Tag: […]

In literature, an ellipsis is a narrative device indicating that something has intentionally been left out of the narrative, or it might suggest the passage of time. An ellipsis might also be a symbolic doorway, a gap, a silence. There is no statement in the collection as to exactly what Fady Joudah intends us to read into the space. […] is not only the book’s title, but also the powerful title of a series of poems, suggesting a number of things including the passage of time during the on-again, off-again conflict in Palestine, the generational trauma of the diaspora, the war, colonialism and so on.

Joudah is a Palestinian-American, physician, and prize-winning translator and poet. He writes “witness” poetry, although his poetry is not from the “battlefield,” as was my “teaser” review of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk and the reminder of Goran Simić’s from Sarajevo with Sorrow that I published a few days ago. (You can read that review here.)

Joudah lives in the United States, a first-generation American of Palestinian-born parents. His experience of war is more like Keith Garebian’s whose subject is the Armenian genocide of 1915-1920. Garebian bears witness to the continuing trauma left in war’s wake. (In my review of Garebian’s Poetry is Blood, you will find notes on generational trauma, click here.) Joudah experiences the losses through his parents: “… What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget? / My parents showed me the way” (12).

As with Garebian, Joudah lives with “home” missing. His past a mirage, a source of loss, a source of anger. The poem quoted at the top of this review, concludes:

You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs:
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?

Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house.

Joudah’s poems are also poignant with the loss of mother tongue, a people’s language, as in “[…]” (6):

From time to time, language dies.
It is dying now.
Who is alive to speak it?

Another narrative technique that Joudah uses is dialogue as in “[…]” (24):

“Your oppressor,” they said,
“has suffered more than you have.”

“As have others,” you said,
… .

Finally, there is one more poem I’d like to quote from: “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams,” #5:

… At a traffic light an old man hands me a rose and says,
It’s for nothing. He meant, I don’t have to pay nothing

or sign a petition.
How our faces appear to him. Quickly
he walks away to let the weight

of the rose grow sovereign in my heart

to the extent it can
on the eve of a new war.

(Note: maqam is Arabic for place.)

Fady Joudah won the Giller International Prize (2013) for his translation of Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me and Other Poems. In the preface, he writes, “Ghassan Zaqtan’s poems, in their constant unfolding invite us to enter them, exit them, map and unmap them, code and decode them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and nonliving, the animate and inanimate, toward a true freedom.” This could be said of Joudah’s own writing in […].

Available through your local bookstore or online: […] by Fady Joudah. Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA): Milkweed Editions (2024). ISBN 978-1-63955-128-6.

Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian. Toronto (ON, Canada): Guernica Editions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-77183-279-3.