On one level, The Neverfield charts a personal quest for identity and belonging. A Palestinian with links to many continents and contexts, Handal refracts the Palestinian diaspora experience through personal experiences of itinerancy and dislocation. After years of “riding through skies wearing different costumes, landing/ in squares strange to the heart, feeling like a misplaced light in a/ dying day,” she writes, “the mind holds on to one flight –/ when/ it is not/ the language my mouth speaks, / nor the landscape my face reflects/ but/ the name I carry, / the murmuring of my blood/ that /is /my only claim.”  This search for a home, for a place of rootedness, expands beyond the personal – her longing for “a corner in my grandfather’s blood” – to the communal dimension of Palestinian history: “that place where oranges stopped us from starving,” where “a single coat” was “large enough to warm/ the entire village.”   

While this place is a matter of history and heritage, it is through poetry that Handal enters it, interweaving fragments of her own wanderings and suggestions of Palestinian devastation with a poetic cadence that contains all of this. Sketching the figure of a poet who becomes the focal point of yearning, whose words are “windows of invincible candles,” Handal evokes the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, who enters the poem more explicitly through the reference to a poet born “on the thirteenth day of March” and through the quote “Towards my heart, the only town not captured yet.”

The search for this poet merges with the poem’s yearning toward home, homeland, selfhood, and a form of transcendence. As The Neverfield charts a journey toward what Handal elsewhere calls “poetry as homeland,” the “neverfield,” a space of both location and dislocation, transforms from an impossible space to a space of possibility, where poetry becomes a bulwark against devastation and way to claim both past and future.  “If I were a woman who didn’t know she had colors on the palette of her stomach…,” writes Handal, “then they could have unknotted the braids in my hair and sent me across the border…” But against the losses of history, it is the creative capacity that provides a ground for the journey toward reclamation and wholeness. “The field continued growing / our forefathers’ names” writes Handal; “my cousin’s auburn hair …/continued …saying that/ the blue leaves would one day be green again…” Against the vicissitudes of displacement, poetry provides a recourse:  “If everything migrates, even my body, I know that in the yellow pond [of the neverfield]/ your words/ will find/ the/ exile’s/ key.”  

It is within this traveling – personal, poetic, historical and geographical – that her poetry, both in The NeverField and elsewhere, unfolds, revealing a landscape as complex as memory and as singular as breath.

Reviewer:  Lisa Suhair Majaj