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Three Poets: Hala Alyan

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Poet Dr. Hala Alyan at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival

She is not only a poet and novelist, but also a clinical psychologist. As she read selections from her most recent poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, Dr. Hala Anyan’s dark eyes flashed; her shock of brown curly hair fluttered in the breeze; and her voice modulated from quiet to powerful. She is a Palestinian-American born in Carbondale, Illinois. But her poems are never far from her ancestral home in a conflicted land.

Even as she read her poems, we heard the loud sounds of a demonstration at the University of Southern California (USC) loudly protesting the horrors of the Israelis’ revenge on the Palestinians. And now we hear that graduation ceremonies at USC have been put on hold during the crisis.

Naturalized

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I won’t say where he was born. I’ve already said too much.
Look, the gardenias are coming in. Look, my love
is watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
He likes to understand. He plays devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
It’s so hot under that hospital elevator.
There’s no room for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting,
I stretch my teeth into a country
When they congratulate me on the ceasefire.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin* with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling peaches again. Woolly in my palms.
I’ve marched on the street too few times.
I’ve ruined the dinner party with my politics.
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. I stop jogging when I’m tired.
Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still
a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.

” Klonopin – Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It is approved for the treatment of panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), as well as certain types of seizure disorders.

Lydda

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The (Former) Palestinian City of Lydda

The (Former) Palestinian City of Lydda (ca. 1900)

It looks idyllic, doesn’t it? And it was, until 1948. At that point, the newly formed Israel Defense Forces expelled the inhabitants of this peaceful city in which Jews and Palestinians had lived side by side for generations. In an article for the New Yorker published in the October 21, 2013 issue entitled “Lydda, 1948,” Ari Shavit writes:

But, looking straight ahead at Lydda, I wonder if peace is possible. Our side is clear: we had to come into the Lydda Valley and we had to take the Lydda Valley. There is no other home for us, and there was no other way. But the Arabs’ side, the Palestinian side, is equally clear: they cannot forget Lydda and they cannot forgive us for Lydda. You can argue that it is not the occupation of 1967 that is at the core of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the tragedy of 1948. It’s not only the settlements that are an obstacle to peace but the Palestinians’ yearning to return, one way or another, to Lydda and to dozens of other small towns and villages that vanished during one cataclysmic year. But the Jewish State cannot let them return. Israel has a right to live, and if Israel is to live it cannot resolve the Lydda issue. What is needed to make peace now between the two peoples of this land may prove more than humans can summon.

I sit here in West Los Angeles, within hailing distance of the Gabrielino Indians’ shrine at Kuruvungna Springs on the grounds of the present-day University High School. In June and July of this year, I vacationed in Iceland, where a resurgent Viking population drove out the Irish monks that had originally settled the island. (Now there is no trace of their ever having done so.) If all goes well, my next vacation will be in Peru, where the Spanish looted and destroyed the Inca Empire. Their criollo descendants still control the economy and the political power, leaving the Andean serranos and jungle tribes near the headwaters of the Amazon as second-class citizens.

Unfortunately, with its burgeoning West Bank settlements, Israel is continuing the process it began in 1948 of squeezing out, to the maximum extent possible, the indigenous Palestinian population. I cannot condone Israel’s settlement policy, especially with its Likud Party racist underpinnings; but I cannot afford to be too absolute because I realize there is a faint trace of blood on my own hands and on those of my forebears.