Some
Propositions on the Poetry of Maged Zaher
I first heard of Maged Zaher when Leonard Schwartz told me about a
poet new to him who made Seattle into a suburb of Cairo. (Or was it
the other way around? I don't think so.) Suburbs exist outside urban
centers. Zaher is an outsider's outsider: he's a Copt in Muslim
Egypt, a brown man in white America, a software engineer and a poet.
He is a materialist and a Christian, and he veers between expressions
of righteous anger (see “brown man in America” or “Arab from
the Middle East”) and pleas for peacefulness (see some versions of
“Christian”). He is often the “you” of his own poems: “you
move as if you were trained from childhood / to inhabit someone
else's country”[.] “You” often stands in for “I” in poems,
but it also suggests a relation between the you and the I. In Zaher's
poetry, this relationship is often fraught.
The problem of space is also one of time: if “you” are of two
places separated by thousands of miles, a language and a culture, the
shift between what you remember and what is is dramatic. In these
poems, Zaher moves back and forth between Cairo and Seattle, with
stops in Atlanta to see his son, Daniel. When he changes places,
“Each action is threatened—while it is performed—to be the last
of its own kind.” It sometimes seems impossible to represent this
wash (whitewash?) between two versions of the poet: “Before even
heading to Cairo,” he writes of one trip, “I can imagine myself
sitting in Cairo airport, on my way back to the States, and in
between, a block of time that I know will capture nothing, because
there is nothing to be captured, and I think, trying to find a
purpose, an immigrant is just someone who is deeply implicated in the
problem of time.” The time of transport (which transcends nothing)
exists out of time, or is perhaps the only thing inside of it. The
immigrant is neither here nor there; he shuttles constantly within
this no-space that is not part of either of his own cities. What had
been home, as well as what is, takes on a quality of temporal
confusion. If Maged Zaher is a lyrical poet, his “I” is more
fractured than most. His English-reading audience can only witness
half of this fracture, while the other half remains a phantom.
If Zaher's Seattle is Cairo's suburb, does he also meditate on the
passage of time t/here? No doubt, as on the “wariness” of
corporate and military power in the USA. Power is wily. Whoever
possesses it quickly abandons utopian dreams for hell realms of
industrial complexes: military, corporate, even poetic. Seattle sits
at the center of Microsoft's power, which is as pervasive as it is
often unseen. A space needle looks over all of it, and it's sharp.
But
Cairo is also a power center. In a recent poem, published on-line,
Zaher writes: “Cairo – then – is a meditation on the
passage of time and wariness of state power.” He called the Arab
Spring's counter-revolution before most in the West saw it coming. He
warned against the Muslim Brotherhood before many of us knew who they
were. He knew that out of revolutionary fervor comes a reactionary
one.
But time is itself an immigrant now. What is time when it's been
digitized? What is time when you share it between computers, and not
in person? What is the time of social media? For several years now,
Zaher has posted his poems on Facebook, which calls them “status
lines”; they answer the corporation's question, “what's on your
mind?” His mind is a rhizome or rain globe (Seattle gets little
snow): it shakes up into scenes of late capitalism and mysticism,
sexual love and persistent loss, the language of the workplace and
that of Middle East conflict. There's a consistency to what's shaken,
but not to the patterns these elements take when they hit the page.
These poems occur on a “timeline” that moves. If you catch them,
they sting. If not, they move away without your ever having known
they happened. And his poems “happen,” even more than they seem
to be written-things. They float on a digital pond, the 1s and 2s of
our ever-dividing and divisive world. These poems are whole until
they break apart. Then they happen again. Only the process offers the
promise of completion. And so he continues to write. The poem is also
an immigrant. It's about “this business of being an outsider,” to
which Zaher returns obsessively.
The life
Zaher describes is one of transactions: like him, we transact
business with our credit cards, on-line or off; we transact our
poetry via facebook; we transact our love lives on social media.
These transactions are exchanges, but they don't necessarily change
anything. To the extent that our digital world renders us into
passive consumers of music, video, love, we ship ourselves out to the
suburbs of a revolution that doesn't happen. When I told him about a
poet who wondered why the revolution had not started, Maged said: the
real question is why revolution is impossible in the west. No
revelations here: just more of the same. A persistent unraveling.
What is the recipe for a Maged Zaher poem? I think it is this: one
part political anger; one part wry observation from a cafe window;
one part cynical aside; one part blurt of hope; one part lust. His
recent poems are short, diaristic. He is the Basho of our age, but
without the frogs or the pond. What gets made is a fairy tale about
class structure or about a princess who is not one and a prince who
lost his magic just moments ago. The moral has to do with an immoral
world through which we negotiate our passages as truthfully as we
can, even if truth is simply a taking note of.
Desire drives itself apart in his work. There is no such thing as
clarity of purpose, unless it is to get a kiss (or a fuck) that lasts
a while. Desire comes in the middle of everything else that distracts
this poet. One could say that desire is his poetry's center, the one
feeling that is not suburban. Distraction is his muse, as befits
someone who lives so much on-line. But this is not the distraction
that entertains us, so much as a distraction that threatens to hurt
us into recognition. Distraction, in other words, not as puddle of
confusion but as a knife that cuts through certainty. Distraction as
counter-insurgency against the fundamentalisms of our age.
