In his second collection of poetry, Border Wisdom, Palestinian poet Almallah chronicles his negotiations with English, Arabic, exile, and loss at large—of a tongue, a mother, a home. This powerful collection then becomes the medium through which he re-visits personal memories as well as philosophical and linguistic preoccupations in death’s looming shadow.
“Is death a mistranslation?” Almallah asks, briefly lingering a moment longer in the “in-between,’’ the state of non-presence and non-absence, marginal to the world’s known units of measure for loss. The elegiac tone carries the poems as if toward their burial. Indeed, the speaker’s mourning of his mother makes of Border Wisdom’s entry point a frame:
هل يجد المرء أمه في منفى اللغة؟
تلك هي لغتي، تلك هي أمي.
In mistranslation,
“This is
her
leaving the body behind.
This is
the am without the I.’’
Often literary, that a mother figure equates a mother tongue and therefore a mother land, the literal death of the speaker’s mother makes it a louder, more explicit conundrum:
A mother, abruptly lost, is exile itself.
The first section of Border Wisdom is diary-like, tracing immediate family dynamics and documenting in detail events that preceded the expected yet all too sudden loss of the mother. Similarly, of language. In the second section, however, Almallah surprises with a complete departure in style, rhythm, and format from his prosaic writing. In a series of one-word-titled poems, Almallah’s couplets construct meticulous musicality all while masterfully breaking his English lines:
“school was always no class
we sat in some dim hall, close
To church, end of no beginning
we there staring wrong
answers, something there is
that loves breaks, screams
and sound, shattering:
we scream together tears—”
This mis-ordering of the English reads reminiscent of Arabic, which in translation, switches the locations of words and produces mis-ordered information to the English-hearing ear. Surely, not an oversight for Almallah, whose collection in its entirety lives at the border of wise, offhand meditation. In his words, he is more in the business of “inconvenience” and “mistranslation,’’ than he is accuracy.
In the third section, awareness of audience is made explicit for the first time. Unlike previous expository prose that framed sections thematically yet casually, this section is prefaced by questions of time and the capacity of language to contain untranslatable experience, i.e., observing Beirut in all its ironies and crossing the jisr (the crossing of the bridge into Palestine). Arabic, again, sneaks into the tight gaps of time and space amidst travel. Almallah writes,
..قلت لنفسي سأكتب بالعربية هنا
.في تلك المساحة الضيقة من الوقت
سأكتب ما سأكتبه من الأم، قريبا من البعيد
It is a promise the speaker makes for himself here to prioritize his Arabic tongue, his Arab being as it is interrogated and remade. It is also a promise not to let the Other—whoever they may be, reader, border patrol soldier, or else—occupy the speaker’s thinking that he must reveal his tricks.. tough reveal he does. Is it defeat if it is intentional, admitted, planned?
“I won’t describe the past for you,
I tell you I got held
at borders, I tell you I am
used to it, and what? What is this record
You play over and over: don’t get
used to it, you shouldn’t
it’s sad— I bow in recognition:
. . .
What commands attention in these lines is the matter-of-factness with which the speaker confronts his subjectivity. It is powerful his uninterest in sentimental remembrance or becoming any sort of representative. In this way, Border Wisdom is a deeply personal tale of diasporic being at the edge of loss and language. Almallah concludes his collection in a most intimate register: the naming of things—objects—as evidence of the fragmented stories, whole. From keys to chairs to broken fingers of a piano, the poems rewrite the collection’s dilemma, the failure of containment, of holding grief:
“the rest
of human
conjunction›s
are covers
of the
elemental
failure
for having
failed to observe
and repeat
in silence,’’
What Almallah does so beautifully, so hauntingly, however, in Border Wisdom is reproduce not only the discussion of the shortcomings of language but the conditions that make it so. His line breaks cut against expectation, his field is vast on the page and his pen quick with subversive movement. In short lines, he argues and argues against, the repetition of his phrases, an echo that vibrates up, up. He grieves and delights, speaks, and silences.
If anything, I wished that more of Almallah’s Arabic had silenced the English, forced itself on the left-margin, that in the last page of the collection, when the speaker reveals that he has been “pretending all along to have a second language,’’ that he “[doesn’t] know anything in Arabic,’’ this confession was upturned on its head the way most idioms were as to not undermine the foundational premise of the collection: being exiled from language at all. Who do we become if we abandon the search for what we were forced to renounce—a mother, a tongue, a home?
Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, public speaker, and creator of the one-woman show, A Map of Myself. Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, as well as the anthology A Land With a People and 9-12 curriculum from McGraw Hill. Sara earned her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently working on her first book.
