Ahmad Almallah
from ‘Bitter English’ (2019) and ‘The Border Wisdom’ (in progress)
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BITTER ENGLISH
that I own no one language cuts me through
that I find this english tongue I use day after day
boring, in construction, even in poetry cuts me
in the middle of sentiment and sentence
I do not understand this sound, I stumble,
as I say to myself I will ignore these english words
emptied today, I walk down the street catching
my hand in the air, greeting faces I know I don’t know
as I walk these streets only owning past echoes
cutting through this language, this english tongue
I want to catch with my teeth, cuts me through
that I have to stack all my old and new passports
on my writing, cuts me through, I go over
my exits and entries for this citizenship, my first
step, I doubt, to owning something of this sound
I owe everything to one place that owns me, not
here, where what I owe I do not own, time and many
years spared because this english tongue cuts me
through, because this english tongue owes me
a language
from THE BORDER WISDOM
mis/translation:ONEترحّلتُ وتساءلت عن ضياع اللغة هذا. أين أجدها وكلّ ما أعرفه منها ذلك الصوت الواحد. هل[ONE language, silence] / When my mother died, June, the second, twenty and twenty one, when[left was right and kept pushing against every attempt to put down any words — how could the world speak anything but her language and sounds]:
كتبتُ بلغة المنفى لأجد شيئاً مِن الأمّ في ركام المعاني؟ هل يجد المرء أمّه في منفى اللغة؟ في
Her body remained without her in the form, I could no longer write in any
الشعر؟ في صمت الكلمات؟ لم يبق لي إلّا السؤال وكل الأجوبة تبقى معلّقة مؤجّلة؟ تلك هي
Adopted sound, poetry was left behind
without its source; I only wanted to
لغتي، تلك هي أمّي، وهذه كلّ قصائدها: صمتٌ يحثّ على التساؤل وأسئلة لا تقبل الإجابات...
hear her voice, but there was that silence, the language she mastered, and the mother
tongue happened to be Arabic — everything she said, and didn’t say like the sword, one
and cutting through everything real, in a reality devoid of speech her sounds I could not write in any form
that strayed away from those original sounds I inherited from that one mother that rarely spoke
but when she did, it was only in Arabic, and all she could remember of her English lessons, is the phrase
that made fun of her inability to be with anything but Arabic she said, that all she remembers
of English, a half definition, that “an inventor is a man or woman …” I can see her clearly, strangely
when she was near the light, by the frame of the door to her bedroom saying those only English words she spoke,
to laugh with me, to laugh at herself, and to always make sure I remember that
school lessons
are not to be taken
seriously.
[I wish you could do things without the mind
she always said: a craft of some sort to save you from those lessons your father gives] —
تتراكم ذرّات الصمت هذه هنا وهناك. أجمُعها ذرّةً ذرّةً. أسترجع بها هزائمي مع العربية، لغتي التي لا أقوى عليها الآن. لأنّي لو قويتُ عليها لرددتُها ــ كما قالها الأوائل ــ قالباً قالباً. وأنا الذي لا أجيد ترديد الأقوال، بل أردّد الأصوات التي حضنتْني، أردّد أصواتهم علّني ألتقط بعضاً من أصداء صمتهم، ثم أودّعهم عندما يحين وقت الكتابة.My defeats with the Arabic language keep up keep me up yup the American English of NOPE.
THE NAME ELEGY, NAWAL
*
Every moment is an image. Every sunrise is a flashback
to the other side
where the dead never reach out to the living who
obsess about connecting
dots and making symbols:
my daughter gives me knives to celebrate
the fancy fact that once upon a time, like a sad
story you existed and you loved to cut and puncture
then carve and preserve:
the blocks of time between being born and being rendered
an aching body ready to receive the final blow make up
some life to celebrate and then cut cut
cut again the only slice of air is that body
the language that you mastered to the tiniest twitch: what
statement were you trying
to make god knows only grief
will make the ones left behind decipher and
then the image might come alive because it is real
and contains gaps like the real yes the real that is
the hardest to
imagine.
*
From memory, a mother, I create your absence
— Nawal, the name attached to the body, is no —
No longer a reality, no longer a reference to some-
One there: is it really possible, your disappearance?
Just like that I hear
You are gone, after you were
Here, with us: then I pack and spend the hours flying,
Only to see your grave, the empty bed, the needles
And the tubes left alone at last. To gain
Some understanding of that thing we call death I fly
Back home to where I no longer know:
Cramming the body into tight spaces and vehicles,
Into the corners of structures here and there
That are now as small as the hole in the ground
They stuck you in.
Was it too much to ask
That I be by your side
To lay you down in the ground, to wash you
Of the filth of living before you be done with
Light, and into the darkness we call
Grave you were no
More.
