The Poetry of Immigrants & Refugees

Chapter 1

The Poets of Islam, Africa, Asia: 

This class was taught at San Diego Writers, Ink on Sunday, September 22, 2019, From 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM by Jim Moreno.

The Poets:

 Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980): is one of the major Iranian poets of the 20th century. Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism, and Western traditions, he mingled Western concepts with Eastern ones, creating a poetry unsurpassed in the history of Persian literature. In Iran, his Persian verses are often recited in public gatherings and lines from them were used as slogans by the protesters in 2009. This edition collects poems from three of Sepehri’s most important books, including the highly acclaimed “Water’s Footfall.”

Dunya Mikhail (1965 – ) (United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing): Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad and earned a BA at the University of Baghdad. She worked as a translator and journalist for the Baghdad Observer before being placed on Saddam Hussein’s enemies list. She immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and earned an MA at Wayne State University. Mikhail is the author of several collections of poetry published in Arabic. Her first book published in English, The War Works Hard (2005), translated by Elizabeth Winslow, won the PEN Translation Award, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of the 25 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Public Library.

Mamoud Darwish (1941-2008): Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.  In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song.

Warsan Shire (1988 –  ): She was born in Kenya to Somali parents and lives in London. She is a poet, writer, editor and teacher. In 2013-2014, she was the Young Poet Laureate for London. Shire wrote “Conversations about home (at a deportation centre)” in 2009, a piece inspired by a visit she made to the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome which some young refugees had turned into their home. In an interview, she told the reporter that “The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof.” The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.” This poem became the basis for “Home,”…“Home” has been shared widely across the media and has been read in a range of public spaces, including London’s Trafalgar Square. Commentators have noted that “Home” has touched a nerve among people, that it has offered a way to give voice to refugees and to provide some authentic understanding of the crisis.  

Paisley Rekdal: You know, the story of refugees is not really one of trauma, it’s one of resilience…there are more people that come out of that experience who thrive, and do well; you see that time and time again…so you can’t just say war will make it’s refugees violent criminals. That’s just not what happens. I want to make certain facts very clear: that violent crimes committed by immigrants are extremely rare, that we report them because they are rare, that we are fascinated by them because they are rare, but it creates the impression that somehow this is the norm…it does make me nervous that a bad (ignorant/racist) reader could look at this book (The Broken Country), and say, ‘This is why we need to close the borders’.

 

The Poetry Of Immigrants & Refugees

Immigrants: Where the Home Is In the People.

Music For Writing:

Sar umad zemestun HQ -; 
Mohmmad Reza and Homayoun Shajarian - Shabe Vasl; 
Amazing Oriental Music - HD - FARAN ENSEMBLE 
Relaxing Arabic Music
The Last Of The Mohicans (Oud cover) by Ahmed Alshaiba

Play: Sohrab Sepehri (So rab' Seep eri'), The Oasis of Now, Excerpts from Water's Footfall
Scroll down to Play and click on the numbers 6:27 & 8:14.

Play: (Start at 6:27, end at 7:45) 2^nd Poem Start at 8:14, end at 10:00)

Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard: Scroll down to the white arrow in the middle of the video and click on it.

 Dunya Mikhail, Artist Child

Dunya Mikhail:  I Was In A Hurry

Dunya Mikhail, “I Was In A Hurry” from The War Works Hard.  Copyright © 2005 by Dunya Mikhail.

Mamoud Darwish, The Horse Fell Off the Poem,

Mahmoud Darwish: I Have A Seat In the Abandoned Theater

Warsan Shire: Excerpt from How to Bloom In Dark Places

How many arms do I need to grow to
fight off what scares me?
How many legs to leave?
How many dreams until mother tells
me how to escape this place?
Mother has given me a message.
I must tell the girls, so they can
memorise it too.
If I ever forget, they will remind
Me.

I read to them the words as my mother said them.
We pledge allegiance to our bodies,
We pledge allegiance to fortifying our
girlhood.
We pledge allegiance to water,
to it’s dutiful scarcity,
we do not bow to thirst and the shadow it
casts over our lives.
We will be our own mothers,
We will be the big sisters we never had,
We will be the fathers we almost had
We will fortify our own walls,
We will protect the vulnerable,
We will protect ourselves,
so, we will protect each other.

                                                                                                                                             yesh kevl: there is a limit: for Alex Odeh

                                                                                                                                            by Jim Moreno

yesh kevl (there is a limit): for Alex Odeh

they blew you up in santa ana, a stone’s throw from the john wayne airport,

in 1985, as you opened your office door.

did they murder you with a pipe bomb,

because on the radio the night before you flattered arafat?

your murderers, like our infamous klan

cognoscenti of hate & ignorance, shadows of violence,

have no spine.

slunk as whispers in the night leaving a small coward’s fireball–

burning you out‒

unintentionally leaving you larger than life with a million dollar reward

for their capture.

a stunning statue sculpted to show your love of knowledge & freedom.

the shadows returned twice, timidly tiptoeing in the mask of night,

defacing your memorial with red paint, odious spite, insufferably tribal,

stone-age arrogance, ignoring realities as early settlers of America

ignored rights and realities of Indian people, then slaughtered us.

one tribe of the sons of Abraham mythologize they were

a people without a land, coming to a land without people.

another tribe of the sons of Abraham believes the myth

that the first tribe does not have the right to exist.

each tribe forgets they are the sons of Abraham

each tribe forgets the way to the path of peace

and one more time we adjust to the path of violence

we adjust like frogs swimming in heating stove top pot.

