Hiba Abu Nada's "Not Just Passing" (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)

Thoughts on the necessity of others.

Not Just Passing

translated by Huda Fakhreddine


Yesterday, a star said
to the little light in my heart,
We are not just transients
passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow
some wanderers go on

walking.

You were first created out of love,
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.

One day, all gardens sprouted
from our names, from what remained
of hearts yearning.

And since it came of age, this ancient language
has taught us how to heal others
with our longing,

how to be a heavenly scent

to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,
a gasp of oxygen.

Softly, we pass over wounds,
like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,
an aspirin.

O little light in me, don’t die,
even if all the galaxies of the world
close in.

O little light in me, say:
Enter my heart in peace.
All of you, come in!


first published in ArabLit Quarterly (November, 2023)

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Hiba Adu Nada was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza almost two years ago. I am thinking of her now — of this poem today, and of another poem she wrote ten days before her death.

In that poem, “I Grant You Refuge,” Abu Nada writes:

I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.

The word refuge holds the same root as the word fugitive, which is a word that makes me think of the word exile, of which Edward Said wrote:

Is it not true that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography?

In that same essay, Said later calls exile “a condition legislated to deny dignity.”

What is striking to me is the way that, in the poem above, Abu Nada — who was someone who both lived under and was killed as a result of an oppressive force that denied the dignity of so many — is the one who is willing to offer refuge. She, an exile in her own land, used a word so often offered to exiles, finding space within what was being taken from her to give to others. What grace, I think now, in the face of horror. In this ongoing contemporary moment where the very idea of aid is legislated to no end, and where the fact of that obfuscating and legislating makes it clear that there are people, clearly, who want other people, clearly, to die, here is a poem by someone who did die. A poem that testifies to the author’s own desire to offer aid to their own — a people made into fugitives in their homeland, yes, this word fugitive that holds flee at the heart of it, and yet chose to stay. We have to keep reading such a voice to remind ourselves — because it seems the powerful want us to forget — that what is happening in Gaza is cruel and murderous.

Today’s poem holds that similar offering of its own kind of aid throughout its entirety:

how to heal others
with our longing

we pass over wounds,
like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief

Relief. Refuge. Come back, these poems say. That prefix, re—, matters. It says something about refusal and something about resisting. In the midst of this ongoing genocide, where the powerful are attacking those receiving aid and are making plans to attack cities, these words hold more heart in them than I could ever imagine. Relief. Refuge. Resist. Remain.

I think of what Naomi Shihab Nye said, in a poem she wrote after being asked — at a literary event, no less — what do Palestinians want:

The pleasure of tending, tending
something that will not be taken away.
A family, a tree, growing for so long,
finally fruiting olives, benevolence of branch,
and not to find a chopped trunk in return.

That poem ends with the kind of tongue-in-cheek quip that I have come to love in Naomi Shihab Nye’s work:

...to be ones who matter
as much as any other, in a common way, as you
might prefer…

I love — and am saddened by — these lines because of the way that they expose the inherent cruelty at the heart of what is ongoing in Gaza. Here, Nye attests that all she would like is to matter “in a common way.” The quip at the end, as you might prefer, is supposed to appeal to those in power — those who claim that they want those they marginalize to achieve agency, but really want them to achieve a kind of bare minimum of agency. This kind of desire on the part of the powerful is played out throughout history; it exists here, in America, in the way immigrants are treated, and in the legacy of slavery and civil rights. You can ask for your freedom, those with power say, but don’t ask for too much.

That’s one form of cruelty, but Nye exposes another, embedded in those final four words: as you might prefer. The ongoing genocide (exacerbated by Israel’s numerous, ongoing blockades of aid, as well as the United States’s continued sale of arms and organization of the few aid sites that Rashid Khalidi calls the “killing fields”) reveals that asking to matter even in just some common way is perhaps asking too much. Death, as each day reveals more and more, is perhaps the point. That’s the cruelty we are living with now. It is the cruelty of daily death. Unceasing and unending. It is the cruelty, too, of hearing its aims spelled out clearly — the violence intensifying, unremitting. No relief. No refuge.