Distraction has a bad name, but a carefully witnessed distraction is
the mirror in the street that Zaher holds up to his readers.
As poetry
publisher and editor, I've received interesting submissions over the
years, with cover letters that run the gamut from overly showy CVs to
“hey, Susan.” When first I heard from Maged, he wanted to send me
a project he'd been working on with Australian poet, Pam Brown. He'd
sent Pam poems for consideration by the Australian Jacket.
He'd forgotten only one thing: the poems he'd intended to send. I'd
done a collaboration with Pam, myself. In our collaboration the seams
between our voices were clear. Hers were poems, mine were prose. In
Maged's and Pam's poems, I could scarcely tell who wrote what line.
They existed in a mind-meld that defied separation, of thoughts or
words or images.
How does
an Egyptian poet, writing in American English, meld with an
Australian poet, writing in her own version of English? Theirs is a
global poetry that has nothing to do with shopping malls or image
consumption. Global poetism asserts the primacy of the imagination
over Kapital. It's capital in its subversions. This is not to say
that assertions win the day, but it's to note that not everyone's
been silenced, yet.
Many of
Zaher's poems address the problem of languages. “Embedded is the
knowledge that I lost fluency in Arabic and didn't acquire it in
English—So I operate despite the notion of the poet as a master of
language—I operate specifically because I am not a master of any
language”[.] But literature is not just made of language; it also
comes with assumptions. Those in Arabic are different from those in
American English: “Growing up in Arabic, I was exposed to a heavy
amount of literary criticism that focused on the 'message' of the
poems. Forever I am marked by confessional-ism”[.] What this means
is unclear to me; does he mean to say that a message inevitably
confesses something? Because “confessionalism” is clearly an
American preoccupation, nay a poetic movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
It also bears the freight of religious meaning. He begins the poem I
just quoted by writing, “I grew up with the concept of evil.” A
message offers mastery, even if it is only a confession. But without
the mastery of language (as he puts it), there can be no fixed
message. The message is a migrant, a crosser of boundaries. While
Zaher is obsessed with some meaning-searches more than others, his
poems never arrive. They are what happens in the terminals between
countries and languages. They live outside of meaning, or as Ashbery
puts it, “on the outside looking out.” That does not mean that
nothing means, however.
He writes
that he transferred the notion of Satan onto capitalism. If there is
a character in Zaher's poems, other than the poet and his constantly
shifting beloved (who never quite materializes into a person), it is
Karl Marx. The full extent of his work is haunted by the promise of
Marxist theory, and the impossibility of its taking root in the West.
In one of the most consistent narratives among his poems, Zaher (with
Pam Brown) writes: “Marx was here for breakfast / he said good
things about the Proletariat, / ate scantily, according to his needs,
/ stacked the dishwasher, according to his ability . . . / mumbling
things like: 'fuck Castro' / and 'Rosa rocks'” The “we” in the
poem, perhaps as close to a collective as Zaher comes, ignores Marx
until he leaves. Then, we “sad commodities” run after him,
begging for him to pray for us. But the poem ends badly, as Engels
appears on Oprah and offers up Das Capital as a movie, coming soon.
Like any of the revolutions Zaher inhabits or imagines, this one ends
badly, with the appropriation of its fervor toward
another—corrupted—end. Arab Spring ended with the Muslim
Brotherhood's counter-revolution, just as any thought of revolution
in this country ends on Oprah's show. If she's not giving away cars,
she might as well give away copies of Marx's masterpiece.
Maged and
I were in Denver several years ago to give a poetry reading at
Counterpoint Press's gallery space; he read from Tinfish Press's The
Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me. Margo Berdeshevsky,
Ya-Wen Ho, Maged, and I went to see the Colorado Rockies play at
Coors Field. After our bags were searched at the entrance, Maged was
ushered off to the side, where an older white man frisked him. I
proclaimed loudly, “he's a famous American poet!” and Maged wryly
responded, “don't make it worse, Susan.” We lingered over the
murals in the stadium, which record history from its origins to the
taking of the west from native Americans by the heroic settlers. It's
their descendants who inhabit the stadium from time to time. The
narrative was totalitarian, the style Soviet realist. The stories
were deeply racist.
Maged
calls out racism in poetry, racism in the police, racism in our
language. But he also calls himself out, often. His poems are
objective, like Basho's, but they are also confessional, deep and
self-lacerating and ethical. Maged's soul is often in danger, but his
wit is not. He possesses one of the largest laughs I know.
Later on
the trip to Denver, we went to the Terrorism Museum in Denver, lodged
next to the wonderful art museum. Among its features are rooms where
you can experience a terrorist attack (there are loud booms and the
room shakes violently). There are also beams from the World Trade
Center at the front, and a snack shop at the end. I forget what food
they served. The museum is called “The Center for Empowered
Learning and Living,” even if it seems devoted—like so much of
American culture—more to death than to living. The Economist
reviewed the museum and concluded: “If this sounds like an
expensive, museum-size example of America's paranoia, that's because
it is.”
