“And I’m delirious: Gaza… Gaza,” Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah writes, the echo of grief shadowing the speaker’s cries. Written as he endured the genocidal assault, Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (192 pages; City Lights Books) resounds with gripping humanity, as his poems of love, the dead, and an accompanying fierce valuation of life evoke realities that often evade propaganda and the mass media. Rabah’s first collection in translation is a bilingual edition translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli, and offers a powerful introduction to his lyrical work in English.
The poet’s language is marked by a refreshing simplicity, a frankness that with its candor forges connections among disparate images: “… while at home, there were neither birds, nor mothers.” And yet senseless tragedy greets Rabah around every corner: “The sleeping child who left us at the hour of shelling / why did he forget the smell of his face on the pillow?” He mourns the disappearance and deaths of his friends and companions, drawing our attention with a gentle hand to the “pictures of the missing,” the “dead like water through a straw basket” as “Cities exhale gunpowder and yawn,” the destruction evident.
It is fitting that Rabah intersperses these elegies with prayerful interludes—“blue rain drenching our clothes in endless song, does love look / like you, O God?”—and meditations on language; for the poet, languages and vocabularies can look like the “sadness that writes,” or forces to overcome, characterized by “haunting vaults” and a “labyrinth” from which to escape. As “the names of the dead repeat like a national anthem,” the tender details of Rabah’s poetry foreground the “neighbors’ window,” the memory-laden scent of oranges, “the jasmine of your voice” and “a moan in another stranger’s story,” creating a lexicon of not only monstrous killing, but of the undeniable humanity of those suffering.
The sorrow and fury wreaked by the Israeli assault is at its foremost in the final set of poems in the collection, as Rabah bemoans the way in which “The war left me only those who died to call friends… war left us nothing / but the distance between the florist and the cemetery.” His verses draw forth both an empathy for those endangered by the attacks and a startled wonder at the human potential for finding beauty where it is least to be expected: “In war the heart chokes, words flee, and along its edge birds / melt into red dew. It flutters on a tall post — a gasp called the homeland.” This double-sided approach—a deliberate invocation of the personhood and soul of the Palestinian people alongside horrifying scenes of loss—takes its strength from its clarity of vision. We are provided with a necessary reminder that Gaza’s inhabitants are not to be forgotten, even as we must inevitably wrestle with the fact that “you could see it all and not cry.”
Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley. Her work can be found at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms.