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. 

lies told honestly in three propositions by Sahar Khraibani


1.
 
I wrote a poem on the subway
 
We drove across the Sonoran desert at 10 pm
And it felt like
Two in the morning
The I-10 at night is pitch black
But you can see the stars
Like you’ve never seen them before
In your little hometown
Polluted by lights
And a thick layer of smog
From nitrogen
And all the cigarettes
Everyone smoked
 
On the F train
Passing West 4th St
Sitting next to a man I don’t know
His skin is darker than mine
I don’t want to be scared
But I am
K told me about the reservations
And how casinos are important
For native people
It felt odd
To not know any of these things
And then to know them

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2.
 
Our histories are merging
As mine is forming
 
I never write poems on the train
I’d been always preoccupied
With my destination
And what station’s next
And the passed out man
And the sad woman crying
 
We have some favorite spots in the city
This is how it becomes a home
When you stop needing directions
To a destination unknown
 
I woke up this morning
Sulking sulking
Sulking
“Stress paralysis is real”
I tell S
 
A guy in Koreatown is really pissed on the phone
Because a dumplings spot he used to frequent 10 years ago is gone

3.
 
We have no sense of history
Yet are so embedded in it
It follows us everywhere
 
Drove down Embassy Row
In Washington DC
One man standing under the rain with an umbrella
“I am the Sudan revolution”
 
The I
Stands in between 
History
And the reclaiming of it
 
“The great force of history
Comes from the fact fact we carry
It within us, are unconsciously
Controlled by it… history is literally
Present in all that we do”
Wrote James Baldwin
 
 
I have no sense of history
In the passenger seat
In the car
Driving across the Sonoran Desert
Across Embassy Row in Washington DC
I can’t reclaim it.
 

Maskoon by Sara Elkamel

We clung to our dreams like ants to sugar.
In them we walked, we meandered uncertain,
we strained to remember

colors of the sea. Then in dream after dream
the homes of our mothers
and fathers crumbled.

They gave them away.
Like clowns, we writhed
and we screamed. Now we can never go back.

When we rise, we assemble the bones
we’ve collected. We toss orange after orange into the water,
watch them float.

We are a queenless colony, feeding on itself.
We recall the crowns
In a country like India, hardly ever couples voluntarily go for the treatment of male infertility cheap cialis 5mg issues. Proper blood flow enables the penis to stay erect in a sexual act and thus when the blood female levitra flow is not proper, it leads to erectile dysfunction. It is always asked to a person by the doctor to have the pill in the way of viagra lowest prices proving safety of that chemical, and of course, its effectiveness. The best part about Calvin is that each of us viagra the pill can see a bit of old fashioned discipline can win back decades. of sand dunes:

one side sewn exactly, pink lines inclined like lashes,
the other gouged out by our feet.

When we were in the desert,

it was difficult to find the end of things.
We dreamed we danced and bled,
and climbed skies for the goats we loved.

Here, someone
asks: is it like this every night?
But the night does not answer.

Two Poems by Lina Al-Sharif

Relationship Goals

When on good terms,
my parents debated the prices
of fruits and vegetables.
Love letters were sent in praise
of my father’s excellent choice of
mint leaves and parsley.
Fights were coded in unsavory criticism
of my mum’s punctured marrows and uneconomical
purchases of hard avocados and sour strawberries.
Reconciliations were held over a festive plate
of khobiza with nestling red chilies and puffy bread
after all, they know their onions.

Ghazal: My Mother

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I hold no land dearer than the one of my mother

I roam faraway countries and pray to find a home
but I keep coming back to the map given to me by my mother

I wear the perfume of burnt orange rind and read the future in coal
I whisper my prayer, scream at my children; I become my mother

I close my eyes and hide thinking of running away
my daughter asks why the refugee boy is crying “where’s my mother?”
I buy parsley I never use, cancel plans I never wanted to make
I forget recipes and repeat “curse me” as said by my mother

I chase a few poems after everyone goes to bed
pretend there’s more to me than being a mother
but what’s more than being like my mother?

I Had Never Seen a Dead Man Before By Hedy Habra

Until my father-in-law died that summer in Tucson, Arizona

He seemed to sleep
in his suit and tie,
expressionless,
the color of death freezing
his shrunken features,
almost youthful in his eighties
as if an artist’s pencil
performed a final facelift,
inverting lines
for a last farewell.

I knelt on the velvet
rest in prayer.
thinking of the fig tree
we once planted together,
of how he always
saved the juiciest fig
for me: “Here,” he’d say
“this one’s from your tree…
see how well I care for it?”

∞ ∞

I felt a pang in my chest,
leapt years and years back
to a January morning: a young
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where all had forgotten
how to smile.
I was never told what had
happened that day,
in Heliopolis. “Your father
is in the hospital,” they said.

