Though the syllabus says that the concentration for the week is to be "Placement historically and culturally, dominance and subordination, center and edge" I found myself more often coming upon themes of journeying, both far away from home and attempting to return to home. Perhaps that is because, right now, home is a theme that has been resonating with me in my personal life of late. In Khaled Mattawa's poem, "Echo & Elixir 3," the imagery of travel is the concept on which the poem is hinged. Odyssey, boarding pass, you've been away: all phrases that evoke travel. And why not, since the scene begins in the airport? But the poem is about more than travel. It is about stasis as well. The narrator is "reading Plato looking for a word" but the thought is incomplete, leaving me to believe he never finds what he is seeking. Gilgamesh is still waiting on his boat and the beaches are full of people also waiting. The narrator brings nothing with him from all of his travels. He affirms instead, "Being away is all you bring." The longing for home in this poem, for a relocating of oneself in a familiar setting, not merely a birthplace, but a place where one can actually feel at home, is woven through each stanza. In the first stanza of "Echo & Elixir 3" The narrator is presumably arriving home from a journey, but it seems that what actually locates the poem at home is the nature the speaker beholds, moreso than any of the physical or intellectual landmarks: "The poetry in sand more than the poetry in poetry," and the blade of grass in which "you are a citizen of its taste." These elements, the natural world that surrounds us are well known by the traveler. I know sand, I know grass, I know water and the sea. It is in the elements, the land that changes less swiftly than human emotion or human surroundings, that one can begin to feel at home. 

There is also a journey in Echo & Elixir I, in which the first references to the poem are those of natural origin: clouds and rain, pink blossoms. Here, through the word usage, we have a feeling of the long journey, "the roads are long and long," and that the speaker is disembodied and uncertain,"these clothes are not my clothes./These bones are not my bones." There is also the insistence that the manmade thing, the ships, which float in the harbor are the same as the sea and that the sea represents the journey. Why does Mattawa say that the journey "awakens a light inside my chest?" I think it is because, like the fundamental message in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, home is where we were, but cannot be recognized as such until we have moved beyond sight of it. It is precisely the journey away that awakens us to our need to return. Unlike "Echo & Elixir 3" which offers nature as a way to feel at home,at least in part, "Echo & Elixir I" does not offer any solution. The man who is "on the phone calling, hanging up, calling again," presumably gets no answer. The poet's use of phrases like "No help" and "no use" leaves us with a general feeling of unresolved travel, of undestined journey. Even though nature is a sort of home in "Echo & Elixir 3" the home is not a concrete one. We are not endowed with a feeling of resolved "homeness." Even when he was home, and writing about home, one gets the feeling that Mattawa longed for something else, or at least expected something else. "Growing Up with a Sears Catalog in Benghazi, Libya" is a poignant look at how the infiltration of American capitalism may have colored the author's idea of "home." Instead of admiring what was there for him to behold, he viewed the pictures in the catalog as the things he wanted to possess. The fact that he traveled so far, to America, to view them, gave me a sense of dislocation for the rest of his work. The author's views of New Orleans aren't very flattering, and the image of nature at the end, after he'd achieved all he really wanted to possess, is one of disappointment and death, "What kind of flower/you want planted/next to your grave?" seems like an acknowledgement and sadness for a way of life that was departing. Though Mattawa's selections never ground us in a home while we read, it is still evident that he carried a piece of his home in his heart. In a world where globalization and opportunity are abundant, what more can we expect?