‘[…]’ Poetry Book Review: Fady Joudah on Palestinian Existence

I accidentally came across Fady Joudah one day and have remembered his work ever since. It intrigued me that he’s a physician. I noticed a thoroughness and deep reflection in his writing, like a doctor examining each line. He also plays with words and meanings in his poems, the sentences twisting and turning, like in the poem, “The Mind in State”:

“Does consciousness exist only when / you name it? Was the double helix a / stranger, the nucleus the first brain? / I feel therefore I am.”

Joudah is always offering questions, holding them up to the light. I’ve read his poems over and over, gathering new meanings like gathering fruit from trees. I never get bored. I am always pausing to think.

Fady Joudah’s sixth poetry book “[…]” (2024) — also referred to as “Ellipsis” and “[…]: Poems” — hits a different nerve, though. As a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Jackson Poetry Award, this collection further explores the endurance and resilience of the Palestinian people. During another tumultuous time in Palestinian history, one can only lean into his poetry, because every line seems to unfold in front of us as reality does.

As a Palestinian-American poet, physician and translator of Arabic poetry, Joudah has an intimate look into Palestinian life. These poems explore human emotions, including sadness, love and joy in small moments amidst chaos, showing us that humanness exists even when everything around is conflict, uncertainty and death.

Brief Summary: 28 Poems About Palestinian Existence

“[…]” is a poetry collection titled with an ellipsis to represent erasure and silence. Because it is a collection on the Palestinian people and the constant targeting of their elimination, ellipsis holds silence for a people who have endured the unthinkable.

Published by Milkweed Editions, the collection contains approximately 28 poems that span almost 100 pages. As a physician and poet, Joudah skillfully uses free verse and prose poems to meditate on the themes of death, love, life, language and transcendence. His skillful storytelling keeps readers invested and reflective on Palestine and what this means for all of us.

Books Like ‘[…]’

The following is a limited list of similar authors and their collections, some of which have been translated by Fady Joudah himself:

• “Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me” by Ghassan Zaqtan
• “If I Were Another” by Mahmoud Darwish
• “Birthright” by George Abraham
• “Rifqa” (see our book review here) by Mohammed El-Kurd
• “DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.” by Noor Hindi
• “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” by Mosab Abu Toha
• “Something About Living” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
  “The Tiny Journalist” and “Transfer” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Audience and Genre: Anyone, Excluding Zionists

Joudah’s skillful language might be intimidating for some readers. Nonetheless, I encourage everyone to invest in this book. Many of the poems beg reflection on what we’re taught by our capitalistic societies, like from this poem, “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams”:

“When did the new war begin?

Whoever gets to write it most
gets to erase it best.

The new war has been coming for a long time.
The old war has been going for a long time.

Coming to a body near me, and going on my body.”

The word “body” here can be land, or it can be a body of a loved one. “Whoever gets to write it most / gets to erase it best” references white capitalism and its tendency to dictate the narrative of the world, while the truth is often hidden. This method is how history often has been written. The realities of colonization and suffering are swept under the rug and revealed much later. The success of empires sit on the backs of colonized people, like the Palestinian people, and suffering is capitalized.

Themes: The Visible, Invisible and Transcendence

Joudah’s poems explore the themes of life, love and language. With his strategic and emotional ways of including line breaks, Joudah builds tension. Readers hold onto every line:

From “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams”:

“The love I wanted to be, I wanted to be
the questions my heart no longer asks.

The language I wanted to be, I will be
after I’m done talking.

The life I wanted to live
as one and not only.”

Love, life and language play with each other in these lines. As Joudah says in the collection, they are “musical chairs.” Joudah references silence as being just as important as language (“The language I wanted to be, I will be after I’m done talking”). Love, on the other hand, is a question Joudah no longer wants to yearn for. And Joudah yearns to live life without limitations — one life filled with possibilities and not one possibility (“as one and not only”). Though not a theme, “yearning” comes to mind a lot while I read these.

In the piece after, “Maqam for a Green Silence,” Joudah is a doctor who doesn’t want to let go of his patient, a 93-year-old woman in her hospital bed. She asks him, “Come here, what are you afraid of?” In the following prose-styled piece, Joudah asks mothers what their biggest fear is, and the mothers reply that outliving their children is their biggest fear. When he asks the father, the father says, “This is the mother of all questions” – playing on the word “mother”.
The theme of death and transcendence is threaded within all of Joudah’s poems. He is unafraid to explore spiritual meanings.

“Maqams” actually have multiple meanings in Arabic, depending on the context. Maqams can mean a spiritual rank on your way to God. It can mean a tomb when referencing a prophet or saint. It can mean a melodic tune or in Arabic it’s a genre of storytelling. In this way, Joudah’s lines may not only be a song, they can be en route to God.

This meditation over death is done so smoothly, you have to pause and think to notice. Often I think death in poetry has to be handled well for the reader to feel they are able to consume it. It’s impossible to talk about war without talking about death. It’s impossible to talk about life and love without talking about death.

In “Barzakh,” Joudah writes, “Generously you dance / so that love is fair. / Alone you sing / as though no one listening would dare.” And then: “The sea / we swam in / and the sea we’re yet to / transfigure.” Here he seems to be speaking to someone he loves (the “you”), maybe a lover. “Transfigure” feels like an opening–the word itself means transforming into something beautiful. I read it as the narrator completing the next phase of life in peace. It can also be read as entering the afterlife.