but will we eventually perish like frogs adjusting,

adjusting, adjusting to the hot, hotter hottest violence

until we die as adjusted swimmers boiled in fatuous flames,

puerile feuds–lethal technology tantrums about what?

no one remembers the start? no one remembers the starters

no one remembers the issue, no one remembers the reason

for fatal false infidelities robbing us of reason

robbing us of cooling democratic, diplomatic dialogue

where both sides feel heard, feel understood, feel justice,

robbing us of hearing the arab-american voice of alex odeh,

your roman-catholic voice remembering rights basic for all.

in the frogs’ last moments, did the relatives realize

the purpose of the fire heating the pot where they swim?

did the relatives realize that endless adjusting,

adapting to hatred’s heat, not exhausting the myriad ways

to turn it down,

turn it down,

turn it down,

not cooling the burning fire has a final,

futile cost―the priceless loss of peace.

Jim Moreno fall 2000, spring 2021

Shadab Zeest Hasmi, A Glass of Tea, A View of the Atlas

A Glass of Tea, a View of the Atlas

You give me Fez honey on Fennel cakes

in a ceramic saucer because you
say, to eat from this bitter clay (glazed and
caressed with geometric precision), will
draw me into the shapeless sob of the
future. You read invasion’s epistle even
in the smoothness of ebony— ashes
of ancestor acacia on your lashes—
I raise my tea glass to level with your
eyes, the snowy Atlas scintillates behind
you— cream on your dish of weeping clay.

 

Untying the knot of ker-chiefed bread in a cedar grove

she would shudder, your mother, child of exiled
Andalus, memory embossed with two kinds of
histories— one flitting like a citron
butterfly, the other wrapped in linen,
knotted, turned to cinder over a cedar
flame— tongue of the grand inquisitor
leaping from Spain to Morocco, night-sweats,
door-chains, the informants and their fistfuls
of gold, the choke-hold of banned prayers.
Tender, the bread sponges the lava of fear.

 

Only the footed teapot’s shadow

on the wall dismantles its truth, its rigid
stance and military-medal-silver
muted in the bounty of the skylight
flecked with pheasant foot-stains from nightly rain.
Its handle forms the shape of a perfect
heart, if there is such a thing, and between
breath of Konya and bloodbath of empire,
furs of sable, mink and squirrel, and the
soft grasp of a baby around the planet’s future,
there are names for the divine in every tongue.

Play: 2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam – Emi Mahmoud (2:58)

Slam Poet and Sudanese Refugee Emi Mahmoud Shares Her Story | Now This (4:30)

Write: Choose one of the below poetry prompts, paraphrased lines of poetry from the above poems, and write a minimum 4 line poem in stanza form. Write more than 4 lines if you wish.

When you have finished the poem revise it 1-5 times, i.e. write 1-5 drafts of the poem reading each draft out loud to let your ear help with sound/meter of the poem whether or not it’s a performance piece.

Go to the banquet of the ordinary…

If you are looking for me I am…

War is generous in refugees..

I want to draw peace…

If you stumble across my country…

The house fell off…

People are just family members who haven’t met yet…

My seat in the bombed theater…

The oak broke…

A refugee’s home is…

When you live in a hole..

Enough…

 

The Poetry of Immigrants & Refugees

Chapter 2

Quotes:

Julia Alvarez: Writers write not because they know things but because they want to find things out. And not just informational things – emotional ones, the whole landscape of human feeling, emotion and passion. They want to experience things. They want to discover. Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. “ If you’re not discovering, your words will die on the page.

Alvarez: Whatever I’m writing in a genre, I’m in love with it. I have to be. If I don’t love it into being, who else will? My default genre is poetry. That’s where I began….As I grow older, I see that those things I left behind are still in me. One is poetry. That rock bottom need of affiliation and affection for language used in that way is probably my first love. “

Li Young Lee: That’s what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It’s like riding a horse that’s a little too wild for you, so there’s this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it’s going to do.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi: In the sunlit verandah, where my grandmother reads, combs her hair, offers namaz, I find the slow pages of Plato’s Republic or Iqbal’s collected poems. She has been a professor for years and years; she spends all her time reading unless she is picking mulberries with me or telling me the story of King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Androcles and the Lion, or the one about the Qazi of Jaunpur, sometimes the story of Kashmir. She drinks tea, I eat kinnos. The stories are like homes in the wilderness— familiar, welcoming, fortifying. All the bullies at school, all the demons diminish and melt away. The art of the story has a peculiar majesty— it nurtures vision, it unties the knots of history.

Federico Garcia Lorca:  The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink – and in drinking understand themselves. Only mystery makes us live. Only mystery.

 

Music To Write To:
Herbie Mann, Live at the Village Gate
Miles Davis – Best of (So What, Blue in Green, Love Me or Leave Me and more hits!)
ROMANTIC GUITAR: 30 The Best Guitar Solo Love Songs

A Glass of Tea, a View of the Atlas

 

Refugee Ship
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Like wet cornstarch, I slide
past my grandmother’s eyes. Bible
at her side, she removes her glasses.
The pudding thickens.
Mama raised me without language.
I’m orphaned from my Spanish name.
The words are foreign, stumbling
on my tongue. I see in the mirror
my reflection: bronzed skin, black hair.
I feel I am a captive
aboard the refugee ship.
The ship that will never dock.
El barco que nunca atraca.*
*(The ship that never docks.) Editor’s translation