Louder than Hearts
Zeina Hashem Beck
Bauhan Publishing, 2017
Zeina Hashem Beck’s second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, begins with the lines: “I write in English the way I roam foreign cities—full of street light/ & betrayal, until I find a coffee shop that speaks Arabic.” The poems in Louder than Hearts range across Tripoli, Mosul, Syria, Beirut, London, Paris, and New York, illuminating what is simultaneously most foreign and familiar in those places: the fundamental human drive to connect with others through language and the complexities of doing so in a world divided by cultural, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries. Hashem Beck writes from a certainty in the consolations of the written word. For her, a poem is “a tree without roots/ a street with enormous wings”; each line here both defies uprooting and takes flight, suddenly and assuredly. As the title poem notes, the motions and avowals in Hashem Beck’s work are bound but not beholden to tradition: “The woman in me is thousands/ of years old, her voice louder/ than hearts and derbakkehs.” The ancient tattoo of drumbeat and bloodline cross corridors, balconies, playgrounds, land-mine fields, broken houses, wastelands, continents, oceans, and ideologies. Louder than Hearts bears witness to the scarred and to the disconsolate, to the war-ravaged and to the displaced, to the strange interior countries one must survey and commit to memory if one is to understand the reality of human suffering.
Above all else, Zeina Hashem Beck’s work attempts to translate her particular understanding of human suffering into a poetics of radical empathy. Her poem, “Body,” emblematizes the elegiac uplift and heartache at the center of this collection. The poem reads:
Body
For Hassan Rabeh, young dancer displaced from Syria, who killed himself by jumping from a seventh-floor balcony in Beirut,
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
& perhaps you flew. I read the news, how you plunged from the seventh floor, a Beirut balcony,
& I am filled with a sound of sirens, a need to be alone. This war this theater this city this.
& I was at a Da Vinci exhibit at the museum this morning.
& what a blessing, to say I was at a Da Vinci exhibit this morning.
& he was a pacifist who designed killing machines, for money always comes from warlords.
& he, who like no other knew of the divine proportions of the body,
& he who preferred to trace limbs & ligaments
& the glide of bat wings in the air, he who preferred the theater,
& the projector, & the drum, & bridges, imagined the machine gun
& the submarine, & the tank, sculpted a bullet with a more precise dance.
& oh how the mind bends & how light & shadows fall.
& you, young dancer, tell me, what do you know of the flight of birds,
& of the difference between theatricality & war, dissection & witchcraft, dance & death?
& were you searching for your Palestine in Damascus, for your Damascus in Beirut,
& were you looking for Allah in the joint, the spine, the twirl?
& that last scribble your body made in the air, was that you,
& were you trying to write backwards, to lift instead?
& did you? Tell me, are the mountains blue in the distance?
& does poetry matter, & does dance?
& is there a bridge where the displaced go after they’re gone?
Here, as always in the poetry of Zeina Hashem Beck the world pliés before us in all of its ruthless beauty and terror. Hashem Beck does more than merely commemorate the life and mourn the loss of Hassan Rabeh in this poem. She articulates the endless adhan of art. She proclaims our ummah as everywhere, on the round earth’s imagined corners, where a poem might begin to take shape, to be uttered, heard, and remembered.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.
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