Hazem Fahmy’s Red//Jild//Prayer (Diode 2018) Reviewed By Helen Wing

It is red rage that guides the poet, who is ‘swinging [his] legs like a hammer’ as he observes the West’s ‘close-up on the dead Arab’ and questions why he is alive if the only images of himself he sees are of his death.

Hazem Fahmy’s passionate debut collection, Red//Jild//Prayer (Diode, 2018), maps a corporeal journey from rage to ecstasy, from fear to pride, ‘unabashed, unafraid’, from the profound alienation of the ‘silly, brown boy’ who defines himself ‘by that which makes me hate myself’ to the courageous emblazoned joy of intimacy and hope, of ‘Scream:/we are here,/ habiby./ Tomorrow can’t tame this love.’

Fahmy’s progress towards an ethnic and gender identity located in the sublime taps into a long tradition of homosexual poetry which seeks gender authenticity beyond the material:  think Cernuda, think Lorca.  Fahmy’s torment is layered and complex for he seeks to repossess the image of his body from the forces of ideological tyranny so that he can paradoxically sacralise his body as holy and indomitable through the power of love.

When the body is constantly shamed for being brown, for being Muslim, for being gay, the poet appeals to God and asks, ‘where else will these eyes go[?]’ Fahmy’s poetry portrays the identity struggle of a young man growing up amidst the Egyptian revolution and counter-revolution, global religious polarization, the devastation of exile, the confusing proliferation of non-transcendent, neo-baroque cultural images of the postmodern and the exploration of non-binary sexuality in a violent, unforgiving world.  Fahmy’s mastery ushers in brutal truths, a soothsaying of the excoriating violence inherent in the racism and ignorance of the West.         

The collection opens with a prayer ‘Red as in rage’ and we are alerted to the life and death battle of biblical proportions that may ensue as the following poem ‘the word’ subverts St. John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word / and it spat on me’.  Language, first the foreign tongue English but then the ability to speak, to inhere meaning, in any language, has been preternaturally stripped from the poet. ‘I opened my mouth only / to find that my throat, too / was stolen.’

It is red rage that guides the poet, who is ‘swinging [his] legs like a hammer’ as he observes the West’s ‘close-up on the dead Arab’ and questions why he is alive if the only images of himself he sees are of his death.  ‘Caesar’, a poem named after the prototypical dictator, rails against the easy belittling of the Egyptian tragedy. Fahmy parodies the contempt of the West for Egypt by domesticating its easy slogans of ignorance. Democracy, he cries ‘is not as simple as a break up song’, not ‘a bag of seeds you buy at Home Depot’.  He blames a postmodern commodity fetishism for the deliberate oblivion of the West for they ‘forget that we have been planting our own crops for over seven thousand years.’ He parodies himself in the oppressor’s dialect and delivers savage clarity in ‘Daily I watch America marvel / at how fast a brown body can burn.’  The curse of cultural improvisation in the hands of the poet becomes part of a necessary process whereby he restitutes a sense of self in the image-bound contemporary, using Jazz and colloquial idiom in a linguistic reduction ad absurdum which, for him, mirrors the perpetual rape of his consciousness as a young Arab man in an alien environment.  It is no accident that his love song to Egypt comes solely in Arabic as ‘my people are still a body’ and in the West, clearly and repeatedly, only a body. 

‘A Queen bleeds in Ramadan (after Orlando)’ depicts the poet Kamagra Oral Jelly contains the same ingredients as the Kamagra tablets. best buy viagra Fatigue viagra 100mg price decreases and endurance increases. For djpaulkom.tv generic cialis without prescription example a healthy person would require 100mg pill and a senior could get erection with single dose of the tablets. A person should avoid all these commander viagra try my link things to prevent pregnancy. caught in the profoundly personal and semantic trap of double oppression, where he is both prey and predator in a massacre that is both imputed to his kind and yet which kills his kind. The paucity of discourse redoubles his anguish as it crudely simplifies both racial and gender hate. Again as he interrogates easy hegemonic assumptions his pain is not just physical but spiritual. ‘Oh God, / we look to you and are told you hate us’.  The poet’s search for identity is a search for the sublime, which, paradoxically, can only manifest through the physical.  In ‘On Adding Sand’, he uses the geography of the page – America on the left, Egypt on the right – to sketch the depth of cultural difference. He deftly weaves a pseudo-coherence between the racist slur described in the poem and a plea for the sanctity of sand: ‘It is typical of us mortals / to mock this Earth. To spit / on its Holy.’ For Fahmy the taste of sand woke poetry in him, and from the desert his body rises as a physical temple as he asserts his refusal to be brought low by the glib mockery of the West.  Later, in ‘Muse/me’, the poet articulates a place to breathe between Self and Other, a self-image, as he says, ‘I tell myself / there is no bad cinematography / in the real world. Only bad editing/ Like stitching two images with no rhythm. Like a call to prayer / and an explosion.’