What
place is more paranoid in the American experience than the suburbs?
Havens for white flight, they mushroomed outside the real or
perceived violence of the inner cities after the Second World War and
during the 1960s. In later years, many of them were “gated.” I
remember seeing a film about Bible salesmen in the South who wandered
a suburb of miniature castle-houses, each surrounded by a moat. I
also remember that there were three suicides within a block of my
parents' house in an upscale suburb of Washington, DC. The suburbs
may have offered an escape from communal violence, but not from the
violence we do to ourselves. Who needs a museum to simulate terror,
when it resides so comfortably at home?
If
Seattle is a suburb of Cairo, it is also a suburb of the American
malaise. Which means that it lies directly at its heart. And, while
it's part of the sleepy, rainy Northwest, real violence has been
directed against the ravages of capitalism. 1999's WTO protests left
many downtown windows shattered and some events cancelled; there were
further disruptions on May Day, 2012. It was to revolutions what a
single game is to a baseball season, and just as easily forgotten.
When I visited Seattle in September, 2015, I saw the heart of
downtown being transformed by Amazon. Like Honolulu, Seattle is full
of people who live on the street, as well as people who live in
comfort high above those streets. Zaher writes with uncharacteristic
tongue-in-cheekiness about American consumerism:
this is
the life come on
an
abundance of optimism
we will
do it and how bring it on
the wonderful world
the total fucking brilliant world
and oh how lovely is everyone
the car seat is lovely the child is lovely
and
so on. Out of an abundance of optimism and the loveliness of everyone
comes the phrase, “bring it on,”
which emerged most famously from the lips of Pres. George W. Bush. I
find a YouTube of him saying, with characteristic eloquence, in July
2003: "There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know,
the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is:
bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security
situation.” American optimism falls into a blunt equation between
happiness and force. We'll be happy if we have enough firepower. If
we're not happy, we need more. We go to eat with our guns strapped
on. It's the death drive, but it makes us grin. And so the American
proverb falls into itself, as Zaher ends the poem with a quick shift
to the opposing position (he tends never to synthesize, only split):
we're
making a difference from the beautiful car
passing
by an infinite number of lovers
an
infinite number of broken hearted lovers
and
stacks of clothes they used to wear
cast
aside in impulsive aspiration
of
the liberty that promises independence
it's
entirely fucking brilliant
“Life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” or what the Declaration of
Independence mandated as the American creed, leads to thrown away
lovers and dispensable aspirations. The language of this poem is
steeped in the Declaration's undoing. We've taken the car, and thrown
away our lives with the lovely, seat-belted baby and the bathwater.
I was in
Seattle last September to give a reading with Norman Fischer that was
organized by Maged. Maged was in Cairo, where his mother was in her
last days. He trans-acts his life between continents and languages.
He grieves on both sides of his lives. But I don't want to paint
Zaher solely as a poet of conflict and despair. He is a love poet (or
a sex poet). His poems often express unrequited love, but he
addresses them to Seattle, to Cairo, to women, to other poets, to the
vernacular sounds of English (the language most of us know him in).
His texts may be brief, but they ping a note of delight on our
devices. We read them, only to await the next. He doesn't use the
typical language of the love poem, preferring software and capitalism
to roses and hearts, but there's something alluring about these
poems. “Mohamed tells me that I am obsessed / with language and
that he likes my poems / best when I am falling in or out of love,”
he writes. In one of the most upbeat of his love poems, one I adore
for its wit and open vulnerability, he writes:
At 6:00
a.m.
With you
in my arms
I could
believe in God
I will
even pray
And send
thank you notes
To all
the angels
We are
half water
Half
advice columnists
And the
rest is love
I mean
you should believe
In few
maps
As our
bodies traverse each other's
But
usually, as in the section, “Simple Colonial Encounters,” the
power plays of the world infiltrate his feelings. “let us chat
freely / but please remember that all these pronouns / have no life
in themselves / unless you bring them with your own imagination /
well the truth is, I was too drunk to unhook her bra / but we fucked
anyway”[.] The language itself (in love, there is little but
pronoun) is dead, unless we bring our imagination to them. Which
might be a lovely thing, except for the way the poem ends, more in
brute realism than in imaginative (love)making.
To
William Carlos Williams's adage that it's difficult to get the news
from poems, Zaher responds: “Poetry is a ghost / That erases the
good news.” But, if poetry is a ghost, “these words can be taken
seriously.” The poem, according to Maged, is a division of
labor—not a unifying force. But he keeps trying, over and again, on
paper and on the internet, to disprove his own adage: “Then God—on
a bad day—invented the poets.” It was not a bad day when Maged
Zaher emerged as an English-language poet. We live in a serious time,
and would do well to take his words seriously as they fill our “news
feeds.” Join me in clicking “like.” Read on!
