‘True Poems flee—’: A Refugee Poetics or Poetry as Permanently Temporary

When I look back on my childhood and the people my immigrant father befriended and invited home for dinner after church, I note that many of them were also immigrants. I wrote about this before in a post for Harriet on whiteness and how difference gets marked when we cross over from domestic to communal space. I begin again with this scene, but this time to gather thoughts on belonging, migration, refugeeness: themes that thread through nearly all of my writing projects.

One particular weekly guest became a family friend and a regular at our house. He had arrived in New Jersey from Hungary alone and without family. I remember asking him if he had ice-cream “over there” and my parents snapped “of course!” and laughed. I was stunned by my blunder and by their quick answer, wondering, “how did they know that some of what is here is also there?”

So while my father’s refugee story—his flight from World War II Estonia—was for me the story of our family, I also learned, at the same time, that foreign-ness is not such a big deal. I learned that socialities and experiences flip-flop between exotic and normal according to who is telling, who is listening, and where the exchange takes place. I also think that my father needed the companionship of a not-fully-American person, and my mother and us kids weren’t cutting it. This teaches me how it is possible to be deeply inside a set of relations—like a family—and still detect an outsider feeling. How beloveds may be literally near yet possess an interior life quite far away. I grew up thinking that this distance had everything to do with my father being from elsewhere and it was this distance that drew me toward him, unsettling the idea that love is always accompanied by closeness.

What does this have to do with poetry?

The migrant experience generates poetry, I believe, even if it is never written and called literature. Migration is not the exception but is emblematic of modernity and the contemporary. Migration throws the over-valuation of rootedness into stark relief. I am not against asking or answering the question “where is home?” but I am more interested in what motivates the asking. I keep circling around this: how to learn from various states of belonging without exoticizing myself and others, and without pathologizing or romanticizing here/there. Finally, migration as a disposition unsettles “the literary”—value-laden practices of reading and writing from which I seek, again and again, to flee.

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A Concrete Tent / Belonging Out of Place

A concrete tent sits on one end of our campus, nearly on the edge and not visible from the main road. It is a work by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti from their 2018 exhibition “Permanent Temporariness.” The exhibition was about “the state of ‘refugeeness,’ a condition meant to be temporary, but that has become permanent for many populations.” Hilal and Petti propose that there is something to learn from refugeeness.

To regard refugees and migrants as a sociality from which to learn is to risk appropriation—a selective attention in the service only of the one who desires to learn. It also risks minimizing the trauma that accompanies refugee and migration experiences. Carrying these reservations, I came to see that Hilal and Petti’s work engages the refugee as fully formed subject prior to the moment when artist and gallery-goer recognize them as such.

It is important to acknowledge that migrations are forced and voluntary, and there are many shades of choice and causes, including “conflict”: a word that usually signals a state’s unwillingness to call it the war it likely is. There are economic migrations, where precarity is rarely identified as the daily battle it is, and where World Bank policies, for example, do not get labeled as the aggressors that they are.

In the early 1990s I worked for a refugee assistance program in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and learned the politics of “immigrant” and “refugee” nomenclature. That Central Americans, fleeing a U.S. sponsored “conflict” would not qualify as refugees, but that Russian Jews migrating to Brooklyn received refugee status and accompanying federal and state benefits. Where Cold War history structured ideas of discrimination, refugee status was granted. In contrast, most economic migrants to the U.S. from places where unjust trade agreements perpetuate poverty will not be granted refugee status.

Now, living in the Middle East, it impossible to not think about migration and refugeeness. From the vantage point of Abu Dhabi—where I will always be a guest worker of a privileged class, where I live and work with many Palestinians, and where groups of guest workers stay for a variety of lengths of time—any part of my vision that tended to equate citizenship with belonging has been transformed. What does it mean to write and teach poetry here?

In his essay “In Defence of Metaphor” Elias Khoury articulates a history of Arabic prosody beginning with the 8th century writings of Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi. In classical Arab poetry “the poet was viewed as a breed apart” yet, and in contrast to the Western Romantic concept of the poet, they are not alone in authorship. Khoury explains that poets work with “jinni or a muse for a partner.” He then stretches this concept to the contemporary, suggesting that “problems of belonging can intersect” where “[t]he condition of the exiled and the marginal converge into a new rhythm, making homelands out of words and images.” Khoury constructs a shift in the very idea of “belonging” and the art that comes from this shift:  

The belonging I write about emerges as liberation from the sway of a place; it is a belonging to people in places. The place in and of itself lacks meaning. The human names the place and calls it a homeland or simply home. […] The artists and writers of our times do not return to a place of stable values and forms. Their very being is afflicted by a crisis, searching for significance in the only reference available to them, namely, in the very artistic forms they create.

