Speaking the Unspeakable

How do you say […]? The title of Fady Joudah’s new book of poems is made up of two square brackets enclosing an ellipsis, an image that suggests modification—someone else’s words swapped out for those of the writer or speaker—and omission. Printed in large font on the cover, it looks a bit like a hieroglyph (derived from a Greek word meaning “sacred carving”) or perhaps a sigil, a magical representation calling invisible things into the material world. The title makes absence present, showing us where words were or might have been. It also reminds us that some things can’t be put into words at all and may be, in the end, unspeakable. Punctuation, after all, doesn’t make a sound.

Joudah is hardly the first to use symbols, abbreviations, and other typographic flourishes to throw a wrench into the reader’s experience. Such gestures can be jokey or dead serious. There are lines in Byron’s Don Juan that become impossible to pronounce because of certain zany interruptions, as when Juan, falling ill in Russia, is prescribed “Aq. fervent. f. 3ifs. 3ij. tinct. Sennae/Haustus.” This startling shorthand trips us up, slackening our movement through the poem even as it cuts short the poem’s language.

In a very different mood, Alice Notley creates a similar effect in her The Descent of Alette (1996), in which successive phrases are tucked inside quotation marks:

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”
“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

In an author’s note at the front of her book, Notley explains that she wanted to “make the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend.” Her quotation marks also “remind the reader,” she adds, that “each phrase is a thing said by a voice.”

Joudah’s […] reminds us that poetry always carries a trace of its origin in recitation or song. Even when we read silently, a poem—unlike, say, a newspaper article or a sheet of instructions—invites us to vocalize the marks on the page. A poem, wrote the critic M.H. Abrams, “has a physical medium,” and that is “the act of utterance by the human voice.” To read a poem without at the very least imagining what it might sound like is, he says, “to disembody” it; to read it aloud is to restore its true material form.

Still, even as it insists upon the poem’s acoustic dimension, that “[…]” hints at what exceeds or baffles speech and therefore, as Abrams might say, reckons with what cannot be reembodied or returned to life. Joudah belongs to a poetic tradition for which the unpronounceable mark—the ellipsis, the bracket, a large space on the page—has an intimate relationship to historical violence. It’s a tradition that includes Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), a Holocaust survivor whose prolific ellipses, em dashes, and colons suggest the incommunicability of severe collective trauma, and M. NourbeSe Philip, whose 2008 masterpiece Zong! repurposes the text of an eighteenth-century legal case involving the murder of over 130 captive Africans, creating a fragmented work whose large white spaces signify the gaps and silences in the official record.

These typographic gestures draw attention to what poetry can and cannot do, and to its always abortive attempts to make sense of what is beyond moral comprehension. For Philip, the challenges of reading her poem mimic, on a much smaller scale, “what it must have been like trying to understand what was happening on board the Zong” as the ship’s captain, an Englishman named Luke Collingwood, ordered his crew to throw men, women, and children, still in chains, overboard as part of a scheme to defraud his insurance company. (The human cargo, Collingwood reckoned, would be worth more dead than alive.)

The poems in […], according to Joudah, were written in about ten weeks, between October and December 2023. Their immediate occasion is Israel’s assault on Gaza in response to the attacks of October 7, during which Hamas militants killed 695 Israeli civilians (including 36 children), 373 members of Israeli security forces, and 71 foreign nationals. Last May the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor applied for arrest warrants for three leading Hamas figures and for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s minister of defense. The prosecutor’s office sought to charge all five with crimes against humanity, though on different scales. As of this writing, Israel has killed at least 37,000 people in Gaza, while many more remain uncounted beneath the rubble of their houses. The vast majority of the dead are civilians, including nearly 15,000 children.

Because the Israeli military has been not only bombing Gaza but also starving its population, interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid including food and medical supplies, obliterating its hospitals and schools, and, as videos shared on Telegram by IDF soldiers amply prove, looting homes and subjecting prisoners to humiliation and torture, prominent scholars in the field of Holocaust studies declared as early as last December that Israel was on the brink of engaging in genocide against the Palestinian people. This judgment was also informed by statements made by government officials including Gallant, who likened Palestinians to “human animals,” and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who encouraged soldiers to put “a bullet” in the head of Palestinian women and children.

