Review: "[...]" by Fady Joudah

By Veena Deo, Library Commitee

Fady Joudah, an American poet born to Palestinian parents, a translator of
Arabic poetry, and an internal medicine physician, lives and works in Houston, Texas. He has also worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and in Sudan.

In this timely must-read book written with urgency and gravitas in roughly ten weeks between October and December 2023, Joudah engages the recent war in Gaza with a deep awareness of the multifaceted experiences of people who inhabit that land with great tension, tragedy, anger, violence, despair, love, survival, life, humanity, and hope. Sometimes, only a pictogram like [...] works for the title of such a book of poetry. In The Yale Review, his interviewer Aria Aber asks him about his title. Joudah tells her that it evokes “silence and erasure” for him. Aber, a poet herself, thinks of it as an “enclosed space, a ruined building with people inside, or even a book.” (The Yale Review February 28, 2024).

In my reading of Joudah’s book I also sense the unspeakable and the continuous destruction of humanity in that region being bracketed, as if by 

momentary force of will, but ready to spill out once again. This work is personal, heartfelt, written with great emotional integrity, and is deeply philosophical.

His opening lines begin: “I am unfinished business./ The business that did not
finish me/ or my parents/ won’t leave my children in peace.” Joudah’s last few lines are a feeling expressed by the “Sunbird”: “I flit/ from gleaming river/ to glistening sea./ From all that we/ to all that me.” A human desire to have a freedom to roam, not just destroy. In between these two poems are so many more perspectives that this book reminds me that poets offer a language of life and help us glimpse a little of how to be human.

Published by Milkweed editions, 2024.