Away from “stable values and forms,” I need the text that shirks claims of mastery. As I make home in a place where I may never be a citizen, I especially need poetry structured like a tent made of concrete: signaling the permanent and the fleeting, a place to gather with others but at the edge. I need poems at the edge.

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To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee –

—Emily Dickinson

Unsettling, un-reading, un-writing: Dickinson’s poem makes an argument for “true” poetry’s temporariness. This is poetry that plays a game of keep-away from literature. It is poetry that is tribal, directing a shrug toward those who would try to over-determine its life force through interpretation. I think that poetry’s gift is that it is more than literature—it exceeds boundaries and points toward the pre-lingual, the impossible book, the post-utterance. Fleeting, all. Some poems are particularly resistant to decoding and they might not even look poetic. It is in those traditions and alt-canons that I take refuge.

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The Living Room, Version 1

I want to return to an important childhood scene. It is so seminal that I feel I must have written about this before. This time I want to go deeper into what it taught me about language and literature—

As a child I would sit in the living room and listen to my father speak with my uncle and grandparents in Estonian. They did not translate for me and my father never taught me the language. But I did not feel frustrated or left out. I remember taking pleasure in that space, witnessing how language could swing off into a sea of pure sound. My sister and I played a gibberish game in response: speaking for hours in nonsense, delighting in our connection and the freedom to not make sense. So it is probably not a coincidence that I am a poet who enjoys the swerve into alternate syntax, grammar, sound and shape, and I gravitate toward work that doesn’t arrive at a singular meaning and stable representation.

In childhood I also experienced a phenomenon sometimes under-recognized: immigrant ambivalence toward heritage via language. My Estonian family likely assessed that whiteness was within our family’s grasp and that to linger in worlds deemed “Lappish” and peasant—persistent stigmas for Estonians—could hold me back from the privileges of white American belonging. Because my grandparents were not immigrants of a professional class, I think the ambivalence toward Estonian was also a byproduct of class striving. In other words, whatever was worth preserving seemed less worthy than what could be gained by assimilating.

So I learned that race, ethnicity, and class impact how heritage and language is lived. This is also a training in poetry—not about literary movements, good taste, or canons. Rather, that language lives within power relations. It meant something to not be taught a language.

Perhaps this is why I write ahead of myself: ahead of sense where sense means logic. I do not fear this kind of text. In early stages of writing I resist the desire to be understood by even myself. This is probably why I write book-length projects: to build an entire home, inviting others to enter where language may not be their mirror and won’t necessarily be a clear window. I need readers willing to read where the mind relaxes its grasp, where sharp focus goes soft, and where the muscles of interpretation release at least a little.

The question of how I revise and what makes this kind of work “good” are ever-present. The answer is rarely “because this is what good literature should look like.” From my work in textiles, I have learned that it is about tension—making work where language does not fall slack and where there are apparatuses to keep strands untangled and distinguishable from one another. So I place footholds within the work in the form of citations that connect to themes, to a bibliography, to an elsewhere. Perhaps this is similar to the way abstract painters sometimes use titles as referents or how sampling is homage and provides context in hip-hop.

I constantly read others whose texts also function this way. But I didn’t come to know the ways of this tribe, sometimes called “experimentalists” or “avant-garde,” through secular literary studies.  

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Refuge in the Avant-garde but by a Different Route

Religion was a network that enabled my father to meet other migrant socialities. But the religion I grew up in also taught me a way of being with words that was different from school. Church and religion taught me that language could impact bodies, change states, call realities into being—like Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the order word,” and like avant-garde traditions where texts perform. They stretch the imagination, they are sonic and visual entities, and they unsettle reality.  

In an essay entitled “I Have Begun to Read Again as I Was Taught,” I describe the “literacy, religion, and textual practice” of my childhood. Here I will call up one of the essay’s anecdotes, reframing it slightly—

Reciting the Psalms relieved me of childhood stomach aches. The alchemy of my body, voice, and the text proved this over and over. Memorizing verses from the King James Bible, or reading them just slightly under my breath, enacted a faith in transformation through language. Though the work wasn’t authored by me, the utterance was a moment of co-creation.