Similar evidence was marshaled by South Africa in the case it brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which, in January 2024, ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent any acts characterized as genocidal under the 1948 Genocide Convention but stopped short of ordering a halt to the Gaza campaign. More recently, on May 24, the ICJ did tell Israel to stop its operations in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip crowded with displaced Palestinians. (Israel refused.) As the war approaches its first anniversary, even those initially hesitant to characterize Israel’s actions as genocidal have begun to pivot. One such person is Aryeh Neier, the cofounder of Human Rights Watch, who, in an essay in these pages, reminds us that International Humanitarian Law prohibits “attacks that intentionally or indiscriminately destroy civilian dwellings and such structures as schools, hospitals, and places of religious worship,” as well as “measures that are intended to starve the civilian population or to deny them other necessities of life.”^*

Whether you’d prefer to call it ethnic cleansing, mass murder, indiscriminate killing, or any other term for the violations Neier describes, it seems safe to say that what is happening is an attempt to destroy any world, actual or possible, in which there are Palestinians in Gaza. Indeed, even arguments over the applicability of the word “genocide” ensure, as Theodor Adorno put it in 1951, “that the unspeakable [is] cut down to size,” turned into “an institution to be prohibited, rejected, and debated.” He continued:

The day will come when discussions will take place about whether some new monstrous act falls within the definition of genocide; whether the nations have the right to intervene, a right of which they have no real wish to avail themselves; and whether, given the unforeseen difficulties in applying the term in practice, the whole concept of “genocide” should not be deleted from the statutes. Shortly thereafter, medium-sized headlines will appear in the papers: “Genocidal Measures in East Turkistan Almost Complete.”

Joudah, a Palestinian American born in Austin, Texas, is not a remote observer of the catastrophe. By his own account, he has lost over a hundred family members to Israeli air strikes over the course of this past year. He is also a doctor—not a common day job for a poet unless you count William Carlos Williams (a pediatrician) and the erstwhile medical student John Keats—and this has particular resonance when Gaza’s health care workers and facilities have been systematically targeted by the Israeli army. One thinks, for example, of the bodies found zip-tied, still wearing scrubs, in the mass graves discovered in the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals.

Joudah won the 2007 Yale Younger Poets Prize, which includes the publication of a first book of poems by a previously unpublished writer. Among the oldest literary awards in the United States, the prize is prestigious and tends to be given to poets working in a lyric idiom—that is, to poets who focus on private experience and the pleasures and crises of ordinary life. Joudah’s first collection, The Earth in the Attic, is conventional in form, written in free verse that falls into short or shortish lines grouped into trim, perspicuous stanzas. Yet even in this book, the personal is insistently entwined with the political:

On the night of the accident
That flipped over the military truck

Cracking many teenage bones, there was a wedding.
The family blazed the air.

Bullets came down
Into the groom’s chest.

Last night we heard a Pop.
One of us shouted Wow in her sleep.

Another, awake and laughing, said:
Here goes the bride…

Joudah’s tone is measured, even dry, his diction straightforward and unpretentious. His early poems show an off-kilter, occasionally absurdist sensibility that crashes with abrupt but muffled force—Pop, Wow—into the hard matter of history. In an interview shortly after the book’s publication, Joudah, who has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur through Doctors Without Borders, noted that he never makes explicit “which parts of the poems speak of Palestine and which speak” of Zambia, Darfur, or, for that matter, Texas, where Joudah still lives and where a hospital might easily become, in his words, a “war zone.” The effect is to create a sharp division between Joudah’s poems and the “medium-sized headlines” of Adorno’s newspapers, which so cravenly trivialize human suffering while milking it for content.

“To write a poem after Auschwitz,” Adorno famously said elsewhere, “is barbaric.” Poets who respond—as Celan did, as Philip and Joudah do—to the most extreme circumstances always risk bad taste, if not barbarity. The line between representation and exploitation is thin—consider what is sometimes called “atrocity porn”—and the urge to brush a sentimental polish over the courage of people living through hell is formidable. There is the threat of subordinating ethical concerns to artistic ones, or else of turning the work of art into a newsreel, in which case we might ask: Why shouldn’t we just watch the newsreel? Besides, what would it mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide?

The poems in […], while occasioned by death, are poems that insist upon life. “I am unfinished business,” goes the opening line in the opening poem (also entitled “[…]”). “The business that did not finish me//or my parents.” In this book Palestine is named freely, but only once, in these early lines:

I forget Palestine

has a kind way of remembering
those who mark it for slaughter,

and those it marks for life.
I write for the future

because my present is demolished.

The use of enjambment is typical of Joudah. “I forget Palestine,” the speaker confesses, before our eyes drop downward and we see that the sentence goes on, that it is not a sentence about the speaker’s forgetting but about Palestine’s capacity for memorialization. Or, rather, it is a sentence that connects and contrasts two different scales of time, one personal and the other historical, while also suspending the ontological difference between a human mind—feeble, always losing track of things—and a land, nation, and culture whose people collectively maintain its memory.

