Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014–2020

Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014–2020, by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, grapples with the limits of memory set against the long duration of the Israeli occupation. If most members of a population spend their whole lives within the interminable span of violence and displacement, then what does the mind of one raised in that reality keep or lose? How can it recall a single cruel afternoon, among so many?

He never remembered that afternoon without a raincloud entering the house,
he never remembered it without a dog barking on the doorstep,
without the smell rising from a supper trying to simmer from the basement,
without there falling over his shoulders
the body of a young man heavy with death,

[…]
during the mountain war that no one wants to remember,
the war in which many were killed
before it was covered by other, more senseless wars,
the war which they, whenever they dug to bury it,
would find another war down there taking shape,
the war which was dropped from memories

As if memory were a forgotten country, Zaqtan’s outstretched lines reach for its places and its people: “Thanks to your hand which was there, / frail and afraid but able to send a signal; / which was how I came from the metaphor to this hill country / which remembers you as though you were real.”

In “When that happens,” Zaqtan leads the poem’s unnamed subject—“he”—through a frightening passage filled with death and violence, toward recognition and a claim to the land as his own:

When things grow thin and the shadows trapped
in their strict forms come apart

[…]

When a djinn calls his name from the wooden shelf
in his mother’s room, his mother
whose features lately he cannot quite recall,

[…]

he knows in his heart,
in a way of which he knows nothing,
that he has reached his land.

Zaqtan offers his readers so much beauty—it is unbearable that it exists in the absence of a free Palestine.