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Monday
An artist friend who lives in Assisi, Lani Irwin, alerted me to Ammiel Alcalay’s “My Apologies,” a poem about the horrific killing that never seems to stop in Palestine. I have Israeli and Jewish friends who are as horrified as the rest of the world at how Israel’s leaders are perpetrating slaughter in their name. They are far from the only ones to believe their democracy has been hijacked by authoritarian wannabes.
Alcalay is the son of Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States from Serbia. In his poem apologizing for how America is enabling the slaughter, he cites the important Iraqi poet Bulunda al-Haidari, who wrote his own poem entitled “My Apologies.” Reading the first apologies poem allows us to better understand Alcalay’s follow-up.
Haidari, a Kurdish poet from northern Iraq who was forced into exile by Saddam Hussein, helped modernize the Arabic literary tradition. According to biographical notes on the All Poetry website, what distinguished Haidari’s poetry and “makes it so brilliant” is the way that he uses his intimate knowledge to express the impact of political violence and the sorrow of living in exile.
In Haidari’s “My Apologies,” the poet expresses his sadness at how Hussein has destroyed the nation that produced The Arabian Nights. “We used to have a sea, shells, pearls and the hour of birth,” he laments. (I’m thinking “hour of birth” refers to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of civilization.) While the Hussein’s television propaganda (a.k.a., “the newsreader”) proclaims the country’s mythical greatness, Haidari sees the truth: “There is no sea in Baghdad”—only “burnt up shadows of the midday sun”:
My Apologies
By Bulunda al-Haidari
My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island,
And everything Sinbad said
About the queens of the jinn
About the ruby and coral islands
About the thousand thousands flowing from the sultan’s hand
Is a myth born in the summer heat
Of my small town
In the burnt-up shadows of the midday sun
In the silent nights of the exiled stars.
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And a polished moon
And fishermen returning in the evening;
We used to have,
Said the newsreader’s last bulletin,
An innocent, dream paradise;
For we, my honored guests,
Lie to be born again,
Lie to stretch in our long history
The myth told by Sinbad –
We used to have
A sea, shells, pearls
And the hour of birth.
My apologies, my honored guests,
The newsreader lied in his last bulletin:
There is no sea in Baghdad
Nor pearls
Not even an island.
In his own “My Apologies” poem, written this year, the American-born Alcalay apologizes for America’s own newscasters, calling them “the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers.” I’ve written about how the corporate media sane-washed Trump, and Alcalay sees them as having done the same with (in his words) “the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine.”
“Everything they say and write is a lie,/ about law and freedom, about equality/ and justice,” Alcalay writes before pointing out “the rubble of the bombs we make and sell” and “the silent cries of limbless orphans.” It’s an angry poem, driven to fury by his disillusion with an America that is betraying its ideals. His fury may be compounded by his Jewish anger at Israel’s own betrayal.
It’s a disillusion I remember experiencing as a college student during the Vietnam War.
Unexpectedly, however, Alcalay’s poem draws on al-Haidari’s original “My Apologies” to end on a note of hope. To read the first poem is to understand the concluding punch of the second.
My Apologies
By Ammiel Alcalay
after Bulund al-Haidari
To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorus and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.
In other words, don’t abandon your belief in mythic renewal.