As a young adult I left that religion. The unraveling began in a required undergraduate zoology class at a secular university where The Structure of Invertebrate Design, our textbook, supplanted the truth that the Bible held for me. At around the same time I also found poetry, dance, and women’s studies: forces of art and liberation that were—and still are—magical to me.

Recalling this is not to pit the secular against the sacred. But it is to say that reading practices and aesthetics are not neutral and universal and I try to remember this as a teacher. Many of us arrive at university with a poetics that may have little to do with secular reading practices and training in literature as a scholarly field. But that is not a deficit and though it might look like an “un-modern” disposition, it is legitimate, generative.

My colleague Andrew Bush and I talk about poetry and language in this way. Andrew is an anthropologist and I appreciate his work on poetry as a living thing, a tool used to negotiate life’s complexities. He recently told me about Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt and when our schedules clear a little, we are going to read it together. Allan’s project looks at the “opposition between a practice of reading based on memorization, embodiment, and recitation in Qur-anic schools” and a very different reading practice: modern Egyptian literacy and literariness. Allan posits,

world literature is not the all-inclusive meeting place of national literary traditions, but the emergent distinction between those deemed literate, cosmopolitan, and modern, and those others who are not. What follows, then, is an account of world literature as it transforms textual practices, defines the borders of a world republic of letters, and distinguishes the literate and the illiterate, the modern and the traditional, the tolerant and the intolerant, and ignorant and the enlightened.

As world literature reading practices solidify, Allan suggests that “what is lost, or blotted out, is a way of being in language before knowing how to read and write.” Is this “before” the wildness I want from poetry? Is this the flight that Dickinson calls the “true” poem? The root of the word “refuge” is “flight.” But what of the “re”—the going back? The poetry I need the most leaves the disciplined borders of literature and returns language back to the wilds.

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I am what I am, that’s a tribal man
We all know the colors, we all must stand
As we start our travels, things they will unravel
“Que sera sera,” for this unit is like gravel
Won’t be gone for long, listen to the song
If you can’t pull it, all ya gotta do is—
Push it along, push it along
Push it along, yeah, push it along

—Tribe Called Quest

Listening to the lyrics of Tribe Called Quest’s first album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, there is movement everywhere. The album title is a poetics, linking migration and language: patterned and transformative where what is status quo “will unravel.” Instead of the image of dragging life’s burdens or responsibilities behind, as if tethered, there is the idea to give things a push—keep the weight out in front and in one’s sights. This style of effort calls the tribe into being.

When I think of hip-hop’s lyrical force, the settled unsettled-ness of black life in the U.S., and a refugee poetics, Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism comes to mind—particularly the chapter “Policing as Plunder: Notes on Municipal Finance and the Political Economy of Fees and Fines.” Wang explains how movement in Ferguson and other U.S. cities is curtailed through the mix of policing, capitalism, and racism: black residents receive citations inordinately and police are rewarded for the number of citations they issue. How this impacts black movement, where residents fear going out because they could be arrested for not paying the citation they haven’t been able to afford to pay. Citizens, yes. Free to move, no.

And so when I hear “citizenship” equated with “privilege” and “freedom” I think: “that depends on who and where you are.”

To the liberal consciousness structured by a faith in individuation, human rights, and who sees history as progressive, the tribal person is outlier, savage, barbarian. In Europe, as the cadastral map and taxation developed, land was demarcated as belonging to one person or another. I have written about this in my collection Cadastral Map: how this suppressed the fact that land was often worked collaboratively and peoples moved through. An ideology of rootedness took hold and it did so alongside “nature writing.” This is an example of literature becoming literature alongside the commodification of land, the capture of wildness, and the endangerment of tribal ways.

The Ottoman Empire, in contrast to Europe, not only recognized but largely allowed for and even benefited from movement of people. Reşat Kasaba’s A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants & Refugees investigates this history. Kasaba’s study begins with the claim that

… most authors who wrote about tribes until recently used an evolutionary perspective. By and large, they concurred that the persistence of nomadic and migratory communities and the formation of strong polities represented different stages of human development and as such were inherently incompatible with each other.

