For Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, There Must Be Poetry in a Time of Genocide

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an inventive and prolific poet, essayist, and translator. The author of three poetry collections, she has also curated poetry for The Baffler’s Poems from Palestine, Words Without Borders’s Against Silence, and Open Books’s book subscription. In 2020, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that “Lena Khalaf Tuffaha gazes straight on. She doesn’t turn her head.”

Her latest volume, the National Book Award winner Something About Living, is full of impossible cohesions, offering this straight-on singularity of body and mind to birds, grammars, and architectures. Khalaf Tuffaha summons beloveds like Myung Mi Kim, Zakaria Mohammed, and Mahmoud Darwish into her wild mind and language, including the title, drawn from her poem “Letter to June Jordan in September.” As playful as it is piercing, this book does not mistake wreckage with its narration.

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Cindy Juyoung Ok: We is a start and a center of your work. In a poem of the first person plural, “On the Thirteen Friday We Consider Plurals,” you wrote “Let the plural be / a return of us.” The right of return applies to language, too. And in this line break there is also a pause with that suspended meaning: let the plural, let togetherness, let the sense of a people, let we—be. We can be Palestinians, and the children of refugees: elsewhere, what makes the we in common is language, is naming: “our city gates are named for animals” and “we named our own sea dead.” The book’s first poem is 20 one-line stanzas; eight start with “the snipers” and three with “the bullets” but it ends on two “we” statements, first person plural: “We outrun the snipers. // We bury the dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home.” The snipers and their bullets have killed them dead, the people whose roots carry on, but the we continues on—those still alive who outrun. How do you conceive of this shifting use of “we” in poems and in life—that even when it shrinks, the we is not diminished?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Although the poems in the book were written years before the genocide, I’ve come to understand the “we” of the poems as a tether to the larger world—one in which Palestinians in Palestine and in diaspora are legible. And to a collective—of parents and grandparents and ancestors and olive groves and hillsides that endured and perished or endured and survived and passed on their memories and practices and language to me, to us.

For the past seventeen months, I’ve often found myself thinking, and I have begun to say, “I feel like I’ve fallen outside of the world.” It’s my attempt to express what it’s like to be in the US—to be in the West—to be in American English, as this genocide rages on. It’s imprecise because the US is not the world. It is only one part of the world and it unjustly determines how the lives of many millions of people unfold. Like every Palestinian I know, I am shattered by the daily decisions of “business as usual” while the livestreamed genocide is simultaneously funded by the US and consent is manufactured for it in every American institution of note. The “world” in which I reside and have had to make my own life is pointing its weapons at my existence. This world—its institutions and cultural spaces—expect everyone to just “keep it moving.”

One strategy for survival might be developing a richer relationship to language and to time, time that does not end at death and does not begin on the date of the colonizer’s choosing.

CJO: In the rich density, fragmentation is another facet of your poems: syllables falter, sentences break, letters drop, the cry punctures, the writing of a poem makes the heart irregular and stories get upended and autocorrect generates love. Any line, any poem, can only be made of shards and grains. Such an unstable understanding of writing finds that in one poem, “All language” is… “littered with corpses” “volition” “legend” “oracular.” In its refusal of resolution, how does poetry prove or remedy the limits of words?

LTK: I don’t know if poetry succeeds at proving or even remedying the limits of words, but I’m drawn to that challenge. I feel like poetry provides an honest space to make and remake with the shards and fragments available. Poetry feels vital to me in ways that other writing often falls short. The nature of the genre—its possibilities of and tensions between spare lines and long unwieldy ones on a page, of line breaks that can conceal or complicate and layer meaning, of forms that can contain and can break, and the lineage of breath, communal expression, of spiritual practice, of earliest music. All of this feels like good space and materials for contending with questions of survival and of power and of loss.

CJO: Your poem “Erosion” grays out and erodes the phrase “No one belongs here more than you do” all the way to “No,” while “Golden” starts with “say” and continues anaphorically: “Say we don’t trend…Say we were unremarkable.” Both deal with tourism and both use repetition, which is the call of all advertisements of empire. In math a recursive function or method calls itself and is not just iterative and repetitive; the part requires the whole. As the recursiveness of genocide depends on travel and tourism, how do your poems use recursion against the autocratic gaze?

LTK: The poem “Triptych” at the heart of the book troubles the line “no one belongs here more than you do.” I first encountered this line as an advertising slogan in a Conde Nast magazine in 1998. It was a multi-page glossy spread that, in my recollection, included the image of a couple looking over what was recognizable to me as a valley in the occupied West Bank. I’ve tried for years to write into what it felt like to encounter this scene as a Palestinian, to read this invitation from the Israeli ministry of tourism to American consumers.

I’ve tried to write about who the advertisers imagine to be their audience, and what that reveals about their own self-perception. About the invisibility of Palestinians and indigenous peoples in this culture that makes such an invitation, with all its implicit lies and violence, unremarkable. In my own poems, I have found that repetition can open up a space to consider absence. It can call attention to what is absent or what is being absented. It can create a visual representation within a written text. It can gaze back at the reader.

CJO: Something About Living complicates translation and its potential to be a colonizing force. With a multilingual poetic life, how do you reconcile, or accept, translation as a place of settlement for some and its practice as a generative and freeing art?

LTK: Translation is an intimacy—and it rests on the belief that a reader longs for a rendering of the experience of a text in their own language, that a reader wants access to the world of that text. For the art to be generative and freeing as you describe it, I return to the words of a translator I admire greatly, Huda Fakhreddine, who describes the necessity of translating Palestinian poetry “with integrity, and not in response to outside imposed imperatives.”

CJO: Like Huda, your book dismisses liberalism in concise and sometimes hilarious ways like “you should shelter in place / while every vote counts.” Is there liberation in absurdity’s sentience?

LTK: I suppose it is important to begin with the clarity that with each of my books I have cared less and less about what is asked of Palestinians by readers. I work hard at maintaining and deepening this freedom. The poem “This Daily Our Daily Bread,” from which the quote in your question originates, is composed of strands of American expressions and phrases in which the contrast between reality and the language used to describe it becomes absurd. Poetry is a practice of attention, and of deep listening, and I think listening for the absurd and the ways in which it develops can offer a relief from being subjected to it. It can also offer a way to break free of its stranglehold.

In these poems, I engage with language by offering a reader shifts in perspective: here’s how it looks from where I stand, here’s how it feels to receive this, here’s how it sounds to someone who isn’t mired in the mythology, here’s how I look standing in front of the mirror saying this nonsense, here’s how it disfigures. Here’s what it erases, here’s the imprint it leaves when I lift it up off my body, here’s what was buried underneath. I try to remove all the extraneous, normalizing gestures and to reckon with the questions that are left.

CJO: Publications have tried to remove “genocide” from your public vocabulary while asking you to press and parade. Palestinian writers can be asked to be exploited and to “represent” in a way uniquely violent: solicited for a both sides cause, asked to pose for normalization. How do the insidious forms of censorship, their anticipation and reiteration, affect your mind and its ironies?

LTK: I think that confronting all that imperial culture embeds in each of us is a lifelong project. First and foremost, we are targeted by fear: of scarcity, of alienation, of violence, of loss. There’s no way to move forward without acknowledging that. But the antidote to fear is the collective—the “we.” We are constantly asked to quietly step around the dead bodies in plane sight. We can get together and decide not to.

I’ve had these lines of June Jordan’s in my mind over the past many months, from her “Poem to A Young Poet”:

I search a face
for obstacles to genocide
I search beyond the dead
and
driven by imperfect visions of the living
yes and no
I come and go
back to the eyes
of anyone
who talks to me.