*
Sometime in May, another war in Gaza is on its way
In the room we save for the living, I watched the buildings
Leveled to the ground dust dust dust rising in a cloud
And more dirt to contend with. I was in Beirut calculating
My next move: should I go back and wait for your eventual
Disappearance, or should I go and try to bring
Everyone back to you? I thought you’ll wait for me, for us,
Time and again — I was wrong:
I never thought a war would erupt, and like a sad smile
It did.
*
Everyone sleeps in these lands, but here it happened, to
Interrupt and trip me again, another war. Everyone I know
Wanted me out.
Get out of the middle, you crazy jumble
of trouble. Don’t come back! Look at the signs!
The war, another fact on the heap:
You don’t have a father or a home. You
Stayed at
A hotel, like a bastard, and only felt at home in the ICU, be-
Side your dying figure of home: your mother: what was she,
a ghost? A
Shadow?
What was she? What were
You then
Mother?
*
I came and carried her to her last hours, it seems. It was
Ramadan and everyone wanted to break their fast but she
wanted to die. I had to come at that hour, and
Carry her, carry her with both hands, up the steep stairs,
with the medical crew, to the
Hospital you were born in, to that awful place that was
Death itself, where the sick lay in hallways, waiting, for
The living to let them go.
Mother, you named me there, you said
To father then, who named and labeled everyone else
You brought to life:
I want to name this one.
*
I made a myth out of that Ramadan trip,
I was your savior:
I was asked to hold your blouse above your breasts
I watched the doctors stick needles near your heart
I saw them clamping sharp metal things into your sagging skin
I held on tight: your body shaking, asking for air —
I felt the touch of death then and there
I guess that other world is possible
I guess you were almost gone
I gathered so, from the hubbub of medical talk:
Why did I have to come at that
Hour, running from the hotel
Upon my arrival, when I received
A call from my sister: Hurry hurry!
After three years, I ran, now
A child nearing forty, I ran
To see my mother, thinking
For the last time.
*
Should I, mother tell you this story
how aware were you of what was happening to you, around you? When after “I saved you” I had to leave again:
I broke down, shouting: how did we let you get to this state
I summoned not poems everyone that was there father my two brothers
And shouted at them: how did we let her get to this state?
Were you witnessing any of this?
I looked at you for the last time you returned my gaze
but you were calm no longer insane simply subdued
drenched to the lees ready for death you didn’t make a sound
You looked at me a last glimpse
From that corner of your wooden
Pain.
*
Yamma, I tried to warm up to father give him a chance, but I was caught
every time
How could I accept this new arrangement you dying in the lower level of the house while
He and his wife served me Kunafa and coffee after breaking fast I made it clear I was not Putting up a show this time
I didn’t fast I know you would have rather I did
I smoked in front of him
I was there to make things messy uneasy for the old fucks the newly wed
Something was eating at me every time I found myself
In what used to be your house with another woman roaming around locking me out When she needed to
Is it really no longer yours her house?
But I wasn’t there to make that women’s life hell I felt sorry for her
How can she bear all this? Us talking non-stop about us about you.
*
What was I there for? I told him on that last night
What you privately said to me and to others
That because he was what he was he pushed us
Out of house and country
And you had to bear his burden
Left alone without your children
You couldn’t make meaning of it all
You prayed to Allah, just like he did
But I think you were beyond it all at a certain point
You didn’t care about a thing —
Alone
Abandoned
The world began
Eating at your brain.
*
In a dream, I was in Palestine, I was
Coming back as I always do
In my dreams
You were alive and well it seems:
My father lied to me again
About your death
He couldn’t face the fact of your
Non-Absence, and the only
Remedy to the
Rift between us: was your passing —
He made up death, another
Excuse.
*
1967: When you were a young girl in Hebron
Palestine —
Against all odds you went to Amman, out of
Your home, as a woman on her own, to study
And meet your man, this father of mine. You
Made him a promise, to wait for him till he
asks for your hand.
It took him a few years, three to be
Exact. Were you that in love?
Three years without a word.
Maybe that was your first mistake —
Keeping your promises. Maybe that’s why
I should never keep
BIO NOTE (after Al Filreis). Ahmad Almallah was born and raised in Bethlehem, in the central West Bank, about six miles south of Jerusalem. For twenty years he has lived in the US, where he has earned a PhD in classical Arabic poetry (at Indiana University), was appointed to a tenurable assistant professorship at Middlebury College, and has worked on a book on Arabic love poetry and the ghazal. He left Middlebury (left the tenure line!) and moved with his family to Philadelphia, where he devotes more or less all his time to writing poetry in English.
EDITOR’S NOTE. Almallah’s first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in the University of Chicago Press’s Phoenix Poets series in 2019, while his follow-up work, The Border Wisdom, is still to be published. It is in the latter, however, that he takes the notable step of writing in a mix of Arabic and English scripts, as above: a contemporary instance of bilingual poetics that has surfaced intermittently among the finest of our experimental writers. For this and for his exemplary writings in standalone English, I would extend to him the well-known welcome that Emerson directed to Whitman nearly two centuries ago. (J.R.)
“I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
Poems and poetics