NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR POEMS
To a Young Poet
Zaina Alsous
I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?
“This poem borrows its name from a Mahmoud Darwish poem, translated by Fady Joudah. It is a reflection on presence: where we place ourselves in the order of things, whom we live for, what we write toward. In his essay on ‘Estranged Labour,’ Marx writes, ‘The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increased value of the world of things.’ I’m interested in what we can learn from the workers who risk their lives to cross empire’s borders to care for their families and from the people in Gaza who have resolutely insisted on collective survival in the face of genocide: a counter relationship to the process of alienation; life as the insistence of the preciousness of life.”
—Zaina Alsous
Zaina Alsous is a Palestinian poet and the author of A Theory of Birds (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award from the Arab American National Museum and the 2020 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. Alsous lives in Miami, Florida.
This poem is simultaneously an act of grief as well an act of resistance. How can any Palestinian but reel in shock at the systematic betrayal, – the weakness of the West (America) and naked avarice? Their land, Gaza, is coveted for redevelopment into a diaphanous resort property and “they” are to be resettled in a neighboring country, with no right of return to a homeland.
“And so it goes”, Vonnegut wrote.
This is what bleeds out. This and much more is published on my iphone feed, rapid-fire, staccato like. Europe, Ukraine at war, Canada, Mexico, the list of victims is very long of peoples strong-armed by tariffs, at home tens of thousands of lay-offs, and much worse is to come.
What necessity that anyone give a fuck about anything written here… All the more reason to keep writing.
2 thoughts on “NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR POEMS”
Reading today’s offering it strikes me that we all live in a sarcophagus of sorts, our brains (the organ of thought and interpretation) sequestered in the dark casket of our skulls. Each one of us relies upon our senses to give us the information that we, in turn, pass through our experiences to form some sort of connection to our world. This is why to concept of objectivism is really a fantasy. I mention all of this, not because of the specifics of your post, but more because I’m beyond certain that many others would view the words above as the opposite of their version of truth.
We’ve come to this juncture many times over the years. That the language we depend on to communicate with each other is less than adequate when it comes to nuance, emotion, interpretation, and perspective. The ideas put forth by Zaina Alsous are poignant and provocative and make enormous sense to me. But you and I are only a handful of folks in this nation who would react favorably. In addition, just mentioning Karl Marx’s name is enough to set some readers into a frenzy of fear, despite the FACT that much of Marx’s writing is just as salient today as when he wrote it those many years ago. But since he is seen as the devil incarnate by the Ayn Rands of the world, everything he ever wrote must be vilified as well. And so goes humanity.
Agree one hundred percent.
Objectivity, Objectvism, in any and all variations is a dangerous misunderstanding.
The senses process stimuli from phenomena external to our organism variously, and then our brain massages the data according to the categories of remembered experience, which is served up to consciousness as “reality.” Every bit of this involuntary, a mammalian body functioning as any mammal in the forest. Then each of us has his/her customized version which only roughly corresponds to anyone else’s. And there’s more, language is for the most part metaphor, agreed upon approximations, which work well enough, most of the time, as long as the participants in a given exchange are inclined to feel “good will” for one’s interlocutor, and each is able to intuit the intent behind symbol and context.
Those holding to any form of objectivity have a subscription to a tribal faith that does not pass examination. Objectivity is lost in a rolling tangle of C&E biochemistry, neuron firings and subjective judgment.