On Sept. 12, the National Book Foundation and its media partner The New Yorker, announced the 2024 National Book Awards Longlist, which includes categories for Young People's Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. The Longlisted poetry category features Palestinian American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Something About Living. On Oct. 1, Tuffaha was celebrated as one of the five finalists in the poetry category.
As described by its publisher, Something About Living explores Palestinian life through the lens of American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal?
This fall, Palestine Square had the opportunity to speak with Tuffaha about her nominated book and its exploration of spaces of memory, language, and heritage under the limitations imposed by imperialism.
I wanted to ask about repetition and variation in your poetry and the power of or use of that repetition as a rhetorical tool toward the central narrative arc that you build.
In Variations on a Last Chance, you write, “The fence does not hold. / The wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread. / The snipers run out of bullets. / The desert, as it always has, of its own volition, blooms.” The use of “the” is repeated here, as well as “we” in the last two lines when you write, “We outrun the snipers. / We bury the dead at the fence, / let their roots reach the other side of home.”
And then repetition plays a significant role again in Fragments From a Sudden Crescendo when you write, “our limbs stun / our hearts grenade / our wounds live.”
I wonder about the intentionality with which you approached the repetition in your collection, can you speak to that?
Variations From a Last Chance is a poem dedicated to the Palestinians who participated in the Great March of Return in Gaza in 2018, which was a ‘nonviolent protest’— I hate that phrasing. Palestinian existence and survival all these years has been the highest form of protest.
Palestinians in Gaza decided to show up and march to the ‘border’ separating them from the rest of Occupied Palestine, they wanted to go back to their homes [which they were expelled from in 1948]. The emotion behind the idea was to go home, to enact the Right of Return, which is an individual, legal human right that Palestinians who have been displaced all have and cannot be negotiated away.
The footage that we saw — those of us who don’t live in Gaza — from those events was that there was a beautiful festive atmosphere, almost celebratory. People were dancing Dabke, families were bringing food… it was an end to this absurd waiting.
And it was met with, of course, horrific violence from the Israeli soldiers; their best snipers were trained on the Palestinian men, women, and children. A journalist by the name of Yaser Murtaja was shot and killed as well as a young nurse trainee, Razan Ashraf Abdul Qadir. Razan was killed while she tended to the wounded. Many people were killed, and these protests went on Friday after Friday after Friday for many, many months. So that poem came from that time and as a kind of tribute to the people of that moment and in that moment, and to who we all were in that moment, as an extended Palestinian community.
The texture of that time created the form of the poem: It was a repetition; those protests repeated every Friday despite unfathomable odds. It’s incredible to show up for the first one, it’s incredible to show up again and again knowing those snipers will be there. Repetition is a feature of the Palestinian experience — we’re locked in a series of repetitions not of our own making. Each of us has to develop a kind of relationship to that condition. I find that in my writing, there are various places where that shows up in form.
In poems I read that I admire where repetition is used well — so this is something that I aspire to in my own work — repetition can open up an idea or a concept and allow different facets of it to come up for a reader and allow a reader to inhabit different experiences that are available from the same word or the same idea. It can be a powerful illumination of Palestinian existence in space and time.
Fragments from a Sudden Crescendo was written in 2021 during settler attacks on Sheikh Jarrah and different Jerusalem neighborhoods culminating in the attack on the protesters at Al-Aqsa Mosque [or what we know as the Unity Intifada]. That “sudden crescendo” phrase comes from some absurd news report that I read where what was happening was described as a “sudden crescendo of violence.” Sometimes when an absurdity is presented, my way of engaging with it is to take it apart, to break it down, both as a refusal and as a way of exploring it. The tension between the repetitions in that poem and the larger claim — the idea that violence is sudden because Palestinians somehow respond to or resist violence that is constant in their lives — was a tension I wanted to explore in that poem.
I also am curious about the interjection of the seemingly mundane or ordinary into the catastrophic that emphasizes the catastrophe or makes the reader feel a sense of shock or displacement. Going back to Variations on a Last Chance, the line “The snipers are distracted, / sexting their girlfriends” referencing Israeli Occupation soldiers sticks out to me, as do the references in the next poem, Portraits of Light, to tea glasses or a yellowing newspaper. Can you speak to your choice to use elements of ordinary life in a poem that is ultimately about displacement?
