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November 4th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
RIFQA
by Mohammed El-Kurd
100 pp. Haymarket Books $16.00
RIFQA is a light, almost ethereal Arabic word that means companionship, compassion, or kindness. It is also the name of Mohammad el-Kurd’s grandmother and the title of his stunning debut poetry collection.
Although less than 100 pages, it took me days to read, mostly because I kept re-reading so much of it. Letting my eyes sweep over lines just once wasn’t nearly enough to take in the unbearable beauty of this book.
The words that Mohammad assembles in his poems aren’t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem’s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history’s smoke. There is rage in this book—piercing, defiant, inspiring rage that ebbs and returns, and settles in blank spaces that push words far apart on the page.
Unlike the lightness of the word rifqa, this book is heavy, weighed with 103 years of Rifqa’s life as a refugee warrior, a woman of infinite final words—which Mohammad calls punchlines—of a matriarch’s expansive love, a colonized indigenous people’s anguished longing to breathe, and a globalizing irreverence rising from what is muted, buried, razed, and painted over. Several times, he acknowledges the heaviness, usually with horse metaphors.
horses and rockets I’ve stuffed in my bag (pg 73)
keeping a dozen dead horses under my bed. (pg 74)
dragging my dead horses onboard
new cities new drones. (pg 75)
Like every word in this book, reference to the horse is intentional and precise. There’s a poetic legacy of horses in Palestinian literature. The title of one of Darwish’s collections is “Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?” the title of one of his beloved poems, “The Horse Fell Off The Poem,” and the seminal novel by Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Time of the White Horses.” El-Kurd recounts a moment in Rifaq’s final years, when her cognition had begun to wane (pg 85).
Last July, she asked how we’re getting home.
On our bikes, I said, giggling.
You take your bike, and I’ll take my horse.
Her punch lines intact her smirk unwavering.
….
“America is the reason.” Tell them, “Drink the sea.”
Let them ride their tallest horses.
Jerusalem is ours.
Early in the book, two poems confront the western gaze. In the first, he is lovingly generous with his naive American friend. The second is a “found” poem carved from a New York Times article about Sheikh Jarrah, his own Jerusalem neighborhood. A correction to the news, it attempts to carve truth from convenient political order. “I refuse to wait in the wreck,” are the author’s implicit words in these poems, and his explicit final words in the book.
Mohammad was “Born on Nakba Day…among poetry”
The liberation chants outside the hospital room
told my mother
to push.
The poem “Three Women” (pg 41), encompasses the feminist, internationalist, and maternal spirit of this book—three pregnant women: One “black-haired and brown-skinned” in Atlanta “pushes out a statistic;” one “olive-skinned and olive-selling” in Jerusalem “pushes out a security threat;” and one from Gaza who “lives where bulldozers rest on clouds” and who “imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.” The reader can recognize other parallels throughout. In “This Is Why We Dance” (pg 6), his father tells him what every parent tells their Black son or daughter:
My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.”
Be composed, calm, still—laugh when they ask you,
smile when they talk, answer them,
educate them.
…
We have wounded feet but the rhythm remains,
no matter the adjectives on my shoulders.
This is why we dance:
Because screaming isn’t free.
Although his poems are in English, Mohammad’s second language, West Asia is always there, and Arabic is often centered—sometimes transliterated (watteeni wazzaytoon; pg 4), sometimes interpreted (“Amal Hayati;” pg. 60), sometimes it remains in its native glory, demanding the reader respect it without explanation (“Most of the rest is مسخرة How do you translate مسخرة?”; pg. 67). Occasionally, he marries both languages with “goddamns and hisbiyallahs” (pg 6) or responds in translation without clarifying (drink the sea; pg 7).
Throughout, Mohammad stops to acknowledge the sturdy shoulders on which he stands—Rifqa, of course, Malcolm X, Nizar Qabbani, Nina Simone, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Audre Lord, Abu Arab, Toni Morrison, Um Kalthoum, Frantz Fannon, B.B. King—and he nods to his contemporaries—Naomi Shehab Nye, Suhair Hammad, Nicki Minaj, Jackie Braje.
Somewhere in this poem
Edward Said throws a rock. (pg 79)
Many of the poems, especially ones that reference his own inner world, are broken up with large spaces on and between lines, giving a visual sense of fragmentation, of missing words and missing halves, of things dismantled and erased, of unseen but sure black matter. But there’s none of that when he speaks of specific people, realities, or moments in Palestinian history. In “No Moses in Siege,” he pays homage to Ahed, Zakaria, Mohamed, and Ismael Bakr, the four boys murdered by Israeli marine gunfire while they played soccer on a Gaza beach. Here, his verse is closely knitted, tight with love and resolve, respect, rage and anguish.
We were limbs in the wind,
our joy breaking against the shore.
Soccer ball in between our feet
we were soccer in between their feet.
No place to run. No Moses in siege.
Waves stitched together, embroidered, weaved
un-walkable, indivisible, passage—implausible,
on most days we weep in advance.
He gives love for an unnamed boy selling gum at Qalandiyah (pg 35)—“The boy is eight which is twenty-two for Americans;” for an unnamed elderly woman who falls asleep on his shoulder (pg 38)— “Her whistles asleep are choppy, her lungs—I assume—were embroidered with screams, grainy and grayed;” for a 15-year old girl killed for holding a nail file— “Violence is not children taking on dragons;” for Mahfoutha Ishtayyeh, who chained herself to her olive tree— “olive skin on olive skin.”
At times, there is a palpable questioning of the author’s own methods, a tension between the rifle and the pen, between opposing passions within him. In “Boy Sells Gum at Qalandiyah” (pg 34), he writes: “A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle?” And later, in “Anti-Biography” (pg 66), one of the poems where he touches on his own political evolution, he writes:
I think identity is corny.
That would have enraged me at seventeen.
My current beliefs would have—
except for the rifles
we all agree on the rifles.
He writes, “At a certain point, the metaphor tires. At a certain point, I’ll grab a brick” (pg 70); and, “I’m bored with the metaphors Children threw stones Sirens were lullabies / fireworks; bombs and we were sick of it” (pg 50).
We meet his guilt, too, that he should have something more than other sons of Palestine.
In truth I’m ashamed of my dreams.
There are those who dream of seeing the ocean,
Palestinian men who saw grave before gravel,
the coffin before the coast.
At times I teared up while reading, went back to read and teared up again. I like words that stir my heart. That’s the best kind of literature. There are two poems in particular that I intentionally re-read before falling asleep, because I wanted to dream about them: “Rifqa” (pg 17) and “Park Benches with Teeth” (pg 55). You just have to read them to understand.
Susan Abulhawa
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American writer and human rights activist. She is the author of Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water, and Against the Loveless World. Born to refugees of 1967, she moved to the United States as a teenager, graduated in biomedical science, and established a career in medical science. In July 2001, Abulhawa founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-governmental children’s organization dedicated to upholding the Right to Play for Palestinian children. She lives in Pennsylvania.
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