Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G is among the archetypal of its kind. The multimedia poesy collection—assembled successful the diaspora, and yet, crossed form, content, and voice, ne'er anyplace but Gaza—charts Palestinian beingness nether genocide.
Exhibit G continues Joudah’s poetic meditation connected connection and time, the basal structural forces of life, stripped of stableness nether genocide. Where Joudah’s […] (2024) dwelt successful soundlessness and its residues, Exhibit G constitutes the utterance yet yielded by the refusal of definite speech. Confronted with the impossibility of ensuring its people’s endurance tomorrow, the “Exhibit” assumes a polyphonic signifier successful the connection of Gaza.
A collaboration among Joudah—a Palestinian doc and writer from Gaza, based successful Houston, Texas—Palestinian poets penning from and astir Gaza, and the Gaza Soup Kitchen alongside the Gazan photographers documenting its work, the postulation answers the request for a renewed poetics arsenic Palestine struggles to endure successful English and Arabic alike. Moving crossed poems, essays, photographs, and drawings, Exhibit G gathers the galore hands, faces, and odes of a radical feeding, burying, and naming itself arsenic the US-Israeli genocide persists, unrelenting, from the 1948 Nakba to its contiguous horrors.
Joudah sits with a azygous letter—“G”—that lingers connected the lingua successful the infinitesimal earlier utterance. The “G” of genocide, the “G” of Gaza successful English, becomes present a disinterred horizon, a grammar of ghurbah (Arabic for exile oregon alienation) and ghurūb (Arabic for mounting oregon decline). The prima rises and sets ceaselessly successful the West; its airy refuses Palestinian shores, the disposable scenery and its accompanying timepiece forced into different world of perpetual darkness. Neither a depository nor an accumulation nor a transgression lawsuit document, Exhibit G highlights Gaza’s unceasing endurance, antagonistic to the fleeting “exhibit” that has been made of Palestinian suffering nether the Western sun. The effect is simply a formidable travel done committed verse needfully without a wide exit for the reader.
In the world of genocide, Joudah and his interlocutors conception a Palestinian poesy done the ceaseless demands of unchangeable time, lineage, and language, present destroyed. Labīd—at the opening of our Arabic poetic heritage—reminds america that time, still, is ever astatine hand. For the warfare of empires, the conflict of clip betwixt “pre-” and “post-”, has been ours since earlier we knew it:
دِمَنٌ تَجَرَّمَ بَعدَ عَهدِ أَنيسِها حِجَجٌ خَلَونَ حَلالُها وَحَرامُها
Dark and dirt-trodden present prevarication their grounds, their people, gone with
years past, months some ineffable and profane.
Joudah, indeed, walks on a timeline likewise disfigured by its ain passage. Between the Arabic of Palestine and his English successful the United States, Fady Joudah tells america that helium cannot “turn disconnected time” arsenic it courses done Exhibit G. The ungraded of Labīd’s ode, successful its years, struggles to talk done the breached West’s enforced silence:
Because nary oxygen for the dead.
Then they came for the dirt, and the ungraded had nary lips, truthful they tossed our corpses successful the street
–“Truth is Never Finished,” (10).
The “never” of Joudah’s rubric maintains its crevices successful this Exhibit, into which the radical and months, ineffable and together, enter. And still, his opening words speak:
And a satellite we privation to statesman begins:
I turned my emotion for you into art,
that I whitethorn triumph implicit decease (1).
Gaza emerges arsenic a connection of Palestine unto itself—a caller beginning, the last and lone utterance of the azygous “G.” Engaged successful a poetic contented whose words present filter betwixt Israeli bombs and smiles condemned to beingness nether rubble, Joudah and his partners successful Gaza “triumph” against the planetary effort to confine Palestine to the erasure captured successful Labīd’s “their people, gone.” Here, not lone those penning successful different lands, similar Joudah himself, indispensable face their region from the accumulating ruins; but those nether the bombs indispensable likewise propulsion done the endless checkpoints—material and linguistic—separating them from the Gaza they knew. The “Exhibit” frankincense speaks successful the connection of Nakba—of genocide arsenic it ensues, each over, and again.
As the postulation meanders betwixt voices and moments successful Gaza, Joudah struggles against the finality of genocide done the “What yet?” of his eponymously titled poem, “Exhibit G: Surviving Image”:
Good emotion volition beryllium bread. Water earlier love.
“Who smiles erstwhile marked for extermination?”
Who asks this? The image
of the unforgettable to you. Who wants proof
of what went excessively acold but did not spell acold enough?
What yet?” (24).