The reality is that violence is a very ordinary feature of Palestinian life under extended Nakba, genocide, and Occupation. It is shocking and extreme to those of us who have some measure of distance from it, whether we are Palestinians who don’t live under its direct assault, whether it is just people who aren’t from Palestine or in any way connected to Palestine who are consuming images or videos or reports of what is happening to Palestinians. That’s one of the recurring themes of trying to write from within the Palestinian experience, trying to express how there is an unfathomable level of violence that is normalized in every aspect of life. In the poems that I find resonant and that have stayed with me over the years, poets make two motions — a ‘zoom in’ and a ‘pan out.’ There is a balance of being able to show scale by focusing very closely. Violence wants to shock and overwhelm. In addition to its destructive nature, violence is employed by the oppressor or colonizer to crush and overpower, but there is also a shock factor that aims to render you incapable of expressing yourself or comprehending or putting a structure around your experiences. How I have tried to navigate that — my own Palestinian experience — has been to look at all the things, to try to hold the very small and the scope at the same time.
Your poems make room for the legacy of inheritance, and language itself as inheritance like in Beit Anya. But also the legacy of memory and the convenience of forgetting, like in First Generation. I’m curious as to how you’ve balanced these two things in your work and how memory plays a role in your writing. I’m wondering about poetry reliant on familial or generational inheritance when we think about things like forgetting as a luxury.
I don’t know that I think of forgetting as a luxury, I think of it as catastrophic. There are millions of Palestinians who don’t live in Palestine, they live in refugee camps; they may live in refugee camps inside Palestine but not in their towns, cities, and villages of origin. There are also many Palestinians who live in the diaspora. So, they are uprooted from having their own lived experience of the place, the culture, and the language. For a people with a national liberation movement, memory is vital — collective memory, but also individual memory from families and parents. And the role that memory has to play in each of our lives is navigated through the personal circumstances of that life. Memory that becomes the literature of Ghassan Kanafani and the lexicon of Mahmoud Darwish roots us — those of us who could not grow up at home — in a culture and a history, and also creates a lexicon for us. You don’t survive attempts at annihilation without the central role of collective memory, and that’s true across cultures that have experienced similar devastation. But there has to be a way of navigating collective memory that doesn’t fetishize memory, and sometimes things need to be roughed up in poetry. That poem, First Generation, was a way of contending with what it means to live like that, how that feels and how that looks on the inside, and the ways in which it can fail. There’s the ideal of recounting memory but there are also the realities of the extreme expectation placed on that recounting and the memory brushing up against time because as generations go on, there is a loss that can’t be recovered. I was trying to think about that while I wrote in a way that doesn’t make it too precious.
Beit Anya is a poem that is more specifically interested in language. Beit Anya is one of the ancient names of my father’s village — our ancestral village, al-Eizariya (Bethany) — that I learned while I was researching. He told me a story — sometimes parents will do this, they’ll spring a story on you that you’ve never heard in your life before and it rocks your world — he told us a story when he was ill, and I went poking around. It raised some questions about the village and its history that I became intrigued by, so I went down some rabbit holes and learned that name, and I was struck by the name and how it sounded in my Arabic-speaking mind, and what it actually meant, and its lineage. The poem is really interested in language as lineage and as a site of belonging, and language as place. Part of my obsession with that concept of language comes from raising children in another culture. I would be considered a first-generation Arab American, but my Arabic is quite strong because I didn’t fully grow up in the United States. I am raising children who are now second-generation and so are further removed. The haunting of distance from language is very real in my life and is a feature of what I think about, but away from the tawdry, little ‘oh you must teach them Arabic’ and ‘they must speak Arabic’ — I’m not interested in those sorts of small, limited discussions. In the poems, I’m interested in the emotional landscape of what it means to have varying degrees of distance from language when language serves as a place as well.
