Once again, it’s 9/11. Somehow, the observance seems dampened this year, with yet another spin around the sun between us and the tragedy. Yet the currents that led to the event still swirl through our world. I’ve written in past years about working next door to the World Trade Center until two business days before the tragedy. This year, I turn to others’ words — words of poets.
The poem is “Revenge,” by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. In it, he explores the pull of revenge — and the human connections that keep him from it. Below is Ali reading the poem himself at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. He reads it in Arabic, which is worth listening to for the rhythm of the words even if (like me) you don’t understand the language. Peter Cole reads it in English starting at 4:00. There’s also a text version translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin at Common Ground News.
I found the poem through a 2010 talk by National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty about “Why Poetry Matters Now.” Doty explains more about how poetry can do what Ali speaks of — humanize those we might otherwise think of as “infidel, insurgent, enemy.”:
Poetry’s work is to make people real to us through the agency of the voice. “‘Poetry is the human voice,’ I tell them, ‘and we are of interest to one another. Are we not?'” When people are real to you, you can’t fly a plane into the office building where they work, you can’t bulldoze the refugee camp where they live, you can’t cluster-bomb their homes and streets. We only do those things when we understand people as part of a category: infidel, insurgent, enemy. Meanwhile, poetry does what it does, inscribing individual presence, making a system of words and sounds to mark the place where one human being stood, bound in time, reporting on what it is to be one. In the age of the collective of mass culture and mass market, there’s hope in that.
On a day like today, when we recall a tragedy of hate and despair, or any day when we see similar tragedies in the news, or know there are tragedies yet unreported, I think it is easy to feel helpless. As parents, however, we can share books, poems, or videos to help our children understand the “other” as human, as individual, both different and similar. Words cannot in themselves solve the conflicts of our time, but they can, perhaps, nurture a mindset in our children that makes those conflicts less likely to continue into future generations.
