My Library
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year but all the words have died. I search for my favorite book, Out of Place. I find it lying lonely in a drawer, next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone. The pen inside the book is still intact, but some ink drops have leaked. Some words breathe its ink, the pen like a ventilator for a dozen patients: Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa, the rock, the oranges, the sand, the pigeon, Cairo, my mother, Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea. first published in The Paris Review (Summer 2024)
I first read this poem earlier this week, when I received the recent copy of The Paris Review. I was sitting on the 6 train one morning on the way to (thankfully) one of my final days of school for the year, saw Mosab Abu Toha’s name in the contents, and immediately turned to page 213. I, like I imagine many, have become familiar with Mosab Abu Toha’s work over the course of the last year, especially as his presence online has become a source of ever-constant witness, reportage, literature, and more — all documenting and lamenting and hoping in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
And so I sat with this poem for a long time, with this long metaphor of the pen as lifeblood, literature as something that literally gives breath and voice — bloodwork, soul-work of humanity — to so much. And I was struck by so much, too. First, I was struck by the poem’s ending — those final, repeating words:
the sea, the sea
And immediately, there it was: an echo of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. And, too, an echo, in particular, of a moment from that beautiful novel:
I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
In that novel, Murdoch’s protagonist isolates himself from a world that he has, in many ways, wronged. And he waits in that immense, unforgiving loneliness. He waits for contact, which is really a kind of forgiveness, which is really part of what making a home means — forgiving the wrong that happens, like all things happen, inside a home. But I don’t know if Murdoch’s protagonist would call what he feels a kind of loneliness. Probably he would say solitude. But really, he is lonely. He feels it eventually, I imagine.
Thinking of those lines, and their heavy emptiness, I am struck by Mosab Abu Toha’s longing in today’s poem. It is a longing for home that is a kind of communion, and such longing contrasts so deeply with Murdoch’s protagonist’s solitude — a solitude that is anti-communal. The sea is empty and massive and in that emptiness he waits for words from others, and none of them come. But for Mosab Abu Toha, the sea is just one part of this deeply expansive and yet intimate and communal thing he calls home. It is a home that is disappearing — because, I don’t have to imagine, of violence — and so he is holding onto it with words. The letters are there, for Mosab Abu Toha. They are the things helping to keep home alive.
That kind of testament to the real power of literature — life-giving, life-sustaining thing it is — is worth sitting with, any and every time you can. It is one of the reasons why we read. I don’t say that to mean that we read to learn how to live, or to develop a kind of ethics. No. I mean that, if art arises as part of a necessary condition of human expression, and if human expression is what it seems to be, which is to say an expression of the full, all-encompassing, multitudinous sensation of what it means to be alive, and if, then, part of that sense of being alive includes, sadly, even tragically, such things as loneliness, injustice, pain, suffering, longing, desire, and more, then we can expect to read such things when we read art, and, through such reading, the feeling of encountering such expressions is then registered to us as its own expression, an expression we must internalize and include in our lives. Do you see what I mean? It’s okay if you don’t. I haven’t proofread that sentence. But what I mean to say is that the very experience of encounter is part of the experience of making and reading art. We make art out of, in part, what we encounter. And what we encounter includes, in part, so much art that has been made. It is a cycle — life-giving, sustaining, sometimes difficult — of meeting and making, making and meeting. And so, I think about how we hold that experience of encounter. Where we hold it. If we hold it. I hope we do.
I just finished Will Arberry’s Corsicana, a wildly beautiful play. In that play, one of his characters, Justice, is asked about something she’s writing. She shrugs it off at first, the question. But then, when pressed, she finally offers this testament of her work:
Well it’s about anarchism and gifts. About the belief that humans are fundamentally generous, or at least cooperative. That in our hearts, most of us really do want the good. It’s about the evils of centralized power, especially in a country as massive as the USA, let alone a state as big as Texas. It’s about an unforgiving land. It’s about unrealized utopias. It’s about how failing is the point. It’s about surrender. It’s about small groups. It’s about community. It’s about the right to well-being. It’s about family. It’s about the dead. It’s about ghosts. It’s about gentle chaos. It’s about contracts of the heart. And the belief that when a part of the self is given away, is surrendered to the needs of a particular time, in a particular place, then community forms.