This is why even the seeming-small act of centering voices that have long existed on the margins is important. In this cult of death where we live, we hear so infrequently from those most frequently affected by the actions and cruelty of empire. We are insulated and cushioned, distanced by design from the origins of what we eat and the destinations of our tax-funded armaments. This distance creates convenience, to be honest. In that distance, what once was there — a physical reminder of hurt we could not scroll away from, our own movement as we ventured toward a store to purchase something — is no longer. What remains is space, and the temptation to fill that space with what feels convenient rather than what seems to disrupt such convenience.

In The Inconvenience of Other People (an awesome book), Lauren Berlant defines “inconvenience” as:

the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation. At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world. It is evident in micro-incidents like a caught glance, a brush on the flesh, the tack of a sound or smell that hits you, an undertone, a semiconscious sense of bodies copresent on the sidewalk, in the world, or on the sidewalk of the world, where many locales may converge in you at once materially and affectively.

She later says, in perhaps one of my favorite sentences ever written:

We cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other.

I know this sentence may feel harsh on first read, but if you remove the negative connotation around inconvenience and define it purely as how Berlant defines it above, then it is true. We are inconvenienced by others, and truthfully, such inconvenience can either be viewed as something disruptive and pejorative, or something beautiful. To view it as disruptive is to begin to travel down the steep slope that leads you to viewing literal people as disruptive. And to view it as pejorative is to begin to travel down the steep slope that leads you to viewing literal people as pejorative. We have been conditioned, I think, by the absence of inconvenience in our daily lives, to view the very nature of inconvenience in such a way, which then means that, when a person is at the center of an inconvenient moment — a news story popping onto our phones, a traffic jam, a biker wanting to turn before a car — we are so close, in a way that is wildly dangerous, to thinking of others as unworthy of our time, our attention, and our care.

We live here now, in this world where, as a result of such distance, we feel that it is okay to discuss, in comment sections of news articles and Instagram posts, whether or not someone is deserving of aid. We read person after person try to justify death or attempt to legislate our usage of a word like genocide, and, in such moments, we are so far removed from the most basic of moral questions. Do people deserve to live? Do they deserve to eat? Do they deserve to write a poem without the fear of being bombed? Such questions, in our age of distance and absence, are viewed as juvenile and out of touch. No; we’d rather reckon with the logistics of war rather than the morality of bodies because, the truth is, reckoning with logistics rather than humans places more distance between me and you. In such moments, the very ideas of me and you become abstract, and, as a result, much more convenient. And in such abstraction, it is easier to kill than to love. Killing erases. Loving builds, which is why it can feel, sometimes, like work. It centers, again and again, someone else. It is inconvenience at its best and most beautiful. We need and are needed. We are friction and its soothing. We are we. We are we most of all.

Here, in Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem, “Upon Arrival,” is a stark juxtaposition of these two polarities, where the immigrant — who is viewed by the state as a disruptive, unworthy inconvenience — must, as a result of being labeled in such a way, prove their very worth, which is another way of saying their convenience, to the state:

You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I am carrying prayers in my suitcase
for a people who wait,
and I’ll unfold them
embroidered linens of verse
and spread them out across the land.

The reason, italicized and beautiful, has to do with people, and not just people, but “a people who wait” — those who inconvenience themselves for another who is inconveniencing themselves for them. I love how much space Lena Khalaf Tuffaha gives to this reason. She allows it to take up space; she gives it the importance it deserves.

Where, then, do we turn to learn how to push against this cult of death, this worship of convenience? We turn, I think, to poems like today’s, which look at a world of death and give us a language for light:

O little light in me, say:
Enter my heart in peace.
All of you, come in!

This is a language of generosity in a world of cruelty. More so, it is a language that does not view the inconvenience of other people as manifestly disruptive or pejorative. What could be more proof of this than the desire to welcome everyone? All of you, this poem says, come in. Not just come in. No. Come in!

As in: I want to be inconvenienced.

As in: I want my time to exist in friction with the time of others.

As in: I want to feel you, here, with me, now.

As in: I welcome whatever happens as a result.

We, in this moment, are so far from a collective language that embodies this kind of grace, and it is an unspeakable shame and horror that those who are giving us the language for what it might mean to reimagine a more generous tomorrow are the ones who were killed yesterday and are being killed today.

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Some Notes:

1. I’ll be doing a one-time class on Tuesday, August 12th on the intersection of longform essay writing and fiction with the Conscious Writers Collective (run by the wonderful Maya C. Popa). You can sign up for it here.

2. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here. Please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here), as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

3. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.