Fady Joudah

Last Updated

February 24, 2025

Original Air Date

February 24, 2025

Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah’s poem is sparingly titled “[…],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.

We’re pleased to offer Fady Joudah’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.

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Guest

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children, where he works as a physician in internal medicine.

Transcript

Transcription by Alletta Cooper

Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and I’ve loved the radio ever since I was a child. And there was one moment of radio listening to the BBC years ago that has always struck me. It’s famous in BBC history. Rowan Williams, a Welshman who was the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, was speaking about silence. And while he was speaking about silence, he kept a six-second silence on the radio. And it’s amazing to think six seconds is nothing, but it lasted forever on the radio. And you’re thinking, has something happened? Has the signal died out? Is my radio dead? And then he continued talking. It was so confrontational and so simple and so brave.

The poem today is a poem that also makes use of silence. This is a poem by the Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah. And the title is a pictogram, three dots in square brackets. How do you say that? I don’t know. Do you take a breath in? Do you just hold silence? Is it some kind of expectant erasure or emptiness? I don’t know. So here it is:

[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]

“[…]” by Fady Joudah

“I can’t explain it. Something about pattern
turning into rhythm. All my life
I knew liberty would be mine
after great disaster is visited upon me.

“Though some attain it
after visiting disasters on others,
it isn’t liberty they attain.

“What is disaster? And what liberty? Years later,
I came across a book about a boy
whose fears lived in everything he lived.

“Without reading the book, I had read it.
I was not that boy. I was the fear
he wanted to be real. A right part

“for a wrong life. The helping hand
his fantasy desired. Kicking and screaming

“my freedom came. Freedom that had been lost
and won back, not always in the same place, but always
the same freedom. Carried on shoulders,

“crawling out of the ground, falling from the air,
onto the shore, into the self, etc.

“Devastated, the boy was satisfied.
We’re all the same kind of animal.”

[music: “Snowcrop” by Blue Dot Sessions]

The title of this poem is the same as the title of the book. Imagine square brackets, and in between those two square brackets, there’s an ellipsis — three dots. Certainly, an ellipsis is trying to imply something’s about to come. There’s a whole variety of poems throughout this book that use this as a title. Each time I see it, when I read it, I find myself thinking of all the different ways within which the complicated expectant space of this could be understood.

Fady Joudah wrote most of this book in about 10 weeks from October 2023 to December 2023. Everything that was happening in Gaza after October the 7th. The book explores dehumanization and complicity, as well as silence and disdain, and extermination. But it’s also about music and survivance, a term that’s used in Indigenous literature in North America to talk not only about survival but about the art of survival under erasure. What does thriving mean? What does eros mean within the context of having to practice survivance?

These poems aren’t just about everything that’s happened in Gaza since October the 7th, it’s about the long history of Palestinian poetry too, the beauty of it, the pain of it, and everything in between.

[music: “Levander Crest” by Blue Dot Sessions]

This is a deep meditation on the ambivalence of desire. On the eighth line, there’s two questions. “What is disaster? And what liberty?” And I think that desire — saying you want something — is usually saying, I don’t have it now and in the future, I don’t want to not have it. It would be a disaster if I didn’t have it. And so, therefore, this question, “what is disaster?” is anticipating, what might it be like to not get what you say you want? But then right after it asks, “and what liberty?” Is it possible to imagine being free of our desire? Or do we think that the thing that we desire will be the very pathway into liberty?

And then toward the middle of the poem, we suddenly fall into narrative. “Years later, / I came across a book about a boy / whose fears lived in everything he lived. // Without reading the book, I had read it. / I was not that boy. I was the fear / he wanted to be real.” Those lines begin to be much more kind of narratively comprehensible than the other lines leading up to it. It’s like he’s been grasping, walking through a dream, walking through the difficult, hard-to-define parts of the human condition when we encounter questions about liberty, desire, ambivalence. He represents the fear about that boy. And who is that boy? A boy on the other side of a border. Is the boy him? He says not. “Without reading the book, I had read it. / I was not that boy. I was the fear / he wanted to be real.” Why would we want a fear to be real? Maybe because it would justify the veracity of the person who told us about the fear. To be somebody who repeats a particular fear can mean that you share a certain kind of belonging with other people who repeat that fear. And then the fear needs to be real, even if it’s not.

“I was not that boy. I was the fear / he wanted to be real. A right part // for a wrong life. The helping hand / his fantasy desired.” This poem reads in a way like some psychoanalysis about the complicated relationship we have with fear because lots of us would say we want to live a life without fear. But that can be a very fearful thing, to look at our fears and say, actually, they’ve fulfilled some role, like a crutch in my life. And “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t,” we say. All of these phrases that were so familiar to us, Fady Joudah is exploring these in this brilliant, dense, sophisticated poem that’s hard to grasp. And he gives us a clue in the first line. “I can’t explain it.”

[music: “Memoriam” by Gautam Srikishan]

Ambivalence in the human condition is one thing, to explore it, but reflecting on ambivalence during a time of annihilation is absolutely another. I found myself looking at the lines about freedom toward the end of the poem, “the same freedom. Carried on shoulders, // crawling out of the ground, falling from the air, onto the shore, into the self, etc.” What’s being described there? It feels like all these memories of watching news clips about what’s happening in Gaza, people who are kidnapped, people who are crawling out from the rubble, people who are helping other people. All of these images came to mind in a catastrophic, complicated way, going back and forth between one and the other. It felt like moments of survival were being called back to mind in a confrontation. Is that satisfying? Of course, it’s not. There’s a grim reflection in this poem about what satisfaction is.

The second last line says, “devastated, the boy was satisfied.” Why would you be satisfied with devastation? If we imagine, if I imagine that what’s going to come towards me is destruction, well then I’m going to need people to destroy me. And that’ll give me a certain satisfaction to say, “See, I was right. I’m devastated, but at least I have the satisfaction of being correct.” And then “We’re all the same kind of animal.” I love what he does here because so often you might want a poem to come together in some universal statement that gives you a bit of relief at the end of it. And he does make some kind of universal statement at the end of this poem, but it’s not a universal statement of relief. “We’re all the same kind of animal,” which is to say what? We are likely to follow our desire for an enemy if that is going to give us some kind of satisfaction.

The place where I see hope in this poem is the challenge inherent in that last stanza. “We’re all the same kind of animal,” which might be to say if we could recognize that, would it be possible for us to have different desires? Or we might be able to carry the truth of our ambivalence. We might be able to do this in a way that doesn’t call for such predictable destruction where we fantasize about others as fear, and then therefore make them into the fear that we fantasize about.

[music: “Caravan 4” by Blue Dot Sessions]