Hayan Charara & Patricia Smith in Conversation at The Lifted Brow

Poets Hayan Charara and Patricia Smith met "in the rapids of an email exchange" for The Lifted Brow #34, as part of the magazine's Poets in Conversation series. Charara, whose most recent, award-winning book is Something Sinister (2016), lives in Texas; and Smith resides in Staten Island. They discuss migration stories, Smith's book Janna and the Kings, and Motown. An excerpt:

HAYAN CHARARA: . . . My parents [. . .] were a part of that second wave of immigrants. They were informed, in part, by the larger cultural and social movements of the late sixties, and the revolutionary ideas sweeping the globe at the time. They were proud of their difference. They definitely didn't think of themselves as white, and nobody else did either. My parents, and the parents of all the Arab kids I knew, instilled in us every kind of "Arabness" they could muster. I had a cousin whose father would not allow us to speak English in his house. He was stern, too, so we didn't dare break his rules.

Despite all this, though, my parents worried more about our physical safety than our cultural heritage. My parents both came from a village in southern Lebanon, Bint Jbeil, which is just a little over a mile north of the Israeli border. The civil war was horrific, and even though other families went overseas and back, safely, I know that my father, at least, didn't feel he could go back so soon—he was too politically active, and this may have meant he was risking too much by returning.

He did eventually return, though, permanently (my mother died before she could do the same). In 2003, he went back, and three years later, war broke out again, this time with Israel. Israeli bombardment in this war—the Lebanese call it the July War—destroyed so many cities and towns. My father's house was spared only because it's situated at the top of a hill—the Israelis could see, plainly, there was nothing going on at the house; tactically speaking, on the Lebanese side, it was useless because it was an open target. It got riddled with bullet holes, but otherwise, it survived the war unscathed. The village, though—schools, pharmacies, hospitals, and a lot of people did not survive.

I have a poem about this, called Animals. It's up at the Poetry Foundation, and in my new book, Something Sinister.

We have one more thing in common, at least, and that's a children's book—both of our books are published by Lee & Low, in fact.

My book is actually based on the war between Israel and Lebanon. From a kid's perspective. With cats. And with a lot more hope in it than in the poem Animals. The book is called The Three Lucys. I'll tell you a little about my book if you tell me about yours.

Read all about it here.