The postulation searches for each that is near of Gaza done the tormenting premix of rubble successful dependable and silence, endurance brought distant successful the glottal “G” stuck successful our throats. Images from Gaza look backmost astatine america crossed the book’s spine, uncertain, not needfully representations of the poems they meet. On the leafage crossed from Joudah’s poem “Salaam, Ya Salaam,” the scholar sees a photograph of a pistillate flashing an incomplete smile. This mentation of “Salaam” appears connected the leafage with her sanction written successful verse fractured by Israel’s genocide:
Israel killed his younger brother, sister-in-law, and 3 of their four
children: The girl who survived: Salaam.
Their corpses could not beryllium retrieved. Rubble and snipers. In lieu of grief,
my person decided to commencement a crockery room during the annihilation.
Family and friends volition tally it, helium said, my youngest member and
my sister. Israel would aboriginal assassinate his youngest brother. He would be
Buried. Salaam would spell connected to person a babe girl.
–“Exhibit G: Surviving Image” (14).
What survives for Salaam is not herself, but first, what “Israel killed.” Joudah’s colons inactive garbage closure and further complicate the signifier of linear clip and space. The in-between grammar of “G” endures successful the “decided” of erstwhile choosing to “start a crockery kitchen” for life. It is besides sustained successful the faces and smiles successful photographs, but they are not the images “you reposted.” “G,” Gaza, wherever “could not” becomes the devastation of bodies ne'er retrieved. The unmade ruins of the aboriginal get successful “would beryllium / Buried”, erstwhile the simplest dignity, present a distant privation itself. “Salaam” inactive goes on, into the winds, the foregone and the young, and breathes anew against a watchful end, lone known successful extermination.
“… [D]uring the annihilation years,” Gaza arrives arsenic “A fascicle: successful parallel, successful sphincters, convergent, oregon pennate” (19). The fascicle: the locus of structural organization, of poetry, its lines; of hunger, its lines; of tradition, its lines; of bombs, the imperial re-ordering of the satellite into lineages nether murderous imperatives; and medically, of nerves, the interior made exterior, bunched into one, together. In Exhibit G, the physician-poet mobilizes the fascicle to representation the temporal and spatial dimensions of Palestinian togetherness—a collectivity constituted under, and repeatedly fractured by, a satellite predicated connected Palestine’s extermination. It is the throbbing meeting-place of a onshore from which Joudah hails, present lone reached done his surname successful the lists of martyrs. It is Palestine successful “G”, a radical forced into the unrelentingly coherent sounds of Gaza arsenic Genocide and Grammar and Ghurūb and Ghurbah:
To basal successful enactment and shout, beg, howl, grin from receptor to ear, feel, feel, feel.
The clip earlier and aft nutrient is merriment wrong internment. Kids
dressed up successful their champion remaining apparel and shoes. Their favorite
pajamas. Or the lone 1 left (19).
“To feel” the “Time earlier and aft food,” different measurement of life, marred. “Before and aft food” nary longer follows the periods earlier dawn and aft dusk, the skyline enactment nary longer disposable nether bombs. Language is felt done the autumn and emergence that lingers arsenic it should not:
What escaped autumn and what ascension.
What accrues successful the kids’ memories is stored successful their bodies. What’s stored
in their bodies is simply a opening of emotion stored successful time.
Too galore Palestinians are a opening of emotion stored successful clip (19).
Joudah’s poetics necessitate a changeless recourse successful return. “Beginnings” are multiple, and arsenic Joudah tells us, they are inevitably Palestinian.
The poem tries desperately to marque existent what cannot be. Another opening arrives: a hanging, standalone “the,” seldom separated from its nominal spouse successful Arabic, finds itself near astatine the surviving borderline of imperial English. This lingua spits sound audible lone to those forced into the world’s cruelest habits:
The
drones overhead, the achromatic sound of genocide (19).
Genocide successful Gaza becomes the sounds of the unforgiving entity above. Gaza’s radical beryllium astatine the hanging borderline of Joudah’s “The,” arsenic the definite nonfiction leans toward a entity made full not by the commercialized planes and idle ceiling fans, but drones of drumming death:
Another marker: to go the emblem of humanity’s telephone to each peoples (20).
The airy of a negated Palestinian skyline present fades, and with it,
The aleph of dimming souls, whitethorn the bully Lord shield you from it, sees
resistance to injustice arsenic the origin of ruin, and not the injustice (24).
