Did the butterfly illuminate you
when it burned with the eternal light of the rose?
–Mahmoud Darwish, “Now When you Awaken, Remember,”
The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah

 

What comes after the end of the world? This question is continuously on my mind as I read the work of the ancients and my contemporaries, from Kim Hyesoon and Raúl Zurita to Antonin Artaud, Euripides, and Azo Vauguy—and I read them all in translation. But as this endlessly shattering relay suggests, maybe the end of the world never stops happening. Maybe this is what is beginning to dawn on me. And maybe this is what the poet and translator Fady Joudah means when he says in a recent interview, “I am far more concerned about the day after the livestreamed genocide of Palestinians stops. The day after is the longest day. And it is just as unspeakable.”

Contemplating this unspeakable “day after” stops up the breath in the throat. But it is not Joudah’s final word on the matter. In his closing remarks, futurity arrives, first as a kōan-like question, and then as a declaration of faith:

Whatever happened to that girl’s smile? Has it returned to her face? Palestine in Arabic is always alive.

This declaration of faith, it seems to me, is also a repositioning and broadening of the coordinates of survival, away from the target-coordinates of drone warfare. In their place, Joudah invokes and evokes the paradoxical futurity of the smile that returns to the child’s face after unspeakable loss dawns on her—the loss of her family, her home, her safety, her innocent sense of the world. This smile-of-return becomes synonymous with cultural survival—”Palestine in Arabic,” its continuous poem of survivance. And this declaration of faith is in turn a demand.

But the dawning of that smile, the day after the day after, has not yet returned to this planet. Until then, we have this terrible interim, this [. . .], made manifest by Fady Joudah’s new book. The title is, to use Joudah’s word, unspeakable. It indicates, as Joudah and as several readers have suggested, a “Palestinian silence,” but also, to me, a silence that implies an interval of waiting, specifically that glyph you see on your iPhone when a message is being typed but has not yet arrived. The iPhone, that deliverer of the worst and best news, the videos of destruction, denial, grief, and glee, has a role to play in Joudah’s poems: “The truth rides photons, always arriving / beautiful, like God, periodically dead or terminated.” Importantly, these photons are not just beautiful, but periodic, as if termination is not final but something that must be borne, again and again. We are nowhere near the end of the end of the world.

That Joudah was able to write the poems of […] in this terrible interval feels miraculous, if a miracle can be ambivalent, and if ambivalence can be true to its Latin etymology and imply not a canceling out of opposing inclinations but an impossible doubling of strengths—doubt and hope, anger and love, intimacy and antagonism. The volume bears an epigraph about time from the tenth-century Arabic poet Al-Mutanabbi, in Joudah’s ever-flexible translation: “I want my time to grant me what time can’t grant itself.” This epigram is also an impossible demand: for permanence, it seems, as well as a collapsing of human and inhuman time scales. The demand might be impossible, but it is fulfilled, impossibly, by the survival of Al-Mutanabbi’s epigram itself, and by Joudah’s translation of it into English, which establishes a coincidence to Al-Mutanabbi’s and Joudah’s modernities, their demands, their “I’s”—in Arabic, always alive.

This opening gesture writes [. . .] into the longest possible cultural and cosmic timescale even as it convulses with the specific cruelties of our present wave of the catastrophe. Nearly every poem is titled “[. . .],” introducing a pause before the poem’s transmission comes through—a pause that might also create the theatrical illusion that the poem is being transmitted from Arabic into English. This inclination toward mirroring is reflected in the habitual signature of Joudah’s volume, chiasmus, a term referring to a mirrored syntax in a line of poetry. The book opens with one:

I am unfinished business.
The business that did not finish me

This couplet, which launches the book mid-catastrophe, seems to most specifically evoke the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion by the nascent state of Israel of 750,000 Palestinians, including Joudah’s own parents. In this couplet, as in the larger poem and book, the Nakba has never stopped happening. The ongoingness of catastrophe is enacted in Joudah’s handling of syntax and stanza, for the chiasmic couplet quoted above is not end-stopped but continues and is distributed, in the next stanza, to the speaker’s parents and children.

Chiasmus, that ironized, top-hatted hat-tip to Anglicized classical prosody, entails a traumatized stutter in these poems, a place where a terrible thought dawns, must be epigrammatically rendered, and then is somehow survived by the poem, which continues past it. The poem “Daily,” for example, features this instance of chiasmus: “My life, the accent of their accent when my mind goes.” Here, “life” and mind” are brought into parallel through the mirroring of “the accent and their accent” and the possessor “my.” Yet even “my” can’t hold on to “mind”: it goes. This chiasmic form wants to close on itself like a knife or a valve, but the poem continues. It delivers us to another remarkable epigram: “And grief sings because the dead don’t grieve or sing.” All this urbane, liquid eloquence lends the poem the pace and grace of a classical ghazal in English translation. Yet it ends in arresting contraction:

Daily, your nuance. Your attention to detail, drop by drop. Another round of sedatives. Sedative: the capital. Body: the sweat shop.

