Taha Muhammad Ali's "Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower" (translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)

Thoughts on the everyman.

Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower

In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”
 
               —
 
Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
 
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.



from So What (Copper Canyon, 2006)

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I first encountered this poem about a month ago, in an essay the poet and translator Peter Cole wrote in The Yale Review — a companion piece to an essay by his colleague Feisal Mohamed. Both essays are worth your time and attention. They are each beautiful examples of thinking through conflict with generous attention.

In Cole’s piece, which details the process by which the two colleagues worked on and revised a joint public statement, he introduces today’s poem by saying the following:

At a certain point I found myself in the absurd position of suggesting to Feisal that we delete from our evolving draft a sentence calling for the United States to refrain from sending an aircraft carrier to the region. What am I doing directing aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, I asked myself—this isn’t a game of Battleship, and what do I know about such things anyway? Though there was of course a logic to cutting that line (with which Feisal agreed). I immediately thought of an aircraft carrier I did know, from Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali’s 1973 poem “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” which revolves around an Arab everyman, the kind of person, Taha used to say, who suffers most when leaders take their nations into war.

Reading this, I think, too, of another poem from Ali’s book So What, titled “The Height of Love.” It begins gently, with an acknowledgment of what the speaker loves about the world:

I love the world, and dreams
set in that forest of light
on the banks of the mystery
of my shameful ignorance

Later, Ali turns the poem, quite viscerally and succinctly. He writes:

My enemies' tragedy,
however,
owes all to their rush
to rehearse my death

As I think of Cole’s moment of strange and absurd indecision relating to including or omitting something about an aircraft carrier, I think of that idea of rehearsing a death — which is, perhaps, what so much of politics is prior to conflict, and in conflict’s aftermath (or, in other words, preparation for the next conflict).

What is an aircraft carrier if not a rehearsal for someone’s death? What is a siege if not a rehearsal for someone’s death? What is occupation if not a rehearsal for someone’s death?

And I think, too, of what today’s poem teaches me about that line from Cole’s essay: “the kind of person, Taha used to say, who suffers most when leaders take their nations into war.” Today’s poem is a poem about that everyman, a word that will always call to mind that line about suffering from Auden’s famous poem:

how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Auden situates suffering outside of the context of that everyman, the one eating or opening a window or walking, but Ali places both suffering and the ordinary nature of an ordinary someone’s ordinary day together. Well, I should correct myself. Ali doesn’t place suffering into the life of the everyman. Someone else does. In fact, in Ali’s poem, his everyman — Abd el-Hadi — makes a conscious effort to distance himself from suffering:

In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.

Yes, the character at the heart of Ali’s poem makes every effort to distance himself not just from suffering, but from any conflict. He does not speak ill of things. He does not “raise / his voice to a soul” unless he is inviting them into his house. And yet, as Ali writes:

his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.

Yes — despite Abd el-Hadi’s efforts, the aircraft carrier is still looming just off the shore.

This character appears again in Ali’s book, in a poem titled “Abd el-Hadi the Fool.” It’s a heartbreaking poem, beginning with these lines:

Before the dough of my skull was ravaged
by the buzzards of the world,
I was a fool!
I was naive...
and wanted to fly;
I loved horses and poetry.
I dreamed of a meal 
that would last forever

Ali’s “fool” is not so much a fool as someone ordinary, someone innocent, someone joyously in love with the wonder of the world. And he is also no longer these things. No longer in love; no longer wanting to fly. His “skull was ravaged,” and he became normal, no longer a fool. This is all after, as Ali writes later, he witnesses “destruction” and “pillaging” and “flame” and “murder.” Such violence translates his innocence into foolishness. This is, sadly, the way of the world, isn’t it? How terrible.

The most shattering, painful moment of the poem occurs in its own stanza:

However,
my great apostasy
is this:
no sooner does the laughter
of a child reach me,
or I happen upon
a sobbing stream,
no sooner do I see
a flower wilting,
or notice a fine-looking woman,
than I'm stunned 
and abandoned by everything,
and nothing of me remains
except
Abd el-Hadi the fool!

This breaks my heart for two reasons. The first is one part hopeful — this idea that what is beautiful never leaves us. That, despite the brutality at work in the world, we might still be in thrall of what might move us at any moment — a stream, a child’s laughter. But the second is less hopeful. It is the idea that, once we are defined by the world as foolish for our wonder or our joy or our innocence — things that always, I believe, begin with ordinary attention — we struggle to free ourselves from such a definition. This is one casualty of violence that goes unrecorded: the loss of our little wonder, and the loss of our appreciation for it.

