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The Earth in the Attic - Poems by Fady Joudah


We (and by "we" I mean "me") love the saying "All poetry is political," but for Joudah, a Palestinian-American and a member of Doctors Without Borders, that notion pervades his manuscript as an ocean keeping the many boats of verse afloat. This is not to categorize Joudah's work as strictly political or bland rhetoric, but rather to suggest that for some, their lives and inseparable from their artistic self, their being always a part of their object.

From the first stanza, the depth of Joudah's experience hits us as a sudden rain storm, and we are some of us ill-dressed. Joudah strings the image of wheat reaching into the sky with a helicopter crashing to Earth. In his poetry, Joudah combines the best of western Modernism (H.D.'s Imagism, Eliot's scope and Zukofsky's lyric) with the great Arabic tradition of Darwish and Youssef.

Joudah's poetry is powerful for its scope, but builds that scope with a small and focused lens - a landscape photo built of a thousand polaroids. He captures those smaller moments - people in markets, camel traders, day laborers, a boy gathering water in a bucket. The everyday tragedy of a people suffering in the oppressive throes of the last great colonial war then paired with a western eye. It is startling how Joudah switches between the two, blends them so skillfully. He tells a parable of ants leaving their shelters after the earth has been bombed with rain, before painting a portrait of a child whose skin is "like spandex on the bone" and whose father has been killed. Amazingly, the facts of that death are unimportant in a scenescape where hunger, rape and violent deaths are a constant hum, a dust that seems ever present on the skin.

Joudah's poetry is a poetry of people, but a poetry from a physician's eye. The people in his work becoming more alive somehow when viewed with his diagnostic, unemotional eye. A bus-load of dead children, a girl dying of malnutrition, and Joudah's own father passing through an airport. The objects stand for themselves within his poetic gaze. Joudah's line follows this, recalls Creeley and Oppen as a bass stutter that flows one line into the next as a back beat, a wave ebbing and flowing on his ocean elevating the boats of verse.

His poems are drawn from life, organic you might say, from sand and pain and blood. Unfiltered in an affected journalism, there are moments when we flinch, moments we turn away from the image, from the reality in the verse. Morning coffee is finished before a pig is bled to death. The goats, we learn, are later bled in a different fashion.

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