I notice many of the poems use place as an anchor, and tether meaning to Palestine’s topography in many ways like in Dialogic or use America as a springboard to highlight the ironies of diaspora and of the neoliberalism of the West more generally like in This Day Our Daily Bread and Notes From the Civil Discourse Committee. I want to pick at this kind of third space you’ve written into existence between those two geographies that you refer to as “a new language for the past that blooms wild on our hillsides” or “a fresh old map” in Notes From the Civil Discourse Committee. The significance of the third space in postcolonial and anticolonial poetry is one that often serves as a place of refuge for those impacted or displaced by colonialism. Can you talk about what makes the new language you write about different from the old?
I hope it’s different. I was born in the U.S. but did not grow up here; I moved back [to the United States from Jordan] on the eve of the first Gulf War during the beginning of my junior year in high school, so I got to simultaneously be an Arab American but also have some version of an immigrant experience.
I had access to language, so I didn’t have that burden to navigate — I was fully bilingual — but I was not raised in this culture. I got to have those goggles that we can have when we move to a new place and see things through the lens of our own experience but also differently from how the people making the culture wish to be seen. The poem, Notes From the Civil Discourse Committee, is me contending with a language I am still trying to develop that is the product of a period of my adult life that was spent doing a lot of community organizing and activism, and engaging with electoral politics — which I do way less of now, very intentionally. Because for many of us who are raised in the Arab world and come here, the act of coming [to the United States] assumes a willingness to engage a set of systems that have no interest in us and in our survival, let alone our thriving. We are all on different curves of reckoning with that. I kept feeling like I was trying to adjust myself and my way of speaking, to become comprehensible, and I would get feedback that it was something I was ‘good at’ — but it’s a scam, you never get the results you want because the system isn't designed for you to survive, and certainly is not designed for you to thrive. And we all are on a different curve of learning the depths of that and how we want to position ourselves vis-à-vis that truth.
For me, that poem felt like a way to build a structure to explore what it felt like to be inside of this language that isn’t designed for me, that doesn’t fit me, that doesn’t belong to me,. I was trying to be intentional and playful with my punctuation to create a sense of enclosure and restriction to show the absurdity of what gets selected and what gets quoted, what gets pulled out, and what gets diminished.
That poem is what's called a crown of sonnets — a series of sonnets that trundle down as a line is repeated that connects them together. A sonnet is a form with its own legacy and history, with restrictions and problematics. You can think of a sonnet as a room or a containment. A lot of the work the poem is doing is trying to wrestle with how the language of the colonizer, which we all live inside of in this country, is trying to contain and bracket us, and punctuate [us] against our will, or disappear us. In some ways, it sits at the heart of the book. Readers ultimately decide what books are about, despite what the poet thinks, but for me, that's what the process of this book became about — really trying to think of how language disappears us and erases us — not just shapes us. The undertaking of the book is about the work that language can do to obfuscate, eliminate, and diminish, and the different ways in which we try to circumvent that or contend with it.
You write, “to translate is to believe there is a reader” in On Translation. I spoke with Fady Joudah about the idea of the Palestinian poet being pigeonholed into doing the work of the witness for a Western audience. We also spoke about how his audience is decided, in part, by the fact that his book was written in imperial English. Your collection interrogates the act of translation itself, like in Iconic and Sfumato, identifying the limitations of a language that is not your mother tongue but also etching out this longing for the memory of a place and the memory of a vocabulary that no longer exists in the way they used to, like in Long Distance. You even ask, “Who imagines this poem is for them?” With that in mind, what do you feel is the work of your book or the role that it serves to the audience, and who is your audience?
I appreciate you bringing your conversation with Fady Joudah into the frame because this book for me felt very pointedly against that posture. That is a trap and nothing good comes of it, and it throws you outside of your own culture, because what does that mean? To witness what you are going through? How am I witnessing it? That is a conception that is designed by a Western literary audience that has nothing to do with us. It doesn’t work for me anymore. There are moments in which we witness things, but that whole framing, I can’t engage with that.
