Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's "You Can't" (translated by Fady Joudah)

Thoughts on posing no threat.

You Can’t

translated by Fady Joudah

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can't.
It'll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree's life.


from You Can Be the Last Leaf (Milkweed, 2022)

A long time ago, while I was standing in front of a locker after swimming at the Y, someone next to me said: you don’t lock up your stuff. It wasn’t a question. They gestured at the locker I was standing in front of, and how it was, well, unlocked. I shrugged and just said no and got changed. I had felt seen, or judged, or both. I thought of this moment earlier this week when two students in my classroom were talking about not trusting other students, about keeping items close at all times, never out of sight. I thought of this, too, in a conversation with some teachers about how our classroom’s doors are supposed to be locked at all times, even when we are in them. Sometimes a student knocks on my door while I am teaching. I want to mouth it’s unlocked, but it’s not. The door is locked. It has to be.

It is true that I don’t often lock up my things. I don’t bring a lock when I go to the gym. I sit at the bar near my laundromat almost every Sunday as my laundry swirls in the wash, and, when I leave to put the clothes in the dryer, I keep a book where I was sitting — sometimes a stack of papers I have been grading, my jacket, even, once or twice, my jacket with my wallet in it. It reminds me of my smoking years, the coasters and napkins left on beers as one cigarette outside turned into two, or three. There is a part of me that feels weirdly bad about this, as if my unwillingness to lock up or safeguard my personal items reveals an inherent carelessness that is actually some sort of moral detriment. But the truth is that I really find it strange how often we spend our days justifying distrust, the somewhat unimaginative (a doorbell that’s also a camera!) hoops we have come to jump through in this process of giving our distrust a different name — protection, maybe, or care.

A long time ago, I was talking with someone about this — my unwillingness to lock up my things — and their response was something along the lines of you’ll wish you locked up your things after someone steals them. I just said something like sure, yeah, I know, but I remember thinking to myself how sad. I felt sad for so much in that moment. I felt sad about carrying around the burden of that distrust every day, the heaviness of the belief that anyone might be out to get you at any time. I felt sad that, well, it’s true — people do steal. I felt sad about that, yes, but mostly I felt sad about the circumstances that might drive one to do so, the loneliness of last resorts, and the supreme loneliness of a life lived and provided for through consistent enactments of last resorts, rather than the more cared-for feeling of a life that could be supported in some collective way.

I guess I’m thinking about all of this because of the opening lines of today’s poem:

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can't.
It'll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.

I’m thinking of lack of imagination sitting on its own line, the cause — just as influential as death by age, or death by boredom — of someone falling. But actually, I’m thinking of today’s poem in its entirety. I’m thinking of how this poem is such a compassionate exercise in miniature, a reminder that our conception of the world and how it should be can be subverted in wildly gentle ways. The poem’s second half is a testament to this:

Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree's life.

The gentle — and still radical — subversion that this poem offers is in the way the final three lines are truly imaginative things. If one falls from the tree because of a “lack of imagination,” then the act that runs counter to that lack of imagination is the belief in gentleness, in the fact that you can convince the universe / that you pose no threat / to the tree’s life. It is this belief in something much kinder than violence that makes this poem light-filled, generous, and radical. It is the way that Maya Abu Al-Hayyat invests the imaginative with something slower, more care-filled than it often feels filled with these days.

Such an idea reminds me of a moment in Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a book I read recently and loved for its perspective and keen eye for absurdity and juxtaposition:

One farmer told me that the future is a created concept, and that in the fields, in the long dark of winters, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment. An act of care. In contrast, urban culture is centered on the belief that the universe must be constantly corrected on its course, and that life is defined by the pleasure of overcoming future challenges.

We live in that world of constant correction. We have to adapt. Pivot. Change course. We borrow and renew and invent language for such correction. We devote schools of thought to it. Industries. We use the word challenge a lot. We use it, perhaps, more than stillness or slowness. We say, often, there’s no time, and then we somehow make less of it, or make it pass faster, or measure it in smaller increments that rush past us in a blitz of urgency. We consult. We advise. We throw money at people throwing money at other people, people we pay to name problems so that we can pay people to create solutions. We ideate. We brainstorm. We test run. We do a lot, I think, other than the simpler — and perhaps more difficult, though gentler — act of trying to convince the tree we live on, this fragile earth, that we pose no threat to the tree’s life.

I don’t want to say that poetry is a place that poses no threat to this tree of earth’s life, because poems can pose a threat. They can anesthetize, or undo, or do less than they say, or more. But one thing I love about poetry is that so many poems — whether intentionally or not — exist in conversation with one another. It is as if, in some imaginative web, there are little tendrils threading their way toward one another, as if we are reading the result of seeds in neighboring gardens being blown into the other’s soil, creating, in some ways, the same garden in different places, but the same world. For example, the almost-final poem in Jane Mead’s collection Money Money Money Water Water Water is titled “Been a Grapevine In My Stead.” It reads, in full:

In the end you are
and then after some time
you are not, more or less—

as the saying goes. What
did you want? You
who were barely honored

with birth in the first place, 
who nearly missed 
being in this world, you

when there could have been
a grapevine in your stead?

