I accidentally came across Fady Joudah one day and have remembered his work ever since. It intrigued me that he\u2019s 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, \u201cThe Mind in State<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cDoes consciousness exist only when \/ you name it? Was the double helix a \/ stranger, the nucleus the first brain? \/ I feel therefore I am.\u201d<\/p>\n Joudah is always offering questions, holding them up to the light. I\u2019ve read his poems over and over, gathering new meanings like gathering fruit from trees. I never get bored. I am always pausing to think.<\/p>\n Fady Joudah\u2019s sixth poetry book \u201c[…]<\/a>\u201d (2024) \u2014 also referred to as “Ellipsis” and “[…]: Poems” \u2014 hits a different nerve, though. As a finalist for the National Book Award<\/a> and a winner of the Jackson Poetry Award<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “[…]” 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and prose poems<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The following is a limited list of similar authors and their collections, some of which have been translated by Fady Joudah himself:<\/p>\n At The Rauch Review<\/a>, we care deeply about being transparent and earning your trust. These articles explain why and how we created our unique methodology for reviewing books and other storytelling mediums.<\/p>\n<\/div> 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\u2019re taught by our capitalistic societies, like from this poem, \u201cI Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen did the new war begin?<\/p>\n Whoever gets to write it most The new war has been coming for a long time. Coming to a body near me, and going on my body.\u201d<\/p>\n The word \u201cbody\u201d here can be land, or it can be a body of a loved one. \u201cWhoever gets to write it most \/ gets to erase it best\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Joudah\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n From \u201cI Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cThe love I wanted to be, I wanted to be The language I wanted to be, I will be The life I wanted to live Love, life and language play with each other in these lines. As Joudah says in the collection, they are \u201cmusical chairs.\u201d Joudah references silence as being just as important as language (\u201cThe language I wanted to be, I will be after I\u2019m done talking\u201d). Love, on the other hand, is a question Joudah no longer wants to yearn for. And Joudah yearns to live life without limitations \u2014 one life filled with possibilities and not one possibility (\u201cas one and not only\u201d). Though not a theme, \u201cyearning\u201d comes to mind a lot while I read these.<\/p>\n In the piece after, \u201cMaqam for a Green Silence,\u201d Joudah is a doctor who doesn\u2019t want to let go of his patient, a 93-year-old woman in her hospital bed. She asks him, \u201cCome here, what are you afraid of?\u201d 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, \u201cThis is the mother of all questions\u201d \u2013 playing on the word \u201cmother\u201d. \u201cMaqams\u201d 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\u2019s a genre of storytelling. In this way, Joudah\u2019s lines may not only be a song, they can be en route to God.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s impossible to talk about war without talking about death. It\u2019s impossible to talk about life and love without talking about death.<\/p>\n In \u201cBarzakh,\u201d Joudah writes, \u201cGenerously you dance \/ so that love is fair. \/ Alone you sing \/ as though no one listening would dare.\u201d And then: \u201cThe sea \/ we swam in \/ and the sea we\u2019re yet to \/ transfigure.\u201d Here he seems to be speaking to someone he loves (the \u201cyou\u201d), maybe a lover. \u201cTransfigure\u201d feels like an opening\u2013the 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.<\/p>\n For Muslims, \u201cBarzakh\u201d is a waiting place between death and the Day of Judgement. It\u2019s like the \u201cafterlife waiting spot\u201d until you get to meet God and see where you go: Heaven or Hell.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cbarrier\u201d or \u201cpartition,\u201d not allowing either side to mix.<\/p>\n The name of \u201cbarzakh\u201d 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\u2019s also meant to guard a woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t be able to endure life. Sometimes we are standing on the edge of it, like in the end of \u201cBarzakh\u201d: \u201cThe sea \/ we swam in \/ and the sea we\u2019re yet to \/ transfigure.