How well this evolutionary perspective parallels the problematic thesis of Walter Ong and others: that societies progress from orality to literacy. Remembering that there has always been fluidity between the oral and the written, and that mark-making systems are usually at the service of power, helps us recognize language arts issuing from places that do not look literary and from socialities who may not code “writer.”

Kasaba argues that “[t]he fluidity and indeterminacy of Ottoman society gave the empire an advantage in earlier parts of its history.” He describes accounts of tribes and unsettled people that were

not confined to frontier areas or peripheral provinces but lived across the entire empire, even in urban areas. Furthermore, rather than figuring solely as carriers of dissent, in many instances migratory and nomadic groups actually mediated and imposed the will of the imperial center.

This is a picture of cities constituted by groups who may not necessarily mix and blend, and they may not settle. But it’s not dystopic. I think this vision helps to decouple tolerance and assimilation. To some extent, this model maps onto structures of belonging in the Emirates. That guest workers actually help define citizenship—by not being that sociality. It is not through resistance to Emirati structures of citizenship, but through performed attachments to elsewhere—in food, dress, language, socializing—that their complex practices of belonging take shape. Also, and very importantly, guest workers from across the Islamic world make the Emirates a pan-Islamic place. Yet in that fellowship there is not necessarily assimilation. Nor is there antagonism.

Living in a place that does not require blending or even performances of blending enables me to see, more clearly than before, how ideas of equality in the States mask policies that functionally instruct: “believe in our version of whiteness or do not be at all.”

*

What if
refugee?
 
Can you curl
into smaller?

I wrote these lines in my forthcoming book SPEECH in order to ask for an opening. If it is not possible to be any smaller, to fit, what then?

After my grandfather died, in his files and papers I found a picture of my grandparents in Estonian national dress published in the magazine of the church they belonged to at the time. The caption read something like “Estonians smiling brightly.” My grandfather attached a rebuttal to the clipping: “Did you know that Estonians lost their homeland and that the church is not speaking out against this?”

My grandfather knew that his being-as-refugee was always going to be political. I have written before about the informational pamphlets on the annexation that he kept inside his jacket pocket and handed out to anyone who did not know the history. In my family he was famously embarrassing for doing this everywhere, anywhere. His pedagogical self was his sovereignty.

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Sovereignty Claimed, Not Granted

Last spring whenever I had a few moments between meetings and teaching I would walk down to the campus gallery and sit with one particular piece in “Permanent Temporariness”: footage of Karma Nabulsi, scholar and former PLO member, speaking on sovereignty. The gallery was dark and I was often the only one there. Headphones added to a feeling of respite—as if she was speaking just to me, telling me what I needed to know.

Nabulsi speaks deliberately and with her hands, the occasional “yanni”—the “I mean . . .” in Arabic speech that fills space as it brings others along—punctuating her thoughts. She proposes that sovereignty is claimed by people in unofficial spaces, and that long before an institution has lost its ability to deliver on its promises, including granting sovereignty, new life is taking root elsewhere. Those kept in a state of permanent temporariness do not always suffer as they wait. They may not even be waiting. Instead, they make space, they host others, they talk, they share meals, make parties and celebrations. I listened, thinking that the politician, the professional-class person, the intellectual for whom institutions of modernity and governance may actually work or have worked at one time or another—someone like me—needs Nabulsi’s message the most.

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The Living Room, Version 2

“The right to host”: this concept underwrites Sandi Hilal’s “Al Madhafah: The Living Room Performance” where Hilal used her temporary campus apartment to host groups of faculty and students during the exhibition. The work is based on Hilal’s life in Sweden where she learned of a Syrian refugee who opened up her home to others—inverting the forces of the paternalistic, liberal state that would over-code her subjectivity as the ever-grateful guest.

I arranged for my poetry workshop class to participate in the performance. In that space I was surprised by my own candor as I spoke about the difficulty of having so much of my art life revolve around my workplace: where cultural activity is closely tied to intellectual work, academic culture, and the efforts of teaching. I said that I craved another space to meet with poets, artists, and thinkers from various walks of life, and where our works didn’t need to be accompanied by a certain kind of research language, contribute to a stated mission, or serve our careers. After participating in Hilal’s performance, an idea solidified: why not make that space at home? And so, in the middle of May, we arranged a move into an apartment with a bigger living room and began laying plans for a salon—a place to host others.