For Muslims, “Barzakh” is a waiting place between death and the Day of Judgement. It’s like the “afterlife waiting spot” until you get to meet God and see where you go: Heaven or Hell.

Barzakh can also mean a bridge between the material world and spiritual life in Sufism, between two realities, the visible and invisible. It can also mean “barrier” or “partition,” not allowing either side to mix.

The name of “barzakh” also brought on another word for me: hijab, which means a barrier. A hijab is often used for a Muslim woman to protect her physical body from the eyes of others, but it’s also meant to guard a woman’s spiritual inner life with the outside world so that she is in constant peace, the invisible from the visible. In this manner, the invisible life is rest. Visible life is chaotic.

The visible and invisible here begs readers to reflect on the idea that those closest to death are more acquainted with the invisible, the afterlife and transcendence. They have to see past life because life is flawed. To survive the visible, we have to reach for the invisible, or else we won’t be able to endure life. Sometimes we are standing on the edge of it, like in the end of “Barzakh”: “The sea / we swam in / and the sea we’re yet to / transfigure.”

Poetry Form: Joudah’s Skillful Storytelling

Joudah is often telling a story through his poetry. Many of his free verse, prose, and narrative poems carry more weight because of what we learn about the characters. In one of his poems, the narrator in Joudah’s poem plays “Fisherman” as a boy, a game where you knock the other team’s pyramid of soda cans. In the next section, Joudah writes: “America, where those who pass, / pass through the needle’s eye, / and on the other side / my son asks / if I am a product / of her dream.”

Repeated Sound Devices: Playing With Language in a Way That Evokes Song Lyrics

On the page, Joudah uses metaphors, repetitions and rhythm. At times his words sound like lyrics (especially when “maqam” is in the title, literally meaning a melody type).

In his second poem in the collection, titled […], Joudah writes:

“Daily you wake up to the killing of your people, their tongue accented in your mother’s milk

Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you? Censored, the news. Shadow banned. McCarthyed.”

The word “daily” is repeated. Every line feels like a new day, a constant burden. It also creates a rhythm and skeleton to which the following lines collect against. The switch from the pronoun “your” to “my” makes the poem feel like a conversation.

A few lines down Joudah writes, “I am removing me from the we of you.” This diction brings back the image of bodies, which Joudah uses as many meanings, and the idea that we could separate ourselves from people who insist on deluding us. The people who “censor,” “shadowban” and “McCarthy”.

In this way, Joudah approaches heavy themes with creative language. Like the theme of death. He writes, “They love you more when you’re dead. / You’re more alive to them dead.” In the same poem: “From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?”

Humans die and language with them dies. To live is to continue speaking the language, carrying on more life, legacy. Also these lines focus on value. “You’re more alive to them dead” signals how the value of indigenous people is seen more so in their death. Capitalist societies thrive on destruction because that’s where the money is. But also language holds value. The ones who are still alive to speak it are ahead, because they are here to tell the truth, to fight back against false narratives.

Exterior Visuals: Simple Palestine Colors

The front page of this collection is minimalistic. It uses the colors of the Palestinian flag: green, black, white, red. Half of the cover is black, representing grief, death, hardship. The other half is green. In an interview with Electric Literature, Joudah spoke about the title that is an ellipsis: […]. He said: “I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence.”

There is space in this collection for silence. Joudah even references in his poems that silence is just as important as language (“The language I wanted to be, I will be after I’m done talking”). Holding silence for Palestinian voices (which he imagines the ellipsis to represent, he says in the interview) is important because activists often talk over Palestinian voices or use Palestinian voices in their own way. I believe respecting Palestinian lives means allowing Palestinians to talk because they are more than their grief and genocide. Mohammed El Kurd, a journalist and poet who has advocated on several platforms, often speaks about approaching the Palestinian narrative in a way that doesn’t demean Palestinians or use them for the gain of others.

Order and Cohesion: Order Representing Space and Silence

Joudah’s poetry collection is separated into five parts. I often find that writers will separate their works into four or five parts, like Mohammed El Kurd’s “Rifqa.” When I look at all the poem titles, I find that most of the poems are in the first part of the book (I). As we get to the other sections, the poems start to decrease in quantity, more so increasing in length. Otherwise, Joudah begins to use the space on the page. As I read, I become more reflective, more silent. As a reader, I honor Palestinian voices and I have time to meditate.

The last poem, “Sunbird,” is the only poem of Part V. It is a minimalistic poem. It is short and full of images. “I flit / from gleaming river / to glistening seat,” Joudah writes. And he ends the poem, and consequently the book, “I be: / from the river / to the sea.”

I don’t see the order of poems as a way of telling a story in order, but rather a way of speaking ourselves into silence. To me, it seems Joudah bleeds onto the pages all at the beginning, says all there is to say, and decreases in words until we’re left with: “I be: / from the river / to the sea.” A reference to Palestine. Returning to Palestine, not in genocide, and returning to ourselves.

Personal Opinion and Conclusion: I Have Paused in the Silence

I find new meanings in the words every time I read this collection. Joudah’s language feels intimate and heartbreaking, while at the same time like music. I feel both enchanted and changed. After every line, I take a moment of silence.

Readers may be perplexed with some of the language in this collection because of Joudah’s skill, but the imagery and messages make it a captivating read. I believe this collection has to be experienced firsthand and read many times, not just once. Readers will find endless meanings with each line, as I did, and have a moment of reflection.

Buying and Rental Options

E-Commerce Text and Audio Purchases

• Amazon
• Milkweed Editions
• Google Play
• Everand