Introduction by Anahid Nersessian
Tamara Nassar is a poet and journalist of uncompromising ethics and piercing emotional clarity. A Palestinian born and raised in Amman, Jordan, she combines a reporter's eye for the indelible detail — the pink of a radish, the stubble of a beard — with an elusive, even hallucinatory perspective on, trauma, remembrance, and the violence of history.
When we read her work, we feel at once what it is to exist in the middle of a crime and also what it is, simply, to exist. Her theme is the impossible coincidence of anguish and survival; her argument is life. In the poems that follow, intimate observation is paired with historical rupture. The family becomes a site where memory and mystery converge; resistance appears as something at once heroic and shattering.
Throughout this year, The Key will publish poetry from writers whose voices are a reckoning for all of us, whether they are well-established or appearing in print for the first time. will seek out and spotlight pieces that continue to bear witness long after the headlines have moved on.
Victoria
Back then you could take revenge
with a fence around the fig tree.
Or going stone mute. You could fold
your hands behind your back
until your fingers arched in place.
This was the life we lived
in the north. Back then we spoke
enormous English. In enormous English
my mom told me the boy had been lost
for days. The village went looking
for him with their lanterns.
They found him sleeping on a rock.
The Virgin tucked me in, he said.
My mother smiled an arresting smile.
He must be forty eight years old now, that boy,
may the Virgin be with him.
Many years have passed since that summer
when the neighbor’s evil eye hit
the electric pole my grandfather could see
from his window, and it shone on us until he, too,
was arrested in prayer. Much more evil
happened since. I am less sentimental than
I had been between those lantern men,
but I know what I saw:
My grandmother Victoria, and her long, grey braid
trailing behind her on the staircase that day,
Three days after we buried her, thirty days
after she peeled the pink off the radish in one long spiral
that left me mute. She was the Virgin coming to see me.
I know you saw her too.
The Eloquent Act
There are men who fight all their lives.
Those are the indispensable ones.
Me, I’d like to think of the eloquence of men.
A fighter filling the city of his birth with lead,
An enemy’s discorded drone
tracks him from above,
wounds him open, and he sits up.
He bends himself
forward like everything else
that comes from mud, prostrated
open to his creator, a pool
of crimson that flowers
on his back like a broken heart.
This is the image we should not see,
not one of us should name.
There are men who remember their mother’s milk.
There are men who see the shoulders of language,
and nod, it’s not indifference, no,
but tell me something I can know for sure.
There are men who choose.
Those are the decidedly eloquent ones.