Here the dailiness of survival, often proposed as a balm, is an injury. There is accusation in “your nuance,” “your attention to detail”; these preoccupations are opiates against the true harms of the world. Even to survive, to remain embodied, is to toil at the “sweat shop.” It is telling that these counter nuances curl like the body of a burn victim around the beauty of the full rhymes “drop” and “shop.”

Another trope of this book is one of the few gifts the English language gifts to poets: the tonal ambiguity and expansiveness of the second person. In his use of “you” in the final couplet of “Daily” (quoted above), Joudah could be addressing the endless drip of media commentary with its “nuance,” or Americans who carry on with their workaday lives atop a war machine, or, a closer target, himself, going about the dailiness of work as a physician while physicians are being martyred in Gaza amid their impossible ministrations. It seems wrong but also right that “you,” deployed in English, implies a target, which we call by the euphemism “addressee,” and if no target is available, the reader or poet may insert themselves. Lyric’s intimacy as an instrument of war.

But I’m closer to you
than you are to yourself
and this, my enemy friend
is the definition of distance.

Within the intimacy of the lyric, the lover may say anything, and so may the enemy—the talk is that close. One of the most astounding moves Joudah makes in this collection is simply to contradict himself, to let the poem establish a reality and then take it away.

They did not mean to kill the children.
They meant to.

What simpler rhetorical gesture could exist? What more evident lie? And yet the naked lie is the signature of our current moment, deadly to all in its far and immediate radii. It recalls to me another poem of cosmic devastation masked in child’s play, Korean modernist Yi Sang’s “Crow’s Eye View #1.” This poem was published in the newspaper Chosun Ilbo in 1934, right under the nose of the Japanese occupiers; three years later, the twenty-six-year-old poet would perish after internment, having entirely reinvented modern poetry. The poem opens,

13 children speed toward the way.
(For the road a blocked alley is apt.)

and closes with this statement’s chiasmic reflection and utter contradiction,

(For the road an opened one is apt.)
It does not matter if 13 children do not speed toward the way.

Into the opened space of paradox, of contradiction, the thirteen children disappear. But perhaps this aperture can also work backwards, the poem read backwards, and the smile return, the children routed to a future apart from harm. Here, the translator—in this case Jack Saebyok Jung—serves as an aperture for a futurity, a later, impossible dawn—if he can bear it. If we can bear the wait, the weight of all the dawns. 

Such a role is one that Fady Joudah has been playing for decades. A physician who served three years with Doctors Without Borders, Joudah made his poetry debut in 2007 with his volume The Earth in the Attic, selected by Louise Gluck for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Series; three more volumes and a Guggenheim Fellowship would follow. Alongside his career as an English-language poet, Joudah has also performed the feat of translating major Palestinian and Arab-language poets, from Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan to Amjad Nasser and Hussein Barghouti, to parallel acclaim and accolades, including the Griffin Prize for International Poetry. This double achievement is not just a matter of ambidexterity, it seems to me, but a commitment to serve as that paradoxical zone where two seas of poetry—English and Arabic—turbulently or elegantly meet, mix and move off in two directions. To bear such doubleness might entail a radiant, if exacting, mode of survival. Another name for it might be hope.

Such hope, however difficultly rendered and endured, is a possibility that Joudah’s [. . .] delicately, insistently probes. For if chiasmus, paradox, the reversal of a life sentence into a death sentence can work in the hands of the antagonist, aggressor, dispossessor, enemy-friend, then surely, or possibly, the trick can work in reverse, bringing the absent into presence, entailing an impossible route of return:

Hope left me
but it isn’t true.

If the route of return is a paradox, if it lives in contradiction, then it is a poem. It is the poem of survivance. Palestine in Arabic is always alive.

This, finally, might explain the book’s closing gesture, and the strategy of the book overall. The end of [. . .] unexpectedly features a long, prose dedication, a litany like a river, yes, finding its sea. This reverses the order of a conventional book of English-language poetry, which generally starts with its dedication. To my mind, this reversal completes the pattern of chiasmus with which the book opens. It conjures the idea of a second, mirrored book that would be the reverse of this one, opening out of it in mirror image, a second wing to the butterfly’s wing. It is an idea that occurred to me, I believe, because of Joudah’s choices as a translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden. In his preface, Joudah explains that he has chosen to prioritize the line and stanza length of Darwish’s Arabic in creating his English translation, “giving the English reader the same ‘view’ an Arabic reader has on the page.” Encountered in facing translation, then, the English and Arabic poems on their pages mirror each other like a butterfly’s wings. That book, then, entails a butterfly, as the present volume implies one. The butterfly—emblematic of flight and exile—may perhaps, in some possible futurity, entail that smile that will return to alight on the child’s face. It is the light on the child’s face. It is the light of the child’s face.

© 2024 by Joyelle McSweeney. All rights reserved.