Guest Review: Jon Tribble

The Lives of Rain
By Nathalie Handal
Interlink Books
Paperback, 67 pp.

Nathalie Handal’s recent collection The Lives of Rain confronts the difficulties of exile and loss through lyric poems that move through landscapes shaped as much by the homeland of memory as by the experiences of the present. This book is both elegy and rebuke, speaking with hope and anger for what is cherished and what is challenged in a rewarding and troubling world.

            The dedication of the collection is “For those who give us voice,” and the struggle to make such voices heard through the poems is evident throughout the book. In “Ephratha” (which takes its title from the Canaanite name for Palestine, meaning, “the fruitful”), Handal addresses the very nature of this endeavor: “Poem/ is exile/ a guest made of stones/ a thin line between our voice and heaven’s throat?” Such a line is the point of demarcation for this work. But it is a difficult place for the poet to find herself, a place where the inadequacies of memory and utterance are not easily set aside: 

Poem

are our memories filled with pale notebooks,
fading paint, falling walls
to understand this place must we understand its howls,
to understand its howls must we understand its verses,
to understand its verses must we understand agony?  

            The question arising from the poet’s effort to speak for those who have been silence, displaced, murdered and forgotten is a recurring theme, as in these lines from “The Conflict”: 

They came to tell me that
I do not understand the place I inherited
so they will help me leave,
and I realize—we are far from each other,
and grow farther still, smaller still
like broken glass shattered in our throats,
 our breath abandoning God.

            And though Palestine is central to the concerns of  The Lives of Rain, the poems venture beyond the poet’s homeland to Morocco (“Une Seule Nuit à Marrakech”) Paris (“Orphans of Night”), Mexico (“El Almuerzo de Tía Habibi”), New York (“Caribe in Nueva York” and “The Lives of Rain”), Iraq (“Around My Body, Lost Songs”), Croatia and the Balkans (“Dalmatian Coast,” “Kolo,” and “Goran’s Whispers”), and the Dominican Republic (“Pequeñas Palabras” and “Presidente”).

            This international exploration culminates in the book’s closing sequence, “Amrika,” an eight section poem which moves through “The Curfews of History,” “The Tyranny of Distance,” “The Cry of Flesh,” “Opening,” “El Color del Immigrante,” Another Sun,” “Incantations,” to its end, “Debke in New York,” a traditional Arab dance adding its music to a new land. Handal asks: “… why we are obsessed/ with difference,/ our need to change the other?” And it is that question The Lives of Rain leaves us with, the exile’s challenge: “my voice still breaking into tiny pieces/ when I introduce myself to someone new/ and imagine I have found my way home.”