Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as someHala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the women in previous generations of her family were the most touching and powerful, while the ones that strayed away from Palestine and being the child of refugees were less powerful to me. Overall, this was an excellent poetry collection and used some unique methods--some that I really loved (the “choose your own adventure” style poems), and somes that I didn’t love as much (the medical records ones).
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”: “… I am never paying attention. I cried because Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia would later say I was the happiest bride she’d ever seen, because I didn’t recognize the photographs, because I left the wrong country, but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere? Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and hadn’t Fatima already died that night, and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”: “... Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke, It’s done nothing for Palestine. … The plants are called fire-followers, but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night, I am a zombie feeding on the comments. Is it compulsive to watch videos? Is it compulsive to memorize names? Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud. Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias: I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles. A plant waits for fire to grow. A child waits for a siren. It must be a child. Never a man. Never a man without a child. There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”: “... I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did” ...more
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