Jild, skin, is sandwiched between Red, the rage at one’s identity appropriation by an alien racist culture, and Prayer, a song to redemption through love.  The skin, the body, is the vessel the poet needs to relocate in his search for a sublime, knowing intimacy.  This body, as delicate and flammable as film reel, has to be rescued from the ravages of fragmentation to choreograph a sense of belonging, love and voice. For the poet his voice is physically torn from the third eye, ‘my forehead cuts open / with a coarse / gurgling / sound’.  His vocal binding, like his skin, is material and constantly under threat from the lexical violence of political sloganeering and the yearning for communication and community. In ‘Jild’, the history of fear, for and of the body, is the central focus for the poet as he struggles to place his gay identity and his Arab identity not just in the US but also within the violence of his Egyptian contemporary and his faith. ‘I’ve lost interest in Independence Day(s) / I’ve grown tired of blood piercing the night / sky.’ Again here Fahmy samples the confectionery of the postmodern predilection for nullified, meaning-drained images to excoriate the culture(s) from which he feels disbarred.  The lexicon of fear: ‘a bogart’, an ‘Ode to Essos’, an image negative, foot-printed evidence of absence, all these terms sketch his pain and his search for a poetic voice in a world that rejects the sublime. Thus the sarcasm of his, ‘What an epic feeling it is / to be unmade by a white man, / and his deceitful pen.’  The pivotal contradiction of the skin, the conceit of the binding of identity in skin and his binding in the book, maps his need to repossess and reinvest identity.  This effort is fuelled by the twin urges of rage and compassion seared into his chilling image, ‘The next time a white man wears / my skin, I’ll cut it off, drain the blood, and drape it over / the first shivering brown child I come across.’

Eventually in Prayer ‘a night of terror / becomes a morning / of joy as Fahmy discovers the intimacy of love, ‘a symphony of skin.’  That skin, once dead and damned, becomes sublime and eternal in love, ‘like the wine that awaits you in heaven’ as the poet takes ownership of his belonging in love and in gay identity. ‘Dawn a red dress / in my closet, / always there / for me.’   The movement from ‘I’ to ‘we’ for belonging, and from ‘you’ to ‘they’, a distancing signaling the poet no longer feels as personal attack the all-encompassing censure, punctuates his new found joy, ‘Louder than bombs, / we cry out […] to see a flag wrapped around a breathing body, for a change.’  At last the parading of contempt and pain has become a life-affirming parade of joy. 

Five poems by Donia Harhoor

the ides of august 2013

mood matching miles
when he sketches
spain, i pass
baba’s office en route

to supply closet’s
fresh paper. arabic
pulls my ear.
it is ahmed –

u.s. citizenship granted
just 30 minutes
ago as helicopters
rain fire on

ramses square. sky:
storming grey blues.
earth: davis/evans
album cover red.

masr moon

Kareema
always sits
on the stool
in the far corner
of my aunt’s big kitchen
while waiting to know what she
is expected to do next. rayon kerchief
covered head, sweat beads decorating full qamar face.
looks at her hands while smiling wide innocent to herself,
hugs me tight tight, smells like older womens’ worked dampness.
ten-year-old Kareema. eighteen-year-old me asks
about her whenever we call our cairo family.
surprise always clear on the hissing line.
she runs away at twelve – escapes
to home. aunt and uncle
shake heads, suck their
teeth. she chose
village over
villa.

our dear cousins never realize she was just a kid.

one version
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story
of immigrant’s
daughter: baba got no
fucks to give bout her diggin’ roots.

transplant.

