In 2003, U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie, volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement, knelt between the home of Palestinian pharmacist Samir Nasrallah and an Israeli Defense Forces armored bull-dozer. The bulldozer did not stop. Despite appeals to U.S. officials and a suit brought by Corrie’s family in Israeli courts, her death generated no judicial, diplomatic, or policy consequence.
The International Solidarity Movement practiced the strategy of creating human shields—in which activists accompany and embed themselves among vulnerable populations, hoping the privilege afforded to them by their ‘first world’ national status will prevent conflicts from escalating into violence.
In 2010, my own daughter, who is the “you” addressed in these poems, was born in the United States, a citizen of Israel’s primary state partner.
To have children is to step into the rivers of genealogy, to ascertain various types of value, including the patrimonies of race, gender, class, and national status. Think of the actuary tables life insurance companies refer to in monetizing a dead child’s life. In what zip code did the child reside? Behind such questions linger others: What was the likelihood the child would be killed by bombs delivered firsthand or by proxy states of the United States, or would be shot by community vigilantes, police, or neighbors? What was their earning potential?
Was Rachel’s whiteness a powerful enough currency to stop a bulldozer?
And still, other questions arise: How to write as a father to a daughter in an address haunted and embraced by the women who brought us into being? How to imagine fatherhood as resistant to notions of ethnic citizenship, patrimony, and patriarchy? How to account for whatever heritage I might share with my daughter? How much is this heritage bicultural—blending my mother’s Syrian and my father’s Peruvian ancestries—and how much is migratory? How many times have these cultures and languages been displaced across generations who have been on the move, often by necessity and not by choice?
The following three poems are excerpted from a sequence of sonnets that explore such questions, by weaving stories of gendered family violence with figures, such as Rachel Corrie, who have entered the historical record by testing the limits of embodied value. I am less interested in rehearsing critiques of any one nation-state or of tracing the outlines of familiar systems of oppression. Instead, these poems contest the notion of ethical relationships across discreet subjects by exploring the ways selfhood itself is bound up with value and ownership.
At key moments, the syntax forms “ambiguous” verse lines where grammatically significant units may be read as predicates or subjects of the grammatical units that precede and follow. The idea is to create in language an experience of being multiple, not in the self-aggrandizing manner of Whitman and his descendants, but in the way that poet and scholar Fred Moten has termed, after Eduard Glissant, “consent not to be a single being.” This, to me, means a radically inter-subjective mode of being that foregoes discreet and singular subjectivity in favor of multiple possibilities—a field, blur, or array of being in a generative, various, and reaching arrangement.
Arguments about one’s relative values, about position and access, are the very definition of politics. Imagining level playing fields where people compete to increase their value, or to imagine an equal distribution of value, are strains of social justice. To reject all systems of value, that’s radical. To ask what comes next, or what was always underneath, maybe that’s art.
from For a Daughter/No Address
Reportless Subjects, to the Quick/Continual addressed—Emily Dickinson
like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back all wet tonight and bugs call up a swamp in this desert in my story my dad wrote all the wrong names for her on a brick that could lift through my mother’s window came the words arrayed in glass dusting San Martincito on her dresser cast in plastic with spaces in his robes a home for the hen the dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel saint still lining a thin easy silence around me come the scenes all down our street in someone’s car music each word lifted into its own space thumps in the moon’s heavy sleep breath there are extensions we can read what we said it’s such a simple print shop so mothers might tell us about what came to be more known a pear tree in the commons and really the words left idle beside if they could tell us about the forms if these came to lift them if we could ask sin miedo y sin piedad
wouldn’t they never say there was a time what hovers turns behind maybe two feet up from our scapulae a moon’s heavy heel in the water an Aleppo daughter in my line ordered from a bride book bringing the wrong language to the Andes her new step kids taking her first stillborn by the heel far from her Arabic taunting I’ve seen their pictures they were beautiful young people in those minutes did they feel in their mouths how there are spaces for the refusals having heard migrants carried cultures in their dough little strains of living stretching back to outleap our generations with their own collapsing days into what they’ve written for us socializing the mother function a daughter in your mother’s line grew to offer her Englishless milk to strange babies in a Newark tenement and once in the parking lot around an igneous intrusion we saw a daughter searching the asphalt and her father screaming “If you lost it I will destroy you” not unhinged but large stretching the wet outlines of his organs to chamber the particular grain of his voice’s promise and here goes my voice trying to fit opposite promises in relation for you would there be no address
if I try to tell it back to you what voice runs over gravel in the sentence taking shapes on the gravel in the sentence a dead girl given to the likeness of a depilated face made white enough or having hired hands to shape in their skill or having bred some not overwhelmingly disposable features having been raised in friends’ congregations in unaffected elegance taking a pledge of resistance to kneel with International Solidarity into the stamp of that human shield before someone else’s house besieged bearing shining hospitality we told you to give your money to the poor kneeling before a partner state’s bulldozer working
a little harder into contested ground happens to flay the white from Rachel Corrie’s body how do I mark the strata of attended things descended past where I let myself be buoyant wanting nothing more just than to be traded it’s not the dusted hurt already layered on what Trojan baby girl would bear me out of the future pre-Rome but wanting a fraying of the lines ridden by a claim to life as a condition so we could play only means in my hands those lines extend it’s no better wanting it in a doting way
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Farid Matuk
Farid Matuk, born in Lima, Peru, to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, has lived in the United States since he was six as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a patriated citizen. His second full-length collection, The Real Horse, is forthcoming for the University of Arizona Press. The recipient of Ford and Fulbright fellowships, Matuk received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.