Mustafa Abu Sneineh's "Nablus Street" (translated by Katharine Halls)

Thoughts on reduction and expansion.

Nablus Street

It was a wordless confession.
I recall the sun sliding into the darkness of the settlement,
Soldiers with guns beating the sunset
until it passed out.

A lovestruck boy stealing poems from Nizar Qabbani
and love letters from The Snow Comes Through the Window.
I’m still a lovestruck boy
Even though the sun has long since gone under
Even though my first confession of love
Was made in the crosshairs of the occupation’s guns.



from Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestininan Poetry, edited by George Abraham & Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024)

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I first read this poem in Heaven Looks Like Us, an anthology of Palestinian poetry published by Haymarket Books and edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi. It’s a rightfully massive and certainly beautiful anthology that does what its title suggests, centering the livelihood and imagination of Palestinian voices in a way that contemporary media so often fails to do. One tragedy that builds upon the tragedy of the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the tragedy of a kind of twofold reduction, where the violence of empire quite literally reduces the amount of lives in Palestine, and where the commentary and coverage of that tragedy reduces those who are left, turning them into people without agency or narrative, mere statistics and body counts, rather than deserved storytellers of their own lives in the midst of such horror.

I felt deeply drawn to this poem today because of its specificity of both personhood and place. Nablus is a city on the West Bank, nestled into a valley between two mountains, and surrounded by Israeli settlements — the same ones, I imagine, named in the poem’s second line. There is the specificity of place. And here, in what follows, is the way a poem can convey the reality of a place through image:

Soldiers with guns beating the sunset
until it passed out

What a remarkable image—awful, striking, brutal. How it takes the beauty of a sunset and says here, this is how violence ruins beauty. The poor sun. Even it, thousands of miles away, has been beaten down by empire. And then there is the way that such violence transforms people’s experience of the everydayness of the ordinary into another reminder of oppression. All of that, in one image. This is a poem.

It is from that specificity of place that Abu Sneineh turns to the person:

A lovestruck boy stealing poems from Nizar Qabbani
and love letters from The Snow Comes Through the Window.

In the midst of that place that Abu Sneineh so brilliantly and so succinctly lays out for us, we are introduced to a boy who is so brilliantly and so succinctly described. Once again, if you need the reminder, this is a poem, balancing between those poles of specificity and imagination, of directness and evocation. One only has to read a few lines from the aforementioned Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani to feel the boyhood at the heart of this poem.

Here are some, from his poem “When I Love”:

When I love a woman
all the trees
run barefoot toward me…

And here are a few more:

I wrote the name of the one I loved
On the wind.
I wrote the name of the one I loved
On the water.
But the wind is a bad listener,
The water does not remember names.

Read these lines, and then read again today’s poem. Do you feel it? The lovestruck boyishness of the kid at this poem’s heart? Do you feel his ache? His longing? All of the romance, and how it swells and beats and perhaps even makes him want to take a different shape? Do you feel and understand, perhaps, his willingness to steal for all of it, for all of that feeling? Do you feel him reading those lines from Qabbani and then looking at the trees that surround Nablus and imagining them all running toward him, pulling up their roots? I do. I feel that. And I see him, this boy. I see him dashing around, in love. I see him foolish and romantic. And I see him now, looking back on his own boyhood, insisting and insisting and insisting.

To see that love, and to feel it, is a gift. To see it, too, in the context of what oppresses it, is also a gift. This poem offers us that gift, asking nothing in return but to be read, which is one way of being witnessed, which is one way of being seen. To read, then, is to practice seeing. What we do with that act of seeing outside of the poem is what we do with our lives.

I am thinking also, about how the word confession, too, is fascinating in this poem. I love it; I am so struck by that translation. We confess when we are guilty, don’t we? But we confess, too, our love. We confess it — instead of profess it — when we are young, I think, or maybe ashamed. Or maybe scared. We confess our love when such love makes us feel guilty. We confess it because we don’t believe yet that love is not an act of guilt, but rather an act of freedom. The confession in this poem is not, I don’t think, about the boy stealing poems. It’s about the way in which one tragedy of violence is that it can make us ashamed to be free. It’s about how even love, in such a moment, has to be whispered. Tell me if there is a greater sorrow than that. I am not sure that there is.

The poem’s final lines attest to the tragedy of reduction I mentioned earlier:

Even though my first confession of love
Was made in the crosshairs of the occupation’s guns.

There is so much sorrow here. The sorrow of a boy not being able to safely confess his love. Not being able to safely express his love. And then there is the sorrow, too, of the way that — as a result of being in a state of ongoing oppression — his life might come to be defined by oppression rather than expression. That he might never be seen as a boy capable of love. That he might only be seen as a boy oppressed by violence. This poem takes that boy out of the crosshairs. It looks at that boy with love, rather than with fear, or with a desire to kill. It looks at that boy with love.

There’s a poem by Summer Farah in the Haymarket anthology titled “PORTRAIT OF ME AS BREAD BAKING IN JERUSALEM.” The whole poem — not just the title — is written in capitalized letters. Here are a few lines:

I WAS THERE! A BREAKFAST LAID OUT UNDER THE
OLIVE TREES AFTER AN EARLY MORNING HARVEST.

Emphatic and specific. I think of this poem when I think of today’s poem because it does what I don’t think many people ever have to do: it asserts, over and over again, its humanity. In the wake of these tragedies of reduction that are ongoing, these poems do what should not have to be done: they remind people, with joy and with romance and with image and with verve and with style, that they exist. I WAS THERE, they yell.

In Hold Everything Dear, John Berger writes:

on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice

A poem like Farah’s reminds us of that — that justice and happiness go hand in hand. It’s a poem that demands visibility and then also ties our gaze, when we do perform the act of witness, to beautiful things: olive trees, figs, watermelons, and more. And then it connects those ordinary joys to an ongoing atrocity of violence. Justice provides the expansion for what such violence reduces. An expansion of life, an expansion of imagination, an expansion of joy.

I think, lately, of a phrase I hear often, one that goes something like we should restore their humanity. It’s a phrase used when talking about those in Gaza, or anyone who has experienced the violence and oppression of empire. And though I notice the good intentions of such a phrase, I can’t help but grow wary about the fact that sometimes, those who are asking for such restoration of humanity are also ones who are complicit in the reduction of such humanity in the first place. There’s a cruelty inherent in such a paradox, that those with the power to take away people’s humanity also think that they, too, can restore it. They consider themselves the masters of some awful lightswitch of both death and life. Since May, nearly 800 people in Gaza have been killed while trying to receive food or aid. Tanks have fired into masses of Palestinians gathered around trucks of food. This notion of restoring humanity in a time like this feels almost perverse. It keeps power in the hands of empire and keeps agency away from those who have been denied it. We should demand, instead, life. And we should demand voice. And stories. We should bear witness, and we should remember.

Toward the end of the anthology that today’s poem is in, there is a poem by Najwan Darwish, “Who Remembers the Armenians,” that reads:

I remember them and I ride the 
nightmare bus with them each night 
and my coffee, this morning I'm 
drinking it with them

You, murderer -

Who remembers you?

Poetry — and those who read it, and those who write it — has the potential to be on the side of memory. To be on the side of witness. To be on the side of agency and specificity. To be on the side of imagination and reimagination. Recentering, and recentering, and recentering, until the center is in the middle of a circle wide enough to include rather than to exclude, to expand rather than to reduce. It has the potential to be on the side of an expression of language that gives testimony to life in a time when there is so much loss of life. Otherwise, something is missing and so much is incomplete.

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1. I was grateful to have four poems published earlier this week in Soft Union. You can read them here.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.