Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens,

I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee.

And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me

your Arabic is unbelievably good.

Tell the truth now, tell the truth,

how long have you been with us?

I say my first name is little lion,

my last name is broken branch.

I sing “Happiness uncontainable”

and “fields greening in March”

until I’m sad and tired of truth,

and as usual I’m never believed.

Then they lead me through congestion,

gritty air, narrow streets crowded with

Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces

of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo’s

taxi drivers and I speak all the languages

of the world, and we argue and argue about

corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances,

the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.