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A Refugee Poetics

Deepak Unnikrishnan is my colleague, I am fortunate to say. When I first moved to the Emirates, I found one of his essays published in The State, a journal edited by Rahel Aima and Ahmad Makia. What drew me to his writing, and everything published by Aima and Makia, is that it counters the problematic discourse of the Emirates as a “no place.”

Deepak’s debut collection Temporary People begins with: “In a labor camp, somewhere in the Persian Gulf, a laborer swallowed his passport and turned into a passport.” In the story, another roommate becomes a suitcase. A third roommate takes the passport and the suitcase, heads to the airport, where, after boarding a flight, he “began swallowing everything in sight . . .” This story overturns the idea that the worker is consumed by arriving and leaving. Instead, he consumes the apparatus of movement and therefore activates those mechanisms. This reversal is liberating: despite confused officials, “the plane didn’t care, it went on its merry way, picking up speed, lifting its beak, tucking in its mighty wheels, returning its cargo.”

But Deepak’s book actually does not start with this story—the first text is a line drawing of a crane whose scaffolding is made of people: stick figures, some of whom appear to be carrying suitcases. These figures return again in the last “Chabter”—the “p” replaced with “b” as a nod to the sounds of Arabic and Indian languages—made from these figures lining up across the page: a contemporary and widely-understood language of arrival and departure.

It is uncanny how much Unnikrishnan’s drawings, which hardly get a mention in reviews, align with the paintings of Paul Guiragossian whose visual vocabulary references migration and the Armenian genocide. I learned of Guiragossian’s work from Etel Adnan’s essay “About the End of the Ottoman Empire”—a handwritten work inside a sketchbook placed on a small desk in a gallery of the 2015 Istanbul biennial.

Guiragossian and Adnan’s works remind us that 19th and early 20th century European pressure on Ottoman borders destabilized the empire and Europe did not intervene when they knew about the genocide. Adnan’s essay attempts to reconcile her father’s Ottoman army officer past with her close friendship with an Armenian family in Beirut. She reminds us how ethics are made and tested in relation—our intimate neighbor, not an abstract moral ideal, asks us to forge complex notions of justice, responsibility, forgiveness, forgetting.

I turn now to a book that is soaked in learning from refugeeness. Much of Asiya Wadud’s collection Crosslight for Youngbird centers on the 2015 refugee crisis—where Syrians in flight to Europe were met with new fences, death at the hands of smugglers, and settlement according to skimpy quotas. It is Wadud’s poem “this is a library,” set in New York City, that I will focus on here. It is structured by a straightforward syntax where “this is . . .” repeats. The poem flees the literary precisely because of its basic grammar from which it only occasionally breaks. And the poem takes flight in content, when, following “this is a library/these are books” comes “this is men with nowhere to go” and “this is the Chelsea hotel.” Sites of knowledge, categories, containment, and shelter are places for homeless men: “these are pee boots/this is a keen stench.” Smell, as a sense, unsettles modernity’s insistence on cleanliness and order.

In compact space “this is a library” makes a vital connection: the same structures that create the library and its idea of goodness also make the conditions that create homelessness. “These are bent backs/this is everyone there everyone.” Both books and bodies, sharing the “spine” as structure, are vulnerable. Hope and disaster, both, persist: “these are weathered books/these are the weathered men/this is a lit lantern an ancient/hope a queuing disaster/this is a library.” The poem gathers landscapes of temporariness and people on the move: perhaps the only aspect of the contemporary moment of which we can be certain. “5 PM lights out/the men return tomorrow/no doubt/no doubt.”

Almost a year ago poet Ocean Vuong and others inaugurated the Center for Refugee Poetics, “a Center that doesn’t yet exist.” At the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, there was “a day of performances, workshops, film screenings, and more exploring the poetry and the refugee experience, with an initial focus on the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora.” I love that this is a center that doesn’t yet exist—a pop-up space makes sense for this poetics. Eagerly, I will stay tuned and support this center and poetics in any way that I can. I hope that others tune in whatever their sociality and experience. Because if we accept Hilal and Petti’s invitation and Khoury’s flight from stable values and forms, there is much to learn—

To keep letting poetry unsettle the literary. To look beyond and before books, staying open to the poem that rejects literature as a project of betterment. To accept the gift of poetry’s permanent temporariness: moment by moment, written or not, poems make place and sovereignty with others in patterns of flight.