I feel this poem in conversation with Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s, if for the simple reminder that we are not, perhaps, as imaginative as we give ourselves credit for. Us, who take up space, when there could have been grapevines in our stead. The products of our societal imagination often seek to amend or even belittle the frailty of our lives. They work to remind us of something other than our transience, something other than our fragility. We — who nearly missed being in this world — take up so much space in it.

This kind of senseless endlessness of the human imaginative is something that Al-Hayyat describes in her work, especially in relation to violence. In one poem, “Since They Told Me My Love Won’t Be Coming Back from the War,” she writes:

Since they told me my love
won’t be coming back from the war,
I’ve been writing our children’s names
on clouds and in journals,
documenting their birthdays,
shoe sizes, the poems they recite,
and once and for all,
I learned that all of them
won’t be coming back from the war,
and neither will I.

The grief here is apparent, yes, but also the all-consuming nature of what we live within. The disaster of it. The way the human imaginative mind has so often been extended toward violence rather than gentleness, toward elimination rather than care. In the consumptive world of such a violent imagination, nothing can survive, not even those who are not part of the war, because — thanks to the imagination — everyone is. And, as such, Al-Hayyat is left to take up the more imaginatively generous work of imagining those who were victim to a more violent imagination. Here is her poem, “Daily I Imagine Them”:

Those who die in wars that don't concern them,
they were driving through shortcuts
or smoking their cigarettes on the roof,
watching a romantic comedy
or a cooking show,
they were passing through the wrong war
to become numbers and martyrs.

I imagine their sorrow as I cross a checkpoint,
wait for my kids after school,
peel garlic and smell my fingers,
or peek out the window to shoo pigeons away.
And at night in bed
I dream of a war
that's got no war in it.

This is the imaginative work of trying to do no harm. Of repair. Care. Wondering a self back toward life. Reminding the tree that you pose no threat. It is work that often falls on those targeted or unrecognized. On mothers and victims of violence. On seeming-bystanders in a war. What are the powerful doing? Whose sorrow are they imagining, other than their own?

There is a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, “Waking This Morning,” which ends with these lines:

                       I want strong peace,
and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.

I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.

We wake each day among the anti-touch people, and we wake each day within the violent day. Sometimes I find myself being one of those people. Sometimes I find myself thinking violently. I do; I do; I do. One burden of living in a world drenched in capital and war and the machinations of progress is that we become threats by virtue of existing within it. We become threats to each other. We become walking models of distrust and greed. And we certainly internalize structures that, when existing within us, turn us into parrots of violence and loneliness and all else that leads us away from reminding the tree that we collectively live upon that we pose no threat.

I need to remind myself, each day, that what was once billed to me as imaginative is not really imaginative, that sometimes the most imaginative things are the gentlest, the slowest, and stillest. This is the one thing, perhaps, that I’ve learned over time that I know I need to hold close, else I will lose it to the rush and swell of living. Though I used the phrase violent imagination earlier, violence is not imaginative. Neither is progress that cannot be imagined without a cost.

I struggle with this every day. I struggle with the verbiage of teaching, the cliched question of what do you want to be when you grow up bouncing around the hallways and locked classrooms of my school, and the answers, often fed into students by adults, that have been the same answers for nearly all of time. Maybe what I love most about this poem is the use of that phrase you can. Often, such a phrase is used to encourage people to be something or someone that exists on the other side of ambition. But here, in today’s poem, Al-Hayyat reminds us that you can be something maybe even ordinary, something kinder to yourself, perhaps, than ambitious. She reminds us that we might have to remind ourselves — as if repeating a mantra, you can, you can, you can — to center that desire in the same way someone else might say you can, you can, you can to remind themself to pursue something at all costs. It’s a realization that Larry Levis comes to in his poem, “Crimes of the Shade Trees.” If I am really / Something ordinary, he writes, that would be alright.

In How I Became a Tree, Sumana Roy writes:

Immediate abandonment of worldly ambition would be familiar to anyone who has stood under a tree. Being under a tree is a holiday from reason—who has seen a bureaucrat clearing files under a tree after all?

I am working toward this. I want to free the imagination from ambition, free it from violence, free it from urgency and the blistering pace of progress. I want to return it, in my own mind, to gentleness and slowness. I get frustrated with how difficult this feels. I get frustrated with how frustrated I feel with myself. We’ve internalized so much, haven’t we? I get lonely thinking about that. I get sad. But we wake each day among people waking into the violent day, and they choose touch, and they peel garlic and smell their fingers, and they know that there could have been a grapevine in their stead, and they live, still, with that knowledge, rather than turning away from it. Maybe you are one of those people. Yes, maybe you guide your imagination toward that, and what it could mean for this life, and yours, and ours. Yes, maybe you move your imagination back toward life, rather than away from it.

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