Gaza Stripped
for Bilal Samir Eweda

Today
soldiers silenced
Bilal. Shot him while he
protested. The Prophet loved his
blessed voice.

Damascus Troilet

Rubble wedged between my toes when we stepped outside.
The night had been much too busy.
Next door, Mrs. Addem’s garden wall crushes two varieties of jasmine and herself alongside –
rubble wedged between her toes. When she stepped outside
to breathe fresher air sweet with night-blooming perfume, her pride
had swelled, such lushness had taken long care-filled hours. Her death, though fragrant, had not come quickly.
She felt the rubble wedge between her toes and everywhere. When we stepped outside
we could see – the night had been much too busy.

Occlusions

By Eman Hassan

i- What we leave out.

I know something of that clank,
nickels and pennies in my mouth,
of times they rust at the back of my throat
making me think of rosebushes
along my back yard wall,
my urge to clip their unruly babel of leaves
down to their original stump
and I am lost
among the shrubbery of my own language,
held back by arbitrary branches.
At night I brush twigs from my bushy hair,
pull thorns from under the tip of my tongue.
Makes me think of my grandmother,
when she turned seven, seeing speech
as perception, announced
to her immigrant mother there will be no more Polish
spoken in the house again: only American.
She taught me how to swear in her maternal
tongue, often spoke of how Great Nana Julia
would scream
long strings of words
at her husband, in a language my grandmother
didn’t remember, those monosyllabic and compound
phrases, just recalled the cuss words
arbitrarily passed down.
My mother tells me this one night as she nods off, smiling
at an image of her grandfather Stanislaus, mumbling

as he stands up for dramatic pause, looks down
at his screechy wife, then flips his hearing aid off.

ii. Loose change

Sometimes people in the old Kuwaiti
market mistake me for American,
which I am, but also one of them,
unlike my British brother in-law,
who teaches Arabs to speak English
there at thirty-five dollars an hour,
his price half the cost
the institute he once worked at
charged for his cockney.
Even my brother in-law can hear
my own words as different, almost off-key,
like my sisters, softer on the gutturals
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I tell him, yes, I am lost between
the diphthongs of one language
and another, among three-pronged
Arabic, its roiling lyric, and Anglophone
Latin, who’s various roots twist
and branch plural versions,
British or American English, yes,
I am lost in my own lack
of singular linguistic socialization.

Who are we, peering out from a construct of sentences,
giving them jingle and form? Who can put a price our coins?

iii. What we take for granted

At the T-Mobile branch I single Elton out,
his unmistakable lilt: Elton is Chaldean,
from the land of Babel and Sumer.
Has never been, but once wanted to be
an interpreter in Iraq because the money,
he heard, was good. When his manager steps
back into the store Elton stops being
familiar, cuts the conversation, says loudly
he was born in Michigan,
explains how my new messaging service
will let me text Kuwait
at forty-five cents a pop.
Elton pronounces Kuwait
like the noun is made out of money:
his associated value with the word
reminds me how we both take for granted
the wealth of a multiple language.
Elton reminds me of my Kuwaiti father
who never took the name of the Lord in vain
but praised it, who often switched around
compound words in English, saying
towel paper or stew beef. He took for granted
I would be proficient in Arabic,
Often dismayed at my syntactic variations.
I took for granted our last conversation
mostly because of the shock,
as we watched the broadcast about Nick
a kidnapped US contractor on TV,
too stumped to speak.

What we leave out, or take for granted. What we take in vain.
The way they held a knife under Nick’s throat, ululating His Name.

Four poems by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Dhayaa

In my language
the word for loss is a wide open cry,
a gaping endless possibility.
In English loss sounds to me like one shuddering blow to the heart,
all sorrow and absence hemmed in,
falling into a neatly rounded hole,
such tidy finality.

In my language
the word for loss is a long vowel stretched
taut and anchored between behemoth consonants, reverberating—
a dervish word
whirling on itself
in infinite emptiness
the widening gyre,
the eternal motion of grief.

