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Review by Brian Young
In all my books I go back to the memory of [Pshery], all the sources of my imagination come from there. Not from Beirut, Beirut was horrible to me, I’ve erased it from my memory. If I had lived only in Beirut I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to write even one line. Pshery [her mother’s village] is the place that opened the doors of imagination before me, the peasants, life in nature, the earth. In all my stories I describe very pleasant peasants, simple people, not rich people but people of nature.
—from a 1995 “Conversation”
(published in Jacket)
I offer you this quote in order to situate your self in Khoury-Ghata’s world. It is not pastoral, not mystical. It is circumscribed and essential and inescapably human: “Here is your prison the children said to me / drawing a circle / around my foot” (“The Cherry Tree’s Journey”).
Nettles, the third of Khoury-Ghata’s 16 volumes of poetry to be translated into English, resumes her obsessions—death and grief, language and history. Obsessions that connect, extend, complicate and widen the five sequences of this volume and unite them with her previous volumes arranged under the titles She Says and Here There Was Once a Country. (I use “arranged” decisively because Marilyn Hacker, whose tough, insistent translations continue to wonderfully serve the poems, nevertheless has selected the sequences from among Khoury-Ghata’s French texts to construct the volumes we have). The poems blend anti-lyric surrealism and stark narrative, a style that works best when allowed to sprawl out in sequences that less resolve than persist. Images circulate, cross borders, marry and live out their deaths in multiple homes. Characters, held mostly by pronouns (that sometimes shift), coexist with trees, the moon, with the road and wind—a myth-like, anthropomorphized landscape living alongside us in the myth-time of grief.
She has the voice of an ash tree in the wind
she is mother to seven daughters who go from her bread box to the apple tree’s toes
she married no one but was the widow of all the trees in the forest…
from a one-night stand with a thorn bush
she had a son
a real sunflower in daylight
—from “Interments”
Khoury-Ghata’s characters tend to be females who maintain their homes alone (a central construct in Khoury-Ghata’s poetics): “Four walls had the house Nina would repeat / four sides the box of matches / and four children minus the one who went to join the litter of kittens in the well” (The Cherry Tree’s Journey). The vitality and animal indifference of the natural world contrasts painfully with human life, which is absent and tenuous. And in a place where, death proves to be another form of coexistent life, it is reduced to objects or banished forever beyond the home:
Someone raps on her windowpane and signals her to follow
she realizes she is dead, which saddens her
in which direction should I go around my body she asks the coffee mill
in which pocket did I put my tears
in which orphanage shall I leave my bees
why does the frozen waterfall tug at my tongue
why am I no longer able to talk to my book
—from “Interments”
Here, language, however conflicted and multiple, has a primacy in life. It is the material essence of life from which we construct our origins, our somnambulating grief. It is how we “evict the sob crowded into [our] throat”: “she transforms words into objects / to touch them / dust them,” “only things that walk die / man brook smoke,” “Blackening pages till words exhaust themselves and this character emerges,” “erased countries and books have the same sorrow.”
Khoury-Ghata describes herself as a peasant, far too practical and in nature to hope for anything of her language beyond survival: “the housewife mends torn words / a craftsman rubs sentences together without producing the slightest spark / someone nostalgic would give his life for a trill.” She composes by the line but finds the next through rhythmic intensity, through the imaginative potential of the constructed image or dramatic situation.
bitter couch grass grows between my sheets
recalcitrant words go on down to the garden
I hoe
I prune
I weed
replant my dreams
morning finds me as exhausted as a field ploughed with a rusty harrow
dreams the only means of transportation to reach my mother who lives beneath
She said she was the mother of anyone who could draw a house
that she milked the moon for them
kept its milk in a female jug
far from the sun which had eaten her two windows
and belched up a shard on her doorstep
—from “Nettles”
Nettles contains five sequences, and while dominated by “Interments,” where characters endure a series of increasingly fantastic burials, the title sequence serves as the book’s nexus and is as unmasked and urgent a working presence as you’ll find in Khoury-Ghata’s poems. “The Cherry Tree’s Journey” tells a fable of a family variously surviving on shades and shadows: “The cherry tree said its farewells to us this morning / It’s leaving for America // where can we tie up the donkey now, asked the mother / to the shadow of its trunk, the father answered.” “The Sailors without a Ship” has the men returning, satisfying sexual needs, but the men are divided between land and sea and even pull away the “fatherless sons”: “they go away on the same wave.” “The Darkened Ones” adopts a “we” voice that could be the dead family members, the surviving characters, the displaced, starving survivors of war alluded to—a plural voice searching out something essential that resists: “the same furrow runs from field to womb with the same cold odor of silence / while their daughters who ride the mountain bareback smell the heavy stones and storms rolling on the slopes.” While there are obvious dramatic differences, I read the sequences as parts of a single poem, a single necessary world where grief strips us to the elements, earth and object, and our burden is to build the home where what endures can, with the dead, begin to live again.
In the “Afterword” of Khoury-Ghata’s moving, largely autobiographical novel, A House at the Edge of Tears, the only one of her 19 novels currently in English, she talks of her artistic origins:
I took over for my brother, condemned to thirty years’ imprisonment in an asylum, his memory erased by electroshock treatments. I wrote the poems he could no longer write, at first with his pen in his notebook.
—from A House at the Edge of Tears
I turn here because Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist who, since 1973, has been living in France and writing exclusively in French, so even if Nettles is her third selection of poems in English, biography still seems relevant to contextualize her concerns and work to a foreign audience. But the details of her life, only partially invoked above, could overshadow the poems. I say overshadow, but I mean blind. For in our blindness, we could narrow her poems, diminish them to a far more local, albeit intimate, space, and in so doing lose how, for Khoury-Ghata, a single death is the collective death. She is a daughter and a wife and a mother of war, an artist whose voice, borne from family tragedy and aged by the deaths of her distant home, “tries to understand where the earth begins / where grief ends,” whose art struggles forward from necessity and whose song resuscitates all the lost housing them in our imagination:
The word NETTLE brings me back to my starting point
I must go right to the end of the line
or begin another page
admit that nothing I’ve described here is true
that it’s impossible for an old woman, a dead one at that, to return on foot to a despised
city to unearth tears and poems
and pull up the nettles that mocked her when insomnia pulled her to window
from which she had a view of the bad side of night
And yet
I can believe in this dead woman’s journey with words
—from “Nettles”
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