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s poem plays \u201cFisherman\u201d as a boy, a game where you knock the other team\u2019s pyramid of soda cans. In the next section, Joudah writes: \u201cAmerica, where those who pass, \/ pass through the needle\u2019s eye, \/ and on the other side \/ my son asks \/ if I am a product \/ of her dream.\u201d<\/p>\n On the page, Joudah uses metaphors, repetitions and rhythm. At times his words sound like lyrics (especially when \u201cmaqam\u201d is in the title, literally meaning a melody type).<\/p>\n In his second poem in the collection, titled […], Joudah writes:<\/p>\n \u201cDaily you wake up to the killing of your people, their tongue accented in your mother\u2019s milk<\/p>\n Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you? Censored, the news. Shadow banned. McCarthyed.\u201d<\/p>\n The word \u201cdaily\u201d 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 \u201cyour\u201d to \u201cmy\u201d makes the poem feel like a conversation.<\/p>\n A few lines down Joudah writes, \u201cI am removing me from the we of you.\u201d 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 \u201ccensor,\u201d \u201cshadowban\u201d and \u201cMcCarthy\u201d.<\/p>\n In this way, Joudah approaches heavy themes with creative language. Like the theme of death. He writes, \u201cThey love you more when you\u2019re dead. \/ You\u2019re more alive to them dead.\u201d In the same poem: \u201cFrom time to time, language dies. \/ It is dying now. \/ Who is alive to speak it?\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cYou\u2019re more alive to them dead\u201d signals how the value of indigenous people is seen more so in their death. Capitalist societies thrive on destruction because that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> with Electric Literature, Joudah spoke about the title that is an ellipsis: […]. He said: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n There is space in this collection for silence. Joudah even references in his poems that silence is just as important as language (\u201cThe language I wanted to be, I will be after I\u2019m done talking\u201d). 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\u2019t demean Palestinians or use them for the gain of others.<\/p>\n Joudah\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cRifqa.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The last poem, \u201cSunbird,\u201d is the only poem of Part V. It is a minimalistic poem. It is short and full of images. \u201cI flit \/ from gleaming river \/ to glistening seat,\u201d Joudah writes. And he ends the poem, and consequently the book, \u201cI be: \/ from the river \/ to the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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\u2019re left with: \u201cI be: \/ from the river \/ to the sea.\u201d A reference to Palestine. Returning to Palestine, not in genocide, and returning to ourselves.<\/p>\n I find new meanings in the words every time I read this collection. Joudah\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Readers may be perplexed with some of the language in this collection because of Joudah\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n As a Palestinian-American poet, physician and translator of Arabic poetry, Joudah has an intimate look into Palestinian life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":6048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[70,63],"class_list":["post-6041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-palestine","tag-poetry-book-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\nBrief Summary: 28 Poems About Palestinian Existence<\/h2>\n
Books Like ‘[…]’<\/h3>\n
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\n\u201cThe Tiny Journalist\u201d and \u201cTransfer\u201d by Naomi Shihab Nye<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
Audience and Genre: Anyone, Excluding Zionists<\/h2>\n
\ngets to erase it best.<\/p>\n
\nThe old war has been going for a long time.<\/p>\nThemes: The Visible, Invisible and Transcendence<\/h2>\n
\nthe questions my heart no longer asks.<\/p>\n
\nafter I\u2019m done talking.<\/p>\n
\nas one and not only.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe theme of death and transcendence is threaded within all of Joudah\u2019s poems. He is unafraid to explore spiritual meanings.<\/p>\nPoetry Form: Joudah\u2019s Skillful Storytelling<\/h2>\n
Repeated Sound Devices: Playing With Language in a Way That Evokes Song Lyrics<\/h2>\n
Exterior Visuals: Simple Palestine Colors<\/h2>\n
Order and Cohesion: Order Representing Space and Silence<\/h2>\n
Personal Opinion and Conclusion: I Have Paused in the Silence<\/h2>\n
Buying and Rental Options<\/h2>\n
E-Commerce Text and Audio Purchases<\/h3>\n
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