I awaited your return,
week after week,
unable to understand
the silent procession,
charcoaled silhouettes
shading spaces
once forbidden to
our clumsy hands,
beveled doors
now wide-open,
black skirts hiding pink
damask silk, flowing
over gilded Louis XVI
chairs and Bergères
like a flock of Egyptian
ravens, threatening
my caged love-birds
placed at the balcony edge

Untitled by Jenna Hamed

Traditions in carry-on bags/ carried on backs/ now become furnishings/ with unfingered holybooks/ failed wallhangings/ in 1 of 2-familyhome’s livingrooms/

Make one word for livingroom/ no// one word for 2 familyhome livingrooms/ make one word for family/ home/ one word for un holybooks/ unholy fingerings/ making walls/ with failed paintings/ I’m waiting/ make one word/ for furnishings on backs/ furnishings in bags/ bags of tradition/
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Bags become words in failed painting traditions/ bags become word for family/ become word for home/ become word for living/ become word for room/ become word for 2 families’ home living-room/

GREAT COAL BEDS OF SOME WORLD By Glenn Shaheen

The sky is blue where blue was ash and soot,
another fire is beamed from screen to air.
We learn of it and gasp and choke. On foot
we rush to learn of darkness from the stare

of actors in some film. Yes, we got jokes,
the politicians desperately inept,
so why’d we want the show to end? The croaks
that seep in to our shade are frogs at best,
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the gasping cries of dying kids at worst
but get real, they’re frogs. The soot is raining,
that ought to put an end to fires that burst
from clickbait. I’m good, I’m entertaining,

I’m good at entertaining. Lovely chumps,
what suckers, we keep begging for more lumps.

Lugha by Hanan Issa

An assured composition,
the confident guttural ‘gh’,
haloed,
the nur of Allah’s language

eviscerates fruitless scratchings,
plaiting words of Welsh or French,
inept,
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A wounded bird,
its upward basking curtailed,
flailing,
I implore with my patchwork tongue.

[1] Arabic word meaning ‘language’

For Fear that My Parents Will Never Understand My Poetry By Philipe Abiyouness

I no longer write poems about self-love because I figured it out.
Now, I write poems to tell my loved ones that I see beauty as far as the edge of their silhouettes.
That when trains are delayed I feed on their war stories and bathe in their jokes.
This is to say they have built me a fortress with legs and a thumping heart and hair that stands on end when morning bows before the hours.

I have known the imposters, took the time to kiss their cheeks and taste their words.
Their pithy left my tongue sour. They wear secondhand capes of culture, bought off those
that could no longer afford to keep it and dance to songs they did not write.

Culture is not a subscription.
Culture cannot be whittled down to knowledge reaped from a book.

Culture is cutting fruit in the palm of your hand
and sipping rosewater to ease the stomach.

Culture is sleeping four to a bedroom because nobody gets left behind.
Culture is generators visible like lighthouses
and filling the soap bottle with water when it is running low
and cutting the toothpaste tube in half.

Culture is not a lover to be fetishized and worshiped
rather a stubborn child screaming over all that you do
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that the earth is always moving and holding onto something
is mercy and reckoning boiled holy warm.

My mother reads me poems in Arabic and I watch her hands painting skies
and swatting gnats. Her eyes look up to see if I am understanding. I do not
understand the words, but the crack in her voice I understand. Her drawn out syllables and gaping mouth, I understand because my mother colored
my childhood with poetry every time she prayed the rosary by candlelight
and every time she made me wait in the laundromat for hours, so long
that I memorized all of the vending machine options and their corresponding numbers (Fritos A4). My mother wrote me a poem every time she locked the door and drove slow and fried fish on Friday.

My family is meter and measure and would hate this poem
because, “aren’t poems supposed to rhyme?” but still I send my brother
every basketball ballad I find, because are we not spun from the same hands, calloused and marshmallow?
(There is nothing tepid about upbringing)

Maybe one day they will lose the tops of their heads
to something radical and begging, like I am lost in their story,
forever attempting to write their fingerprints into cities
sprawling and forgiving.

 

Poets Tending to the Aches of Empires By Shadab Hashmi

When you are broken-boned, heaped upon
the deadly alloys of power, retching
on the saffron and citruses of our own
planting, remember how good we were with
salvaging beauty, blunting edges with imagination’s
cotton kiss, remember the night-boats to villages
of authors of the past when you didn’t leave your bed,
locking tealeaves in summer lotuses that open
with the brave clove of the moon in your cup

Naming the hungers in Hangzhou

Twice-seasoned soup at dawn, along with shreds
of hot puff-pastry and steamed rice before
beginning the business of the day with
a naked quill and an innocent scroll— the
Hangzhou Tea Merchant puts the moonrise to
shame in his lifting of delicate burdens,
distilling an epoch’s hunger in his poem.
Though empire prospers, and even commoners
may eat more than thirty kinds of vegetables and
seventeen types of beans, there are aches borne of hungers.
 

The poet, an apothecary in Nishapur

pounds the finest husks, seeds, barks and roots. Soon,
the Mongol conflagration of forest and field,
library, mosque and hospital will feed
an ashen history. He wraps salves in torn
pages of poetry. The mauve blooms and leaves flicker
their last as the wind brings carrion-burning stench—
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Attar is lifted by birdsong: in remembrance
of God, hearts find serenity, the ringdove
repeats. Wings folded, she tends to the poet’s ache.

Rumi reads The Conference of the Birds

and pens: “Attar has traversed the seven cities
of Love. We are still at the turn of one
street.” An exile from Balkh to Anatolia,
the Mongol invasion forces him West—
On the way: corpses eaten by stork, kites,
porcupines. What was the text of the sweet
basil of Samarkand? What did the hoopoe
behold after a lifetime of flying
through the valleys of quest? The birds of the book
travel East, Rumi finds the ancient beloved everywhere.
 
Tomb of Al Ghazali

The rebecs, musk roses, onyx towers,
diamond-encrusted ewers are gone, as are
the artisans, the ink-and quill-crafters, translators,
navigators, perfumers, tyrants, ascetics,
and the teahouses and mosques and madrassas
where the Sufi taught how to find the Divine
without seeking ownership of piety. In the decay,
melon vines and jasmines sweeten
with the sage, gardenias run wild. In the
sunken ruins, mynahs, the irreverent pilgrims, chirrup.