I Found Some Smart in Texas

Increasingly, I find the strongest work in the poets gathered in the Inclined to Speak anthology. Each time the book is assigned, I'm reading saying, "Damn he's smart. Damn she's smart. Damn that's deep on so many levels." And though I do find value in most of our material, others often pale in comparison.

When speaking of poetry, written in English, by writers who straddle expanses of culture, whose familial ties are to cultures assaulted by English/American politics and policies, the "who" grows to encompass all peoples who share the experience of assault. The expression of this violent experience (either direct or vicarious) in English, uses the dominant language to expose its cultural atrocities, uses grammar as weapon, the drawn line as sword. Made sharper by the intimacy the outsider poet enjoys(?) with the language used to exclude him.

Joudah wields the tools of the English language with precision, exacting a poetry of structural commentary that questions belonging. "Proper" English is the tape around the parade. It is the test by which savages are culled; it is the marker by which assimilation is measured. What does it mean for a man of Arab descent (whether or not he was born American is, of course, of no consequence) to have a mastery of the English language that eludes most of white America - college graduates, professionals, CEOs, and the entirety of its suburban high school population (and their teachers)? Is superiority not called into question? The definition of difference?

Let's put aside for a moment (how easy to do, for me, wearing white skin) the ugliness of self-sacrifice, the biting regret of bowing to the oppressor, albeit in order to oust him. Let us set aside for a moment the sticky question of damage inherent in study of dominant thought/language, and focus instead on the beauty of what this poet has done, the glorious edge of the weapons he's swung. The flash of genius.

Joudah's "Morning Ritual" may give an accurate account of pig and goat slaughter (I don't know), but this poem is not a lesson in butchering. It may take place in a rural village (I don't know), but this is not a pastoral poem. Two hints that what he says is not the only story told: (1) the unpleasant idea of "squealing pigs" being "bled through an armpit wound" placed in contrast to the serenity-evoking title says 'wake up! all is not as it seems;' (2) the poet admits to lying within the poem and does so in the present tense, "I lie," indicating the activity is current while reading the poem and possibly habitual (there is something else he is not telling), he gains the trust of his reader with startling imagery then dashes it without apology, abandoning the story first presented, seeming to change topic, to leave the morning even, which says 'wake up! all is not as it seems.'

I believe a covered message lies in the construction of the poem. In much of the piece, lines are sequenced as multiple modifiers of a kernel clause. These serve in subordination to the independent clause and employ prepositions (awfully close to propositions) denoting distance, position, or direction; and verbals functioning as adverbs and adjectives, gerunds even, the rarest of verbal modifiers. Subordination is highlighted, modification is highlighted. The message offered by taking each first word of the subordinate constructions suggests the struggle of belonging and the direction and duration of pressure. Allow me some leash.

"back"
"Down"
"From"

"To"
"Being"
"In"

"For"

"going"
"Where"

"Between"

"Then"
"Until"

"Between"

Subordination and preposition vanish in the final stanza. The poem-long descriptive sentences combust at a fragment, and hereafter the message of content unites with the message of construction. "Now the knife that slit the throat." This is the only fragment in the entire poem. It signals the kill-point, at the very least, a change in objective. The quotidian of death, daily cultural death, the mutual devouring of claim and stake.

Syntax and content melt together in the last two lines, a sentence, full, yet employing relative pronouns. Relative being changeable (also family); pronouns being position holders, dummies, stand-ins, unnamed. "Who knows / What you'll need skin for." Content and construction together speak to power structure, racial divide - "who" gets to name "what" and what is the significance of skin. The content suggests uncertainty, the line break at "knows" reinforces it, and so the final sentence also stands like a challenge: those enjoying the proceeds of slaughter may not always be on the soft side of the blade.

"At a Cafe," Joudah is just showing off. "stone fungating out of her ribs" - say wha...it means to assume a fungal form or grow rapidly like a fungus. Metaphorical stone doing this. Geez man. You got me "hunched like a gibbous moon" over the dictionary, forehead in hand, close to flabbergasted.

"Sleeping Trees" also examines language and belonging in the emotional break of the poem: "Maybe if I had just said it, / Shejerah, she would've remembered me longer. Maybe /." These lines speak to the power of language to evoke ownership, a desire to keep one's connection to culture undiluted (especially in the face of cultural assault), and a desire to be accepted, remembered; the fleeting and unjust nature of exoticism, the many ways there are to be a whore, to be dominated, to give in.

One sentence in this poem though is really clever and beautiful. Whether or not he meant to do this, the poem meant to do it: "Between one falling and the next / There's a weightless state." True on it's face, the first part weary and sad. One thinks of falling and getting up. For those who do not enjoy dominant (American) culture perks, life can be a series of falls, perhaps even continuous (in terms of absorbing racism), so that the descent feels at times like floating. BUT! knowing as we poets do that each word is painstakingly chosen, "state" sounds curiously like a double agent. If "state" were to refer to nation, country, land, then "weightless" would also have to be working double-time. Something that is "weightless" might also be without mass, or absent. And so the lines transform into a succinct commentary on the constant pressure of living outside your parents' country, yet unable to claim the one you reside in (absent land) because your body is physical evidence of enemy status.

"I was terrified of being / The only one left."

'Who' becomes a very lonely place for the dashAmericans, outsiders to present and past.