Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's "Upon Arrival"

Thoughts on solidarity as an enlargement of our imaginative capability.

Upon Arrival

You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I want to walk down old roads
and caress stone walls the color of my skin.
 
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because the olives are ready for harvest
and I will coax the fruit from the trees,
press it into liquid gold.
 
You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because my parents’ house
still sits empty on a bluff overlooking the sea,
the green shutters my grandfather had just painted
remain sealed shut
and the army listed the property’s owners
as absentees.
 
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.


from Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017)

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For most of this month, I have been teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to my AP Literature class. I love teaching this book. It is, personally and also — to the extent that this is possible — objectively, one of the most powerful books ever written. Ever, really. It does everything at once. It subverts expectations of both theme and style. It gut-punches you with a sentence that remakes your understanding of the world while, at the very same time, remaking your understanding of how such an idea might be conveyed. By that, I mean: there’s real style in the book — style that expands the world rather than minimizing it.

Anyways — I’m thinking of that as I read this poem because I’m thinking of Hurston’s protagonist in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I’m thinking of Janie, someone who loves blooming things and sensuous things. Someone who loves the world unabashedly and who, when she doesn’t see that same love replicated in the ways that humans connect and communicate and interact, gets confused, even a little bit depressed. She gets lonely.

And I’m thinking of Hurston, too. I’m thinking about how, when her novel was published, some people tore it apart. Here are a few of Richard Wright’s criticisms of Hurston’s work, from a review titled “Between Laughter and Tears”:

Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction…

Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in…facile sensuality…

The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.

And so, I am thinking not just of Janie’s loneliness, but also of Hurston’s. I’m thinking of the loneliness that arises not out of a commitment to what Wright labeled “facile sensuality,” but out of a commitment to what is truly a more dogged sensuality. A tough, enduring love of the sensual, which is to say — a love of the world, as it is and as it could be. It is that love-of-world that is present throughout all of Hurston’s novel. It is present on the sentence level — Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time — and it is present, so deeply, in what is underneath each sentence.

Here it is, put simply, and near-perfectly:

A little war of defense for helpless things was going on inside her. People ought to have some regard for helpless things.

And here:

What things? She didn’t know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.

I’m thinking of all of this — of Hurston and Janie and the war of defense for helpless things — because I’m thinking of the conceit of this poem today. I mean, read this again:

You will need to state the reason for your visit.
Don’t say because I want to walk down old roads
and caress stone walls the color of my skin.

Here, immediately: a juxtaposition. A juxtaposition between the bureaucracy of the world and the immediacy of the sensual imaginary. A juxtaposition between limitation and freedom. A juxtaposition between power and those who are marginalized by such power. A juxtaposition between so much we see in the world and so much we no longer see. Today’s poem lives in that same juxtaposition that made Wright call Hurston’s work “facile” rather than true, or loving, or full of real care. It is a juxtaposition that you can bear witness to every day, if you are paying attention.

Each stanza of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem begins with a reiteration of the power, cloaked in rationality, in reason, that exists in opposition to the real care of the world:

You will need to state the reason for your visit.

Each time this is said, we are reminded of the ways in which power — in this case, the power of the state, and the power of empire — places a limitation on the human experience of the world. It structures what does not necessarily need to be structured: love, or compassion, or feeling. Each time this line is repeated, it makes you wonder: Why can’t love be enough? It makes you wonder: Why can’t feeling be enough? And, as the poem continues, it makes you wonder: Why can’t olives be enough? Or fruit? Or the green of my grandfather’s shutters?

Yes, look again at all that should be enough, which is all that Lena Khalaf Tuffaha italicizes in this poem:

the olives are ready for harvest
and I will coax the fruit from the trees

I am carrying prayers in my suitcase
for a people who wait

Here is poetry as a form of resistance to the machinations of power, as a form of resistance to the way that power forces people to see the world through power’s eyes rather than their own, and, in doing so, to feel as if feeling is not enough. That love is mere whimsy. That there is no place for idealism. Or no reason to pick fruit from a tree you once picked fruit from. And here, too, is elegy for all that is lost to empire. The fruit lost. And the living lost, too. Touch turned into memory. A place turned into something distant. Intimacy pulled apart. That is what makes up love, isn’t it? The intimate ordinary. The days spent in the groves of our lives, with the people who know such groves, who know the wind and the air and the smell and the care of being among people in a place where people have been among each other for a long time. Empire can rip that apart, too. It can deprive people of that simple and joyful architecture that makes up love, which is to say that which makes up a life.