Joudah’s is a poetics of upended expectations, woven through lines that often revise themselves en route to the end of a thought. Consider the strange play of agents and objects in “those who mark it for slaughter//and those it marks for life,” where the capacity to act (to “mark”) is first ascribed to Palestine’s enemies and then swiftly reclaimed for Palestine itself. The suggestion is of aggressors and victims perpetually intertwined, in an uneven, multivalent struggle audible in the poem’s syntax.

Given the war in Gaza’s disproportionate impact on children—more than 19,000 of whom have been orphaned since October, and around 3,000 of whom have had at least one limb amputated—Joudah’s emphasis on the future is especially pointed. In another poem called “[…],” we are told that “the bomb-droppers” wanted to save the children they killed “from future sins.” And yet behind this grotesque justification, Joudah uncovers a more complex motivation:

This is what the bomb-droppers
did not know they wanted:
to see if others will be like them
after unquantifiable suffering.
They wanted to lead
their own study, but forgot
that not all suffering worships power
after survival.

Again, an enjambed line—“They wanted to lead/their own study”—flips from the political to the academic, from leading a government to leading a study, in order to indict the murderous logic that transforms human beings into lab animals. While Joudah’s tone is cool, even satirical, the undercurrent of the passage is deeply pained, as the “unquantifiable suffering” of Jews is translated into a justification for the murder of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the epithet “bomb-droppers” flatly rejects any conflation of the criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The ethnic, religious, or cultural identity of the bomb-droppers does not matter; what matters is that they drop bombs. When forms of identity or affiliation are weaponized, Joudah implies, they are also erased, an irony that is as staggering as it is tragic.

Throughout […], Joudah puts severe pressure on the addressee of his poems. Apostrophe, the rhetorical figure by which a speaker hails someone or something who cannot (for various reasons) reply, becomes a device for mapping the contours of both hatred and the resistance to hatred. Joudah’s “you” is almost always a hostile and benighted entity, “blind to [the] past” and “to what’s being done/to me now by you.” In an echo of the grim salute that famously closes Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur” (“Hypocrite lecture,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”), Joudah speaks to “my enemy friend,” telling him, “I’m closer to you/than you are to yourself.” “This,” he adds, “is the definition of distance.”

I say “resistance to hatred” because these poems are determined to break from the dangerous myth of ancient enmity invoked, for example, by Netanyahu when he associated Palestinians with the Amalekites, a tribe God commands King Saul to destroy in the first book of Samuel. “You must remember,” insisted Netanyahu at a press conference on October 28, 2023, “what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” The Holy Bible says: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Joudah consistently veers away from this sort of apocalyptic language and its biblical cadences—exhortatory, paratactical, grim—opting instead for a distinctly modern tone that is almost uniformly cerebral and urbane. Emotional restraint becomes a way of refusing to mimic and thereby justify the aggressor: “Listen, ears/are erogenous,” one poem ends. “I’ll lick yours against revenge.”

Interestingly, many of the poems in […] are darkly erotic. “You show me a snapdragon,” goes one, “I tongue a fishmouth,” before concluding: “A light wind touched a bloom./It clothed then unclothed/a permission to be lonely with you.” A poem called “Barzakh”—in Arabic the word means “obstacle” or “separation”; in Islam it is the name given to the place between the world of the living and the afterlife—is divided into seven sections, each a tense, tender vignette, such as:

Each morning I clasp
your bracelet, your necklace,

Your earlobes, two buoys
on the tip of my tongue.

If anyone wanted to wonder what such sensual lines are doing in a book whose occasion is bloodshed and unremitting horror, the only answer would be that […] is a book that forces life to disrupt annihilation. In the name of thousands dead and gone it declares, “Our bodies are real,” a phrase Joudah pairs with the equally inarguable “Our ghosts are here.” He persistently asserts the tangible against the unspeakable, that which can be remembered against that which has been obliterated.

In an interview with Joudah published in The Yale Review, the writer Aria Aber suggests that the book’s unpronounceable title “evokes silence and erasure…an enclosed space, a ruined building with people inside, or even a book.” The day I sat down to write this review I saw a video, circulating on Instagram, of a man holding a toddler with no head. The video had been filmed in a displacement camp in Rafah; bombs had fallen on tents, incinerating people alive. The toddler’s name was Ahmad al-Najjar. He died along with his mother and two of his siblings, leaving behind his father and his brothers Muhammad and Yamin. Now whenever I look at the cover of Joudah’s book, I see what Aber sees, and I also see Ahmad’s head, which was never found and which he was buried without. I suspect that Joudah’s brackets and dots will go on accumulating these unendurable associations, their slender form distended by the pressure of all they are forced to hold.