Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Exile -- Talia's Questions
How do these poems, as we receive them, exhibit various types of exile? What distinguishes before and after, if there is a distinction? And why might that be an important (poetic/political) distinction to make?
How does the translation of these poems comment on and/or further and/or limit - so, complicate - our understanding of exile?
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In the poems “Eid Before the Occupation” and “Eid After the Occupation,” Al-Joubouri juxtaposes the religious celebration that closes Ramadan as a moment of tenuous solidarity before the storm with images of emptiness that result after the occupation. The before/after form of the poem raises the question of binaries, but Al-Joubouri complicates this notion with her topic selection and complexity. In this pairing, Al-Jabouri privileges the before with an image of religious unity; although one might also read the italicized line about peace with an ironic undertone. The collective “we” suggests unity as the “singing” of the “hymns” implies comfort, even if only for “tonight.” The second stanza reemphasizes these images of solace with Al-Joubouri’s repetitive use of the negative “No” before “diaspora” and “holocaust,” two words that signify dispersion and persecution, respectively. One might also read the repetitive “No” as the failure of language or humanity; regardless of the repetition, these images are actualized. In this scene, an emphasis on solidarity with “we,” “together,” “singing,” “world,” “our,” and “homelands” overrides the strength of the pain of “diaspora” and “holocaust,” but cannot silence their suggestive presence.
ReplyDeleteIn “Eid After the Occupation” the “we” is no longer “singing” but is now “[dragging]” happiness to our “dark homes.” The “[dragging]” of “happiness” is a stark image that delineates the positive emotion of happiness as a dead body or heavy burden that involves a slow, steady movement of force and persistence. Al-Joubouri extends this dark tone with parental “lies” to children, “calls that catch nothing,” and the Eid which has become “unreachable.”
“Eid Before the Occupation” and “Eid After the Occupation” provides the reader with a deeper understanding of exile through the image of a religious ritual prior to and after the occupation. The theme of exile is raised not only as a physical dislocation with the image of the “diaspora,” for the “homeland,” but also as an internal one through the community’s struggle to rediscover and reclaim the “unreachable Eid.”
In looking up the roots of the word exile, I was led, through the Latin and Old French, to the idea of banishment. As in exile, with banishment there is the sense of someone being sent away from his/her place of origin, but the word banishment also gives play to the punishment inherent in exile. This idea of banishment/punishment helped me to connect with the way exile works in Hagar before the Occupation/Hagar after the Occupation. One of the ironies here is that there is exile even after the author’s technical “return.” The punishment, or a new dimension of it, begins after the occupation, when Al-Jubouri has returned to her homeland, but finds that occupied, war-torn landscape has changed everything, from neighbors and soccer to Eid and emotions. This exile, as I think “My Mouth after the Occupation” points out, is a kind of “spiritual” casting away, where both truth and God are absent: “I’m terrified of losing truth/ and look—it’s already gone // Exiled with God’s tongues” (59). Furthermore, the poems and the series’ structure, using the occupation as a temporal benchmark (for starters), suggest that exile is a changing, unpredictable space of shifting power dynamics and desires. In this way, Al-Jubouri’s poems indicated to me that exile is, as felt by the one exiled, a disorienting state in which before and after can offer only slight purchase: “Loneliness of my breast/ of borders/ of alleyways/ of my confusion// in this market of conscience, / you are looted” (71). For Al-Jubouri, exile, estrangement, offer an ongoing form of punishment.
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