Poetry, like love, cheapens when not deeply true or almost perfect. Embracing the unloved lover is a small torture, an excruciating ennui. Similarly painful is cracking open a book of poetry that doesn’t immediately slay you. Arguably the worst reaction one can have to that person beside you, to that poem on the page, is disappointment. And so I lie in bed with Ehab Lotayaf’s To Love a Palestinian Woman but the title only conjures up Mahmoud Darwish’s “A Lover From Palestine.” It’s complicated.
It might be that Lotayef, the Egyptian-born McGill IT engineer and self-described photographer, songwriter, playwright and social activist – and of course, poet – is trying too hard. He makes reference to the 26th chapter of the Koran that admonishes poets because they “say what they do not do.”
“It is mainly due to this verse,” he says in the book’s introduction, “that I have decided that if I want to write poetry then I will have to be present in the streets, the slums, the danger zones and do my share of action.” A familiar presence at demonstrations, rallies and meetings, Lotayef has also exhibited his photos of Gaza and Iraq.
The poems in this collection, thirty-three in their original English and half a dozen translated from Arabic, are concise, rarely over a page long, and thematically clear and accessible. In one of the more brutal poems, “Kill the Suicide Bomber,” he asks:
How can you kill the suicide bomber?
Give her justice
she’ll defuse.
In another, “The Ocean of Wisdom,” he offers a rare critique of the Dalai Lama:
we resist from our slums
you resist from your podium
…
Leave my aching land alone
to Lhasa
I support your right of return.
In such instances, Lotayef’s personal experience and worldview serve him well, grounding the poetry in unassailable truths.
All too often, however, there is a sense that with such incendiary subject matter (Palestine,
imperialism, injustice) Lotayef feels that just showing up is enough. In “Amerika” (can somebody please impale that spelling with a very sharp pencil?) his take is somewhat facile:
Only within the artificial freedom you allow me
am I free
Only within the confines of my prison cell
can I manoeuvre as I will
Who stabbed me in the back I’ll never know
I only heard them laugh as darkness fell.
Meanwhile, in “Exodus” he advises, “forget Hamlet and his crazy conquest.” I understand that reading Shakespeare may not be high on his list of priorities, but there is nothing “conquest” about the story of Hamlet. Elsewhere, stock phrases seem to satisfy: “the dark depths of the night” (“Alone in My Tower”) or “we lived a dream of dreams” (“Damnation Song”) or “freedom is a bird” (“The Wall”), or “the earth trembles beneath our feet” (“The Dream”). The cumulative effect of all these clichés renders the text banal, not to mention a little tone deaf.
Even worse than being boring is the lover or poet who inadvertently conjures up someone else. Which brings me back to Mahmoud Darwish, the great lover, I can only assume, and great poet. In “A Lover From Palestine,” Darwish engages the entirety of his senses risking his life for his lover: “If I sleep/Let maggots eat my flesh… Long ago/I turned away the invaders’ horses/Deep in my soul/I know/I will turn them away again.” Now that’s what I want to hear in the middle of the night.
There is a reason the French use the term petite mort when describing an orgasm. To achieve the ultimate pleasure one must engage in total abandon and self-sacrifice. With a little more risk-taking, commitment and skill, Lotayef may yet write a great poem. Until then, I confess I cannot be faithful.
Leila Marshy is a Montreal writer and editor.