Eating the Earth

And to the flour
add water, only
a thin stream whispering gathered
rains of a reticent winter.

And to the flour add oil, only
a glistening thread snaking through
ridges and ravines of what
sifts through your fingers,
what sinks, moist and burdened
between your palms.

And in the kneading
hinge forward, let the weight
of what you carry on your shoulders,
the luster of your language, shade
of your story press into the dough.

And to the dough bring
the signature of your fingertips, stretch
the canvas before you, summer linen
of wheat and autumn velvet of olive oil,
smooth like a map
of silence and fragrance,
of invisible terrains of memory.

And on the dough let the green leaves
fall, drenched
sumac stars flickering among them
shards of onion in their midst.

Scatter them as the wind would
or gather them in the center of this earth
and fold them into the tender embrace
of the dough, cool and soft beneath their bodies.

And make a parcel of the dough,
filled with foraged souvenirs,
fold them in, and then again,
let their silhouettes gaze back at you.
Recall found treasures of hillside
wandering; flint, thorn
blossom and a hoopoe
feather carried home in your skirt.

And to the flames surrender
the bread, gift of your hands.
Grasp its tender edges and turn it
as the heat strafes and chars
this landscape you have caressed.
Some grandmothers sing as they bake,
others speak prayers.

And let the edges bristle to the color
of earth, let the skin of the bread scar.
The song of zaatar simmering
in its native oil rises up
and time evaporates. You are young
again, it is spring
in the greening valley.

*zaatar – wild thyme native to the Levant

Intifada Portrait
for Ramzi

I have a Palestinian friend
who drinks coffee with me once in a while
and tells me stories of the Intifada.

“Who can erase those days from the memory of time?
The land will never forget our footsteps
pounding against bullets and tear gas.
My skin remembers it.”

I grew up watching it on the news,
the nightly accounting of young broken bones,
the women in sensible skirts
and the boys in kuffiyehs
who all woke up one morning and had enough.
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I have a Palestinian friend
who lived that rainy winter
stone to stone
who swayed over the hairpin edge of death
who shouldn’t even be here today
to talk about it.

I have a Palestinian friend
whose eyes are like two pools of olive
oil about to ignite.
They swarm with stars as he tells me
about his Intifada portrait.

“The Israeli soldiers showed it to me in jail.
They have cameras that can get a close up
of every pore in your skin!
Shit! Is that really me?
I was flying
above the black smoke
from the burning tires…”

He leans over his coffee cup,
“…a stone in my clenched fist,
ready to strike!”

His eyes narrow now,
his voice drops to a low rumble.
“Who is going to erase that
from their memory?”

Gone to Feed the Roses

“More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Unseasonably warm today, and green
pierces through January earth saturated,
earth that shifts like a lover, wrestling silent
nightmares deep into darkness.

Four years ago we embraced, sleep-
walking through the moonlit square,
four years ago our slogans were winter
coats and our throats were bonfires.
How our words dissolve in tear gas,
how the thorn of who our neighbors are
pierces without warning. What
happens next is only human.

Unseasonably light today, no clouds to obscure
glass eye of the sun staring at us
docile winter-worn wanting
for anything that tastes of spring —
we’ll sip poison if it’s served in pretty teacups.

What is that poem? Something about roses,
I can’t recall but I know a woman wrote it.
I know it as a mother
knows in her bone marrow
that a child who has gone missing from the street
hasn’t just turned the corner to chase after a stray ball
but has been taken,
knows in her bone marrow,
with the dirty fingernails grip of certainty,
that the child will
not return breathing.

I can’t remember the poem
about roses and witness,
the delirium of all that perfume
ornamental blades of thorns
petals like mouths writhing muted
for the fallen as they scatter,
trampled underfoot.

I know she was a woman,
that poet who wrote of roses,
just as a woman marched to the edge
of memory, four years after
a dream soured into nightmare
with a wreath of roses,
her words trickling out of her head
a rose-red poem spilling on the streets of her city.

in memory of poet Shaymaa Sabbagh, poet of Alexandria, killed on the 4th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution.