By Vacy Vlazna

Susie Abulhawa, Palestinian poet, exile, mother, lover, friend, stands naked in My Voice Sought The Wind; her collection of trenchant and beautiful poems replete with honesties and literary seductions.

Reading her poems is akin to being in conversation with a lyrically intelligent and passionate woman; a conversation that is at once intimate and universal shifting vividly in place and time, in emotion and insight, in self and the people of her poetic landscape.

There’s something so right, so apt that her first poem for this book is ‘The Gift of Olive Oil’ for like the essence of the olive, her poetry is ‘A token/ Something from the soil of things shared ‘ and the ‘heritage’, ‘longing’ and ‘a wound’ are its recurring songlines. And each poem, when you linger and ‘Press it between your tongue and palate’ will yield unexpected revelations into the darkness and radiance of human experience.

The first section under the heading of ‘Palestinian, Black & Blue’, speaks from the bruising wound of the oppressed within Palestine and in exile. ‘Black’ is a fierce indictment of western racism,

I am the wrong kind of human

and Israel’s colonial supremacy,

A European took my grandma’s house

Painted my country white

The refugee child- Abulhawa- journeys along the vicious via dolorosa of exile, racist abuse and desperate conformity,

It is where I believed I was ugly

When I tried to be white

When I put down my flat bread and picked up a fork

And Mrs. Wall said I was “white enough” to

Stop being a “nigger-lover”

She arrives at adulthood and the rediscovering of the integrity of herself,

I am Palestinian

And in the blue and bruise of my heart,

I am become Black

Because Black is beautiful

And the beautiful in me

Is Black

Yet, Abulhawa reveals that owning a Palestinian-self-in-exile comes with painful cultural loneliness;

Most don’t even know it’s Ramadan

Or that I’m fasting

There is no solidarity in el ghorba (Ramadan in el Ghorba)

Abulhawa doesn’t shirk from truth about the toll of physical and emotional violence on women resulting directly from the emasculation of exile, ‘When they pulled the land from under your feet’,

The first time your husband hit you

It nearly knocked the country off your back

Then comes a second abandonment,

You loved him

And he left five months

After your second daughter was born

This culminates in the disintegration of identity and family,

The girls you raised were not Palestinian

The house you built was not yours (Sister Palestinian I)

In Palestine, different forms of violence torture living and breathing Palestinians. To  bring us close to the horror of Palestinian life, in ‘Awake on memories in Gaza’, Abulhawa zooms from the  objectivity and distance of reports on Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza into the  terrified thoughts of a young Gazan man under bombardment,

Was it the spider web in the sky, the

White phosphorous death?

Or the sonic booms?

My eyes bulge

The better to see should

My heart break free

And make a run for it  (Awake on Memories in Gaza)

He clings to the useless calm of memories of a first love with Sameera that will be dead before it was born- typical of the loss within the inhuman Palestinian condition under the cruelest occupation:

Might there be mercy for us?

Perchance ten more will not lose a limb today

thousands will not leave school to scrounge for food.

Perchance Lena will marry, instead of committing suicide

and Ahmed will dream tonight, instead of shivering in his own piss. (Sister Palestinian II)

‘Wala’ and ‘Picture of a Family Man’ echo, across oceans, the stark contrast between life for Palestinian families and the petty-by-comparison modern western malaise of urban angst.

‘Wala’ is a searingly poignant poem and Abulhawa asserts the power of the personal pronoun to connect or not; with the use of ‘you’ we are not only drawn into, but walk in the vulnerability of the Palestinian father while the ‘he’ distances us from the Family Man.

Both are loving fathers deprived of a fulfilling fatherhood;

You kiss the faces of your sleeping babies

You haven’t seen them awake in months

and you wonder

Has Walid’s voice begun to crack yet?

Have Wijdad’s hips begun to flare?

How big was Suraya’s smile when she came home with her report card? (Wala)

and in ‘Picture of a Family Man,’

He works impossible hours

Until the last moment before his children sleep

Then rushes to catch them

And as he carries them to bed

An ache of love overflows in him

Both men are trapped, one in a meaningless box of existential angst and the other, imprisoned in an Israeli cattle cage, struggles for existence. The former has choices, but the Palestinian has none behind the bars of daily humiliation:

the zionist settler boss-man yells

Wala, mish hon el yom!

Not there today, boy!

And all you can do is thank Allah that your

wife and your babies are not there to hear them call you wala

In the sections ‘Love and Neruda’ and ‘History of Love’, Abulhawa the lover bares her ardour and wounds. Her passion, be it for a beloved or for a country, seethes images that makes your head turn and turn again;

Swim into my flesh

And taste the fever that burns my body

Feel the tempest in my breasts  (Earth’s First Story)

There are a thousand ways to love

And I loved him ten thousand ways (Untitled and Unfinished)

I’d put my lips to his and close my eyes

And at the cusp of summer

We would know how truly gentle

Are these defiant hearts  (Seasons of a Sapling)

I peeled our shadows from the street

And made of them a dress

To wear to his birthday party (What I Did Today, for Tomorrow)

I slip from my flesh

And wander Arabia

To gather the poetry

You plant in the sand  (Qais, Your Layla Speaks)

Perhaps questions have no place in love

For questions demean the risks taken

The conveniences tossed

The fears abandoned

The courage

The beauty and greatness

Of heeding the urgency of the heart  (Godly Lovelessness)

As mother, Abulhawa evokes the magnificent archetypal act of love of a mother for her child,

In my chest there is a last beat I’d take from my heart for you

In my lungs a last breath I’d give to you  (How You’ve Grown)

This natural generosity of self overflows in ‘Lexi’ while massaging her dying friend,

I tried to move life from my core

Through my hands

Into your feet

To your core

Grief inevitably passes through anger which rails in ‘Cancer’ against the obscene ravaging of the disease in her friend, “Death is fisting her’ and the moments never to be cherished again,

Fireflies lighting the night

Freshly brewed coffee and the morning light

Good fitting blue jeans

Springtime and random smiles

Once Abulhawa’s anger is spent, girlish humour,

Remember Faherty’s?

No, it was “Farty’s”  (Lexi)

and unrequited hope weave a life-filled lament for her beloved Lexi,

Maybe enough that we could make it to Spain

Take that trip to Oxford

Eat lobster until we burst

Drink until the world was healed

Build a playground Just enough for you to be a mom

Your hair to flow long and golden again

And the shine to climb back into your eyes

There are 36 poems in this small volume that burst from the bindings to bind your heart and mind in a lyrical kinship with a poet who soars from ‘the precipice of history‘ bravely and with grace.

Susan Abulhawa is also the author of Mornings in Jenin and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine. My Voice Sought the Wind is published by Just World Books.

– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.