I can’t help but consider the title of today’s poem. We think of that word — superpower — as something good, often. We ask people: what is your superpower? We do this so often. And yet, and yet, and yet. I sometimes think about how the great superpower of those in power is to make us believe that part of our ordinary life must include longing for superpowers of our own, superpowers that try to rescue us out of the place where we are living, a place where we are shamed for our imagination, our littleness, our daily lives where we cook breakfast and open a window to let the breeze in.

I have, over the past month, been almost exclusively reading the novels of Alice McDermott — my first exposure (long overdue!) to this writer of magnificent grace, someone whose attention is so focused on the ordinary that each of her novels — I’ve read Charming Billy, Someone, and The Ninth Hour — feels like looking through an apartment’s window for a lifetime, through the glass steamed by breath, frosted by snow, cleaned and then steamed and frosted again.

Here’s a passage from Charming Billy that illustrates that feeling:

Maeve lifted her head, but did not raise her eyes. You could see in the stubborn set of her jaw that it was not a figurative life that she wanted for Billy at this moment but a literal one, his literal presence, coming in with the dog as she dozed, opening the cookie jar where they kept the dog biscuits, hanging the chain on the hook by the back door. Their life together, even as it was, simply going on.

Their life together, even as it was, simply going on. This is what an Alice McDermott novel touches on. It is, too, what a life is. Or can be.

Consider, too, this short, as-close-to-perfect paragraph from McDermott’s novel Someone:

He shifted in the bed and put his arm around my waist, put his face to the satin and lace of my lap. There was the sound of water running in another room, another door closing somewhere nearby, and short voices in the hall. The ordinary, rushing world going on, closing up over happiness as readily as it moved to heal sorrow.

I think of these novels and lovely glimpses of the ordinary that McDermott offers when I think of today’s poem, and when, lately, I think of what continues to happen in Gaza — namely, the ongoing violence that has affected so many, I imagine, who have been moving through the ordinary actions of a life before being caught up in the brutal acts of war.

In McDermott’s novels, her characters are shoe salesmen and uncles and widows and children and childhood friends and nuns and train passengers. They walk dogs and have trouble falling asleep and hide their worries. They might be thought of as smaller than life, in common parlance, though they are actually — as each of us are — the size of life itself. They suffer loss and fall in love and question their choices and the choices of others. They gossip and brew coffee; they wonder about the future and worry about the past. They do what we all do, which is live, which is no one singular thing but is instead so much of everything, all at once.

I think of them now because I think of what they remind me about the world, which is that, while I am living, so much else is living, and so much else is in the process of offering attention to so much more. There are lights in the sky, moving. And from the sky: lights on the ground, moving and standing still, huddled together in rooms and walking beside each other on streets.

And so, too, I am thinking of the everyman presented by today’s poem. I am thinking of what we can learn from him, and the danger of forgetting about him. I am thinking of the sheer, awful scope that war presents for us, clear as day. An aircraft carrier against a man cooking eggs. A billion dollars worth of weaponry against a town, a village, a building, a home.

People suffer enough already. McDermott’s novels have taught me that. They suffer the ordinary machinations of a life, such things that have the potential for suffering just as much as joy. These little lives we have are brutal and yet wonderful. But then, add to that ordinary dailiness the great scope of war, and the little lives are the ones that, as Peter Cole says, “suffer most.”

I do not want to lose sight of the ordinary, ever. It is from the ordinary that I have learned so much of what I love about myself. It is from the ordinary that I might learn to — as today’s poem illustrates — love, or offer, or just simply invite in. Not knowing who. Not caring why. Just loving, or offering, or inviting. These are ordinary actions. They make up so many homes in which, right now, so many people are being gentle with so many others. They are not superpowers. Superpowers are, so often, these brutal things we have come to accept about the world. The cause of so much suffering. And so I turn my attention today back toward the ordinary, toward the man offering food to strangers, to the person brought to tears by a child, to someone waiting, with real love, for who they love to come home — from work, from walking the dog, from anything at all. I don’t call it foolish. I call it alive. I wish it more life. I wish it as much life as possible.

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Some Notes:

1. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition 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.

2. Here are some things I’ve read recently in relation to the war on Gaza that have moved me:

   1. This wrenching overview of the death of the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, which includes a link to this widely-shared poem of his

   2. This essay by the Palestinian Youth Movement

   3. This essay by Peter Cole

   4. This essay by Feisal Mohamed

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