This powerful, wide-ranging testament exists within a play where everyone is struggling to conceptualize their idea of home — of what they need, and who they need, and what they need from who they need. And, along with the final lines of Mosab Abu Toha’s poem today, it reminds me of all that literature can hold, and, through such holding, keep alive:
the pen like a ventilator for a dozen patients: Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa, the rock, the oranges, the sand, the pigeon, Cairo, my mother, Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
I love this final stanza. I have come to love it all the more as I read it again and again. I love it because I think there is something special happening in the craft of it. Notice how the pen that Mosab Abu Toha mentions is keeping “a dozen patients” alive. And then notice the “patients” listed below. If you don’t count any repeated words, such as “the sea,” then you are left with thirteen different words. Not twelve. When I realized this, I smiled, and wondered what to make of it. And then I thought no, don’t count home. And why not? Because home, I imagine, is the word for all of them. And the word for each of them.
And that is part of the beauty of this poem. It shows, with a little playful dexterity, all that can be included in a word. And all that must be included. It shows how large — almost beyond description — an idea of home is. And it shows, too, how tragic it is when violence is so willfully used against every idea of home. Because when war — or, I should say, intentional destruction of a people — is made reality, we are shown images of houses destroyed, buildings. We are shown awful images that barely do any justice to the reality of such destruction. But such violence also destroys fruit trees. It destroys libraries. It destroys people’s relationship to their conception of home. The most ordinary things. Such destruction is horrific in its totality, and you forget, because of the way language is so often weaponized by those with power, all that a home can hold, and all that is lost when a home is destroyed.
In another of his poems, “What is Home?,” Mosab Abu Toha reckons with that same largeness hinted at above. Here it is, in full:
What is home: it is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted. It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled. It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum. It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes. It is the café where I watched football matches and played— My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?
Though it is not a film about war, such testaments of the indescrible, all-containing idea of home remind me of a scene from a movie, Prince Avalanche, where Joyce Payne, not an actor, but a survivor of a wildfire, is sorting through what is left of her house. Here’s a bit from Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of the movie that describes the scene:
The most powerful scene is one of the subtlest: Alvin talking to a woman named Joyce Payne, whose home was destroyed by the blaze. Payne is a real-life fire survivor, and that was actually her house. Green and the crew met her during filmmaking and thought it would be nice to work her into the movie. "This is your house," Alvin says. "Was," she corrects him. "Everything's past tense now." She tells him she used to be a pilot, and wonders how "anybody's gonna prove that I had all these experiences, and flying." She tells him he's looking for her pilot's license. "Do you think it burned up?" Alvin says. "I guess so," she replies.
For Payne, her idea of home was about more than just the structure of the house itself. It was something seemingly ordinary. And in the scene, her grief as she searches through the wreckage is palpable. Beyond palpable. It takes over the film.
And so, when I think of Mosab Abu Toha’s work, I think of what it asks us to witness about atrocity. I think of how he bends our ears and guides our eyes to the ordinary losses, the things that, when lost, become extraordinary testaments to the idea of what home must mean for people who are alive right now. How home includes buildings and books and birds and trees and windows and all that can be seen from such windows. And yes, all the people. So many people.
In another of Will Arberry’s plays, “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” one of his characters, Basil, says:
All there ever was was people. Discover your neighbors. Discover your children. When the sirens blare, you need to know each other…
Mosab Abu Toha’s work is work that reminds us to know each other, and to know that what each other means is a thing that contains so much more than any of us could ever be able to explain. And so we must protect each other, in order to protect that vast, inexplicable sense of who each person is. Each incomprehensible universe. If home takes at least twelve words to even try to get at explaining, as today’s poem shows us, then a single person, and all the homes they know? It must be infinite.
Just the other day, I attended a graduation ceremony for the seniors at the high school where I teach. I love graduations. I love how people show up. And I love the real joy — a joy of relief and a joy of pride and a joy of doorway-making. But my favorite thing about graduation — as I texted my wife during the ceremony — is the caps. I love how many students made special designs for their caps. Sitting behind them the other day, with all the teachers, I welled up looking at and reading all the caps. Some were funny. Others were certainly inside jokes. And still others were impassioned thank-you’s — to family members, to higher powers, to places and to countries where some students were born. Taken together, the caps offered a sense of what it means to celebrate, and to belong. They did what so much art does: they invited people into the room. And then we were there, all of us, seeing how big a home could be, and how many people could fit there, in such a home, at once. It was a lot of people. It was beautiful. You have to hold such a thing. You cannot let it go.
Some notes:
If you do not already, consider following the work of Mosab Abu Toha.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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