Poem: Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf (Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA)

A colleague, John B., mentioned today that I was posting much more, and it's true, though there are always 2-3 more things I'd like to post about than I manage to post here. A few weeks back, another colleague, Fran B., told me about Fred Wilson's show at Pace Galleries, and I went. It was really amazing, one of the most enjoyable art exhibits I've attended in a while. And Fred Wilson and his partner, artist Whitfield Lovell were there, in the gallery! So I want to blog about that. And I said I'd post a review of Red Tails--what was that, a year ago?--and I've wanted to write about Steve McQueen's Shame...and on and on.  Oh well. One of these days soon.

Today, it's a poem, by Mohja Kahf (1967-), whose wonderful little collection E-mails from Scheherezad (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003) I came across a few years ago. I don't get out that much, but I think it's a smart and provocative gathering of poems, and I rarely see it or her mentioned anywhere, so I thought I'd feature one of the poems, since that's one of the things I can do with this blog. (Can I just say that I wish English had diminutives like Spanish and Portuguese, because it's my natural instinct to use them frequently and affectionately when talking about things like, well, this blog.)

Who is Mohja Kahf? She was born in Damascus, Syria, and now is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She also is a pioneer in the field of Muslim American literature. The poem below gives a sense of some of the subjects Kahf's poetry addresses, though many of the poems, which range in length and form, directly address the experiences of Arab immigrants and Arab and Muslim Americans, especially women, in the US, and many are as seriously fiercesome in their tone as this one is wittily fiercesome. It's truly about poetry and poetics, about form and statement, about poetic effects and aims, about how any poem by this poet will initially be read but what she's--it, the poem is--really trying to do. Do read it. I think she, and it, succeed.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SONNET

So you think I play with the multiculture card
and sign up for affirmative action verse,
slide into print with poetry that's worse?
So you think I get excused from being good

by throwing in Third-World saffron and some veils?
Now is the summer of minority discontent
They have no Idea of Order in the West--
But I do not insist on difference. Difference pales 

beside the horrors facing our race
--the human one: hunger, HIV, genocide,
the unconscionable global marketplace
Where is the salve? We write. We recognize

--we must--each other in millennial glow
or we will die from what we do not know

That's all these smoke-and-mirror poems do
I came across the world to write for you

1998

Copyright © Mohja Kahf, "Affirmative Action Blues," from E-mails from Scheherezad, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003. All rights reserved.

Poem: Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-) is a poet whose work I came to only as an adult, through my experiences teaching 7th and 8th graders. I had never heard of Nye, a native of St. Louis and the daughter of a Palestinian father and white American mother, but at some point during my combined poetry class, working with fellow poets Mattie Michael and Caitlin O'Donnell, a classmate at NYU, I was flipping through an anthology of poetry--perhaps it wasn't for children though I want to say it was--and happened upon Nye's work.  It seemed as though after that moment I would see one of her poems everywhere, though more likely I just began to notice her poems, and read them.

Sometimes coming to poetry and poets happens this way; it does with me. Nye had released her collection Red Suitcase only a year before, so that might also have been why her name rode the air--or my mind's air--but she has since published a number of other volumes, including most recently You and Yours (Boa Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award.  Nye has been a resident at various points of Ramallah, Jerusalem, San Antonio, and many other places, and has received a wide array of awards.  She is now a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, lives in San Antonio, and has traveled around the globe promoting the arts and cultural exchange. The poem below suggests multiple readings, in the various senses of that term. As you read it, slowly, let its language and images ride on your mind's air.

THE MAN WHOSE VOICE HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM HIS THROAT

remains all supple hands and gesture

skin of language
fusing its finest seam

in fluent light
with a raised finger

dance of lips
each sentence complete

he speaks to the shadow
of leaves

strung tissue paper
snipped into delicate flags

on which side of the conversation
did anyone begin?

wearing two skins
the brilliant question mark of Mexico
stands on its head
like an answer

From Red Suitcase. Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Published by BOA Editions, Ltd. All rights reserved.