Tablets: Secrets of the Clay

Dunya Mikhail’s Tablets: Secrets of the Clay is inspired by proto-cuneiform, a system of proto-writing on clay tablets that emerged in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) circa 3500 BCE. The book consists of 10 Tablets (chapters), each with 24 poems composed of drawings with Arabic writing, and a corresponding English poem.

The image in poem I of Tablets V has the quality of an X-ray, though nothing much is visible except black specks that look like birds against the evening sky. The Arabic is on the surface, seemingly handwritten. The English reads:

Light falls from her voice
and I try to catch it as the last 
light of the day fades…

In a note to the reader, Mikhail wonders if the images on the clay tablets represent objects or if they are symbols and codes. Mikhail’s own take on the relationship between image and words is less obscure—her drawings are fairly straightforward renderings of the objects that appear in the poems.

An image from later in this section resembles a Mark Rothko painting. What appears to be a blackboard is divided into two rectangles, with drawings in chalk. Whereas Rothko’s color blocks are opaque, in Mikhail’s homage the blocks are transparent: the top section has writing in Arabic, and the bottom section is filled with trees. The English poem that follows reads:

there are secrets,
faces, and wind
behind the colors
in Rothko’s untitled canvases.

Mikhail intersperses such seemingly light poems with others whose focus is death, war, and imprisonment. In poem 7 of Tablets X, we see a tree bent over, about to fall; nearby two humanlike figures appear to be swaying:

When the war saw us eating 
the tree’s music, it asked
to join in the singing.
We understood the war’s hunger
and its boredom. But the war 
swallowed our country whole.
We watched in shock as the war
got sicker and sicker and threw us up.

In Tablets, an ancient writing system typically associated with economic record-keeping is reimagined as a hybrid, bilingual literary form.