Poem of the week: […] by Fady Joudah

[…]

And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation

from her rescuers,
all men
on their knees and bellies

clearing the man-made rubble
with their bare hands,
disfigured by dust
into ghosts.

All disasters are natural
including this one,
because humans are natural.

The rescuers tell her
she’s incredible, powerful,
and for a split second, before the weight

of her family’s disappearance
sinks her, she smiles,

like a child
who lived for seven years above ground
receiving praise.

“The book title insisted on being wordless,” Fady Joudah told The Yale Review when discussing his latest collection. […] includes a substantial number of poems written during the early months of the current Israel-Gaza war. Palestinian-American, Texas-based poet, translator and physician Joudah has reported that Israeli air strikes have killed more than 100 members of his family. There are many poems of joy and love, and celebrations of Arab culture included in […] but, importantly, inevitably, the darker themes are dominant.

Joudah’s most anguished poems have a pared eloquence, but a book title can’t contain a poem. Joudah’s solution, the near-silence of the pictogram, […], forms not only the title, but additionally heads a number of individual poems, including this one.

The symbol has been variously interpreted. Joudah’s Yale Review interviewer, Aria Aber, sees “an enclosed space” and “a ruined house with people inside, or even a book”. Naomi Foyle, reviewing the collection in the journal Critical Muslim , suggests “one might hear it as ‘Nakba’ – literally ‘catastrophe’ – the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a violent erasure subject always to further deletions … […] also conjures physical presences: prisoners in a cell, bodies in a mass grave, children being carried on a stretcher”.

There’s a kind of encroachment indicated in the more “academic” use of square brackets when quoting material which needs alteration, for instance, a grammatical form or forms changed from the original to fit the quoter’s sentence. The device becomes a symbol of the power of the critic over the creator, and this might stand for other forms of imperialistic assertion.

This poem’s opening conjunction, (“And”) takes the reader in medias res. The shell has already hit, the building has already fallen, the search for civilian survivors may have begun some time ago, and may have meant only recovery of the dead, or no one at all yet found. It’s as if sound is suddenly un-muted in that solo first line, when it lands on the plump and splendid word, “ovation” – with its possible source in onomatopoeic Greek and Latin words meaning “to utter cries of joy”.

Related: Poem of the week: When you Wake you’ll Believe you are a Theatre Critic by Aaron Kent

We’re not given direct information about the circumstances of the blast. It must have affected a sizeable building, or complex, or street of buildings: there’s an abundance of rubble and thick dust which has “disfigured” the rescuers “into ghosts”.

“All men” tells us that all the searchers, rather than the majority, are male. We might guess that the air raid was also an all-male act. But we wouldn’t know for sure that human agency was implicated, without the disclaimer “All disasters are natural/ including this one,/ because humans are natural.” It’s a shift of perspective which heaves away the stereotype of thinking about disaster in the binary terms of “natural” and “man-made”. The statement doesn’t forgive humans, but its simple, logical truthfulness explains them – it explains us. The term “animal” is used sometimes in the attempt to distinguish between “us” and “them”, between “our” legitimate forms of terror and “their” illegal terrorism, for example. But no: “animal” is another word like “natural” – the term Joudah revives to describe a fundamental form of human behaviour.

The last three verses rise to an unbearably painful insight. When the narrator says that the girl’s instant reaction to her rescuers’ acclamation is that “she smiles,// like a child/ who lived for seven years above ground/ receiving praise” there’s a flash of understanding for the reader. The word “like” doesn’t drag in some hollowly supportive comparison. The wounded, orphaned child, whose survival thrills her rescuers and inspires them “to tell her/ she’s incredible, powerful”, actually is the one “who lived for seven years above ground,” who since her birth has received love from her family in the form of praise.

The little girl’s own moment of understanding is different, and wholly devastating. It has suddenly occurred to her that her parents and siblings aren’t with her, she’s alone among strangers. The loss is registered as “the weight// of her family’s disappearance” and the simple concept “weight” seems to contain many deaths, much solid human once-living flesh, and all the praise, warmth and safety loving flesh can give. The knowledge covers her in rubbled darkness again, it “sinks her.” There is an underworld in […], complete with dust-grey “ghosts” and now the child has re-entered it. For ever? We don’t know.

Although the narrative goes no further, we who read it can’t help thinking of the child’s future, perhaps hoping against hope that the psychological foundations her murdered family have laid will enable her to rise from the underworld and live happily and strongly, when, if, the time comes. Joudah shows us the domain of hate but here there is also embedded a poem of love – family love, strangers’ love, the smile of being loved. I think the pictogram […] is able to show something of this paradox, too.