And so yes, when I read a poem like today’s, I think of the responsibility we have to reckon with what poetry bears witness to, and what poetry turns our attention towards. I think of Gaza, where this poem is being made to happen, and has been made to happen, in real time, where war and killing have turned homes into memories and people into marginalized exiles. The intimate ordinary — shattered through with violence. And I think of the solidarity we must have with such people, people who live and love under siege. That solidarity is important on its own, yes, and it is also important because — as today’s poem reminds me — we all have experience with this juxtaposition, with what empire and power makes of ordinary life — how, so often, people are made to justify their care or their feeling or their love, are made to state the reason for their visit, which is the same, perhaps, as saying state the reason for your life, as if care or feeling or love was not enough.

What we choose to minimize and what we choose to enlarge has to be — I have come to realize over time — one of the most important questions we should consider as we move through the world. Solidarity is an enlargement of our lives, a way of extending our imaginary capabilities into what feels disparate, but is actually truly connected — in so many ways — to our own experience. When I think of Hurston’s “little war of defense for helpless things,” I think of how helplessness is the consequence of reduction, the consequence of someone saying that your experience or point of view or feeling or life is not worth their care. To take on the fight that Hurston mentions is to enlarge one’s perspective. It is to reject the way that power redirects and limits your gaze.

This past week, I tried to talk about something tangentially related to this in my AP class. I tried to talk about how Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, feels so consistently lonely, which is a kind of absence of solidarity, because no one — in the novel’s opening chapters — shares her sensual experience of the world, an experience that makes her question so many different structures of power. And when I asked my class if they wanted to know what I thought about her, and when they said yes, I tried to talk about the fact that, though so many people might dismiss Janie as childishly idealistic for her love of nature, Janie is actually really on to something. I tried to talk about how nature — in so many ways — has modeled a more imaginative and sustainable way of interacting with the world than we, as humans, have.

Anyways…there is no way my little impromptu lecture did justice to this idea, and, as it happens, Ali Smith said it better than I ever could.

In Ali Smith’s Artful, she has what I have come to call a “perfect paragraph” — perhaps my favorite encounter in all of writing. (As an aside, I don’t call many things, if anything, perfect. But, when I encounter a paragraph in someone’s writing that is so entirely its own thing, this frame-able, compact journey of ideas and style and thought, then I write perfect paragraph in the margins, and I read it over and over again.) John McPhee writes many perfect paragraphs. There is one, in particular, from his book Oranges. Zora Neale Hurston has one on page 25 of Their Eyes Were Watching God. And Ali Smith has one on page 102 of Artful. It reads:

The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its color, it's not because its time is up and it's dying, it's because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf's been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change color in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it's filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that's coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff which seals it against cold and bacteria. Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.

What this paragraph teaches me is that Janie’s love of nature is not wistful foolishness. That the speaker of today’s poem’s desire to simply caress the walls of what once was home must always be reason enough to visit. To love the world, which means to see the world, truly, in all the ways it has modeled for us a more caring and compassionate and intimate and connected way of being, must be enough. And if the structures of power make us feel foolish or inadequate or marginalized for such love, then such structures are oppressive to the very condition of being human. The truth though, is that such structures have made us feel foolish for such love. The truth is that this oppression — of the imaginary capabilities of our lives — exists everywhere; it exists in even the most mundane interactions of our existence. It exists in officers who ask people the reason for their visit. It exists in grocery stores and in education and in forms and in tests and in corporate newspeak and jargon. It exists everywhere — this oppressive limitation of the full extent of being and feeling and sharing in such being and feeling.

I want to be more like Janie in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I want to be so in love with the world that I do not doubt our collective connectedness. I do not want the possibility of solidarity to be a question mark. I want it be an exclamation point. I want blooming things. I want to talk to the leaves as they fall to the earth. I want to say — to everyone and anything that falls — I hope you fall on soft ground. Just as, yes — just as I, too, want to fall on soft ground. Whenever I fall. And I will fall. I often do.

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Some notes:

1. I had an essay published in Longreads a little over a week ago. You can read it here. Thank you for reading it, if you have the time. It is about a year of learning (when I sent in the essay, it was just titled “Learning”) and what such learning has taught me — which is to say, more about about how to cope with the uncertainty of life than anything else. What is the word for that, I write in this essay (and still wonder), for the wild surprise of life we make possible by learning, each day, how to live?

2. Here is a list of urgent fundraisers for Gaza, if you have the means.

3. 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.

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.