write this instead
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you are thinking about the last white person you had to cut out of your life. the one who took a picture of dylann roof to the hairdresser “coz she wanted a look with ‘creeper vibes.’” you wonder if the hairdresser was a person of color and rage fills you. how clearly you see that murderer while the hairdresser... and you do what you always do when this happens in public, you disassociate switching to the fantasy of having a particular baldwin quote* printed on billions of small cards and dropping them via drone all over this country. you are fantasizing about how you are always fantasizing about this but the quote is always changing and the location is always changing then you are thinking on home and language and how in some ways they have come to mean the same thing. the train arrives, you get a seat. at the next stop a large white man finds the open space beside you and you resist the reflex to make yourself small, to make room for him. he shrinks into the allotted negative space and reveals a pack of index cards with your mother tongue scrawled on them. you remember god is a surrealist poet and has a funny way of revealing herself to those who will believe. but you wonder why this campy looking man has such an interest in your language. a slew of predictable acronyms rush to the forefront of your mind: CIA, FBI, NSA — based on his age, you dismiss the possibility of the foreign service exam. you are tempted to ask, “why such an interest in arabic?” then you notice a golden band on his ring finger. perhaps he is learning it for the love of a woman who loves this language as much as you do. this sole warm thought is fleeting, as he is: he stands directly in front of you as he prepares to exit the train. you scrutinize him. you sense he senses it. you want to make him uncomfortable. you want to know what he is going to do with your language. but you do not ask. you go home and write this instead.
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*“Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country — until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it.”
-James Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” March 7, 1965 |
generation of feeling
these growing pains though
this good will hunting
we
fallen twigs
look like bones
waiting to be lit
i am trying to tell you something about how
rearranging words
rearranges the universe
this good will hunting
we
fallen twigs
look like bones
waiting to be lit
i am trying to tell you something about how
rearranging words
rearranges the universe
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Walker Evans. Light Through Subway Grating, New York City, 1941. Film negative, 35mm. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, Marwa Helal’s poetry has appeared in Apogee, Day One, The Recluse, The Offing, and Winter Tangerine. She is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Prize. Her essays and journalism have been published in Poets & Writers, the American Book Review, Entropy, Egypt Today, Sukoon, and elsewhere. She is a fellow of Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and VONA/Voices, a mentor in the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program, and she received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. More at marshelal.com or on Twitter at @marwahelal.