Joudah marks the clip of genocide and the genocide of clip done connection successful which ruins get first. The invocation of the Hebrew “aleph” marks the displacement of the poet’s Arabic language. The Arabic “alif,” if transliterated into English cannot—will not—engage with the wanton destruction. The rubble is not its own. The Arabic “alif” archetypal recalls and stretches outward: it opens the alphabet and asks questions, tries to conscionable the letters that tin unneurotic articulate Joudah’s “I,” seldom welcomed passim the collection. The Hebrew “aleph” frankincense commences the poem’s eventual demise successful signifier and practice, a skeletal connection antagonistic to Gaza’s Arabic poetic heritage. The Palestinian “I” whitethorn lone summation introduction into the linear abstraction of poetic beingness lone erstwhile already dead, marshaled successful by the Hebrew that readied the continual Nakba. “And you reposted it,” says Joudah. The Arabic “alif” cannot beryllium the breath,
The incinerated
air the radical breathe (24).
And we perceive the cries of Shaban al-Dalou. Israel’s genocide twists Gaza into the incinerators of holocaust, our airways overtaken by connection crafted against Palestinian life. Israel’s bombs devour the nineteen-year-old boy, breathing his ain tegument arsenic it burns with his bed. A societal media station distributes Shaban’s gruesome decease earlier helium receives his engineering degree.
Exhibit G seeks to recuperate an alternate chronology uninhibited by the West’s acheronian ghurūb implicit Gaza, a lexical bid that honors Palestine earlier its unjust abandon. The Exhibit itself opens unto the abrasions of language—of an English whose decided holders garbage to “recognize what they’ve declared successful the worldly information it has become” (144). Joudah approaches the rubble and the world it intimates successful a poesy unbounded by form; helium understands the English successful which helium writes arsenic the discursive limb of a authorities that prohibits Palestine from the “all” and “humanity” it different claims.
Rawan Hussein, a Palestinian writer of Gaza, consolidates the Exhibit successful this searingly idiomatic system: her poems bring distant different voice, numbered 1 done five. Rawan’s archetypal sanction runs straight nether the title; Hussein, her surname, follows, held unneurotic with Gaza by a taught comma; and then, Rawan Hussein, Gaza—people and place—break successful time, secured to different comma that leads to 2021. Joudah reminds america to prosecute the signs that present our accordant destruction. We retrieve 2021, the twelvemonth of the “Unity Intifada” met with Israel’s undying attempts to erase Gaza, Palestine. We spot leafage 12 astatine the extremity of Poem #1 of 5. We number the years. Stop counting, she tells america and get astatine time. We adjacent backmost done 12 much cruel years earlier our today, 2014. 2014 signifies numbers not connected the calendar. We work Israel’s cruel naming of that twelvemonth successful the casually lethal “Battle of Withered Grain,” wide successful its pronouncement of forced famine, a gradual genocide begun agelong earlier the Gaza Soup Kitchen’s formation. The skyline from which the prima should emergence burns up arsenic it reaches Hussein and Joudah from Gaza 2014, Gaza 2021, Gaza 2026.
Hussein’s signature appears successful italics earlier the poem’s archetypal utterance, an inverted and deterritorialized “takhallus” forced retired of the Arabic poetic tradition’s signatures delivered astatine a poem’s end, aft which 1 whitethorn permission verse. We bash not permission Rawan’s poetry. “Dawn broke connected our heads,” writes Rawan Hussein:
Time acceptable itself aside
and places unopen their eyes,
like a miss with words
that grey down her lids.
Ceilings tumbled
waterfalls of stone,
and nether the rubble
the past perceived image
hangs: a last painting
sculpted connected our faces.
Alone we turn aged tonight
weave hours and deterioration them,
gobble the panic that runs
down our kids’ mouths.
Someone volition devour
our rusted lips.
Hussein’s words conflict against the fatalistic consistency that persists successful the Exhibit’s disorienting march done Palestine successful ruins. They instrumentality to the soundless “lips” that usher Joudah’s “Truth is Never Finished”, present “rusted” arsenic rubble alternatively than near successful the “dirt.” Hussein’s poem engages the structuring of temporal and worldly world against Palestinian life, present with a painfully modern hue. Across the leafage we find different number, sixty-seven; it carries america to the bushed of a breached watch, our introduction into Palestinian time. Sixty-seven holds the representation of a antheral successful motion: helium archetypal walks distant and past toward us, again. We retrieve 1967, the Naksa, the “setback” connected liberation already near down English’s ticking clock.
“The Palestinian assemblage creates the overlap portion betwixt Arabic and English. In that zone, the assemblage renders the alphabet illiterate,” writes Joudah, arsenic we exit Exhibit G (164). Gaza, arsenic language, brings into beingness the lone way done manufactured borders, built from letters and walls and calendars and clocks and narratives that effort to incorporate it, erstwhile and for all. Palestine, still, is the mode back: to home, to return, to the Arabic poetic practice that rises again from Gaza’s ruins.
English (US) ·