The work was to try to map an emotional landscape of living in a culture that does not want you to be legible, that resists your existence. We are here and there is nowhere else to go, and this is the language I have. There are very serious efforts to write us out of the frame, but I wanted to map that emotional experience. I think of this as my Palestinian American book in a lot of ways, because that is an exploration worth doing.
There’s no specific statement or answer that I want to offer — I just think it’s an important landscape to explore and an important set of emotional experiences to capture, because I believe that our experiences are human and we’re part of the human story.
My grandfather was a poet and translator in Jordan, so it's not like I only have access to English through the United States. Arabs are some of the most educated people in the world and many of them are multilingual. It's not the specifics of just a mother tongue, it’s that there is an entire culture that the American empire has put in its crosshairs and that's the culture that I belong to. That emotional landscape is what the book wants to map, with its tiny experiences that can be as simple as crying in a courtyard in Rome when you encounter an apricot tree that sends you back to your childhood. And things that are much larger, geopolitical moments and events. All of that is part of the map of that experience.
In your book, you reference poets like Darwish, Said, and Kim — what poets or poetry do you return to as you write, even during a time like this?
I have found myself returning to reading Arabic poetry. That is what I long for the most. I have spent a lot of time rereading poets I admire. Darwish is a mainstay. Also, Amal Dunqul, he is most known for his poem, Do Not Reconcile. Abdel Rahman Al-Abnoudi — a lot of his poems are delivered orally. Fadwa Touqan is an important poet in my life, her body of work is not nearly translated enough into English. Growing up, I read a lot of work in translation, even when I lived in the Arab world, where reading across different geographies is not uncommon.
One of the joys of the last few years has been learning about the work of living Palestinian poets who are new to me such as Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Ahlam Bisharat, and Sheikha Hleiwa, as well as Zakaria Mohammad — a contemporary of Darwish, who passed away last summer. There is almost embarrassment to saying that, but that’s the reality of diaspora life — you have a patchy awareness of literary life.
I'm curating a yearlong subscription to Palestinian poetry books with Seattle's poetry-only bookstore, Open Books. Each month I choose a book by a Palestinian writer and write a flash essay about it. It is paired with a tatreez (embroidery) pattern bookmark designed by local artist Hala Saleh. So far, I've sent readers Mahmoud Darwish, Zaina Al-Sous, Fady Joudah, Olivia Elias, Nathalie Khankan, George Abraham, Deema Shehabi, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Huda Fakhreddine, and the anthology A Map of Absence.
I read broadly, and I read the work of my fellow living poets.
There is an incredible wealth of poetry available — there is a richness across American poetry. Another mainstay for me is the work of June Jordan, who has grown to become more important.
What would your advice be to young poets, especially Palestinian poets, who are struggling to write amid such horror, the genocide in Gaza?
I say this with love and deep empathy because I struggled to write this year: Reading is a form of writing. If you feel unable to write, it is your mind and body telling you something. Consider reading as deepening the well of resources, language, and image, as well as being in the community of poets who are writing now and who have come before you. Poetry is that great ancient conversation with which we are all engaged.
In the U.S. especially, there is a production machine mentality that is devastating to art which leads to poor work and leaves the artist feeling empty. You are not a machine, and sometimes knowing that can free you. There is time, there is no rush — the words will come. Let go of the production machine, the capitalist urgency that surrounds us all.
I’ve been enjoying curating and celebrating and being deeply with the work of Palestinian poets other than myself. That has been a lifeline for me. There have been a couple of places where I have done that this year. The journal Prairie Schooner did a focus on Palestine, and I had the privilege of curating that. Selecting a conversation among the poems was important and enriching to me in ways that felt a lot better than forcing writing I couldn't make happen. I also blurbed a chapbook by Ibrahim Nasrallah — I got to say what I thought Huda Fakhreddine was doing with translation. That is just as important as generating work.
I can’t subscribe to that idea of force. I hope that this is a permission and reminder that spending time with the words around you is just as important and will bring out your words when they are ready.
I also curated a series this year with Words Without Borders in the digital journal called “Against Silence” where we published various Palestinian writings, where a conversation in literature is happening by Palestinians and about Palestine.
