Throughout, Mohammad stops to acknowledge the sturdy shoulders on which he stands-Rifqa, of course, Malcolm X, Nizar Qabbani, Nina Simone, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Audre Lord, Abu Arab, Toni Morrison, Um Kalthoum, Frantz Fannon, B.B. Occasionally, he marries both languages with “ goddamns and hisbiyallahs” (pg 6) or responds in translation without clarifying ( drink the sea pg 7). 60), sometimes it remains in its native glory, demanding the reader respect it without explanation (“Most of the rest is مسخرة How do you translate مسخرة?” pg. No matter the adjectives on my shoulders.Īlthough his poems are in English, Mohammad’s second language, West Asia is always there, and Arabic is often centered-sometimes transliterated (watteeni wazzaytoon pg 4), sometimes interpreted (“Amal Hayati ” pg. We have wounded feet but the rhythm remains,
My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.”īe composed, calm, still-laugh when they ask you, In “This Is Why We Dance” (pg 6), his father tells him what every parent tells their Black son or daughter: The poem “Three Women” (pg 41), encompasses the feminist, internationalist, and maternal spirit of this book-three pregnant women: One “black-haired and brown-skinned” in Atlanta “pushes out a statistic ” one “olive-skinned and olive-selling” in Jerusalem “pushes out a security threat ” and one from Gaza who “lives where bulldozers rest on clouds” and who “imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.” The reader can recognize other parallels throughout. The liberation chants outside the hospital room Mohammad was “Born on Nakba Day…among poetry” “I refuse to wait in the wreck,” are the author’s implicit words in these poems, and his explicit final words in the book. A correction to the news, it attempts to carve truth from convenient political order. The second is a “found” poem carved from a New York Times article about Sheikh Jarrah, his own Jerusalem neighborhood. In the first, he is lovingly generous with his naive American friend. “America is the reason.” Tell them, “Drink the sea.”Įarly in the book, two poems confront the western gaze. Her punch lines intact her smirk unwavering. You take your bike, and I’ll take my horse. Last July, she asked how we’re getting home. The title of one of Darwish’s collections is “Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?” the title of one of his beloved poems, “The Horse Fell Off The Poem,” and the seminal novel by Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Time of the White Horses.” El-Kurd recounts a moment in Rifaq’s final years, when her cognition had begun to wane (pg 85). There’s a poetic legacy of horses in Palestinian literature. Like every word in this book, reference to the horse is intentional and precise. Keeping a dozen dead horses under my bed. Horses and rockets I’ve stuffed in my bag (pg 73) Several times, he acknowledges the heaviness, usually with horse metaphors. Unlike the lightness of the word rifqa, this book is heavy, weighed with 103 years of Rifqa’s life as a refugee warrior, a woman of infinite final words-which Mohammad calls punchlines-of a matriarch’s expansive love, a colonized indigenous people’s anguished longing to breathe, and a globalizing irreverence rising from what is muted, buried, razed, and painted over. There is rage in this book-piercing, defiant, inspiring rage that ebbs and returns, and settles in blank spaces that push words far apart on the page. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem’s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history’s smoke.
The words that Mohammad assembles in his poems aren’t pulled from books or dictionaries.