Siwar Masannat’s poetry encounters Arab lands and beyond

Credit: Courtesy of University of Georgia Press

Credit: Courtesy of University of Georgia Press

“cue” challenges its reader, even one with broad knowledge of history, culture and poetry, but in the most meaningful of ways. In blending high intellect with commonalities of daily life — there are erasure poems using pages from “Classifying” by theorist Michel Foucault, as well as at least a dozen segments involving chickens — Masannat shows us that being human is a jarring mix of global concerns and individual lives, the claiming and denying of self and, ultimately, just a moment in time and space.

Masannat’s inspiration for the first sequence in “cue,” lies in a collection of photographs taken in Saida, Lebanon, in the mid-20th century by Hashem El Madani, pulled from the rubble of El Madani’s bombed-out studio by artist Akram Zaatari. These images and this place hold layers of significance: The photos capture citizens with untold stories living in a city that is “in an outsider region to Lebanon’s national discourse by virtue of Saida’s historical relation to Palestine,” Masannat tells us. During the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians, many refugees were resettled in the Saida area; even today, many residents of the area claim Palestinian identity.

She brings these human beings out of the black-and-white images and into her readers’ minds. We encounter a family, a few individuals, but most of all, couples, whose stories Masannat seeks to re-imagine for those of us distanced in time and space from their source.

It may surprise readers encountering the photo reprints in the book to see not heterosexual couples but those of the same sex. There’s a photo of two men, one dressed in bridal garb, leaning close to one another in unexpected intimacy. On another page, two women dance and seem about to kiss. This, too, is disavowal for the sake of another: In that place and time, opposite-sex couples could not show affection in public, so, to make art with respect to that taboo, El Madani and his subjects had to set aside notions of gender and its preset roles. This is, as Masannat explains in her preface, queer.

Masannat seamlessly blends past with present, self with image. In one segment written about and including the image of the male bride and groom mid-page, the disguise slips: “whereas asmar here is the true melancholy center of the photograph,” she writes, “najm’s soft lean into him is as tender as i recollect your hands: gentle, warm — generous on my knee.” Artifacts, too, cross the boundaries of space and time, as Masannat moves from the “effeminate tailor” with “that hairdo your checkered shirts” to her great-grandmother’s hand-crocheted lace, “asymmetrically diamond shaped and round edged,” as it traveled place and time “from safita to madaba to amman.” The poems, like artifacts, serve to transmit history, humanity and cultural knowledge to readers.

Credit: Courtesy of University of Georgia Press

Credit: Courtesy of University of Georgia Press

In these pages, Masannat engages with a variety of Arab writings by authors past and present: El-Ariss, the late Lebanese poet Etel Adnan (including her epic work “The Arab Apocalypse”), Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail, medieval philosopher-poet Ibn ʿArabī and the medieval Egyptian historian Al-Nuwayrī. While never slipping out of poetry into lecture mode, Masannat nonetheless invites us into the conversation held on Arab identity and culture by these writers. We learn the tale of crow and cockerel from Al-Nuwayrī and Adnan’s thoughts on the emerging value of images. We also get a peek into the private spaces, invited into “a narrow entrance to a group of houses” with “garden: lemon, olive, palms: orchard,/field” and “lush garden she later grew inside/the small, enclosed apartment balcony.” Through these details, we glimpse the influence of an environment both like and unlike our own.

The book’s second shorter sequence, “plan(e)t,” leaves gender and human presence behind in favor of biology and geopolitics. The pairing of individual human stories in “cue” with the broader issues in “plan(e)t” seems to reflect how Jordan and Lebanon sit among lands with some of the earliest written history in the world but also long-standing conflict. Borrowing language from an article in an academic journal on the subject of evolutionary biology, fragments such as “a boundary always has a double function” and “a simultaneous separation from and exchange//with the environment could be as death-ridden as a cut flower” point toward the shifting of national boundaries in her home region that has contributed to danger, displacement and, sometimes, death.

This creates a sobering echo with an earlier fragment, also holding multiple reading possibilities:

“how do i go with or despite a paper born of a false boundary’s shameless penury?”

Which boundary does she speak of — a geographic division? A limit set on identity? What makes it false? Paper, too, puts us in mind of the documents that move us through life, from birth certificate to passport. Identity cards and regulated movement — Masannat’s so-called “double function” of keeping beings in and out. Yet she pays equal attention to the features that unite people, particularly those bound by shared ethnicity: “as i say wolf you must/know that means kin, i will carry you.” Biology becomes metaphor; the systems of the body are a microcosm of the workings of our world. At all levels, human existence is complicated — for some more so than others, as “cue” reminds us in the end.

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Jocelyn Heath is an associate professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, “In the Cosmic Fugue,” was published by Kelsay Books. She is an assistant editor for Smartish Pace. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Sinister Wisdom,Lambda Literary, Entropy and elsewhere.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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