have you seen the face of your father?
the Zohar says:
when a person is about to depart from this world, their father and all their relatives hover before them in a felt presence. and the person, who is about to depart, sees them and recognizes them.
what interests me the most from this sacred text is not the ancestral arrival, but the jolt of recognition.
at the moment of departure, a new dimension of vision opens. the ability to recognize relatives that one has potentially never met.
for the past six months, i’ve been working on a book about the 1915 Jewish deportations from the Baltic region.
hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from their villages on the holiday of Shavuot— including my grandfather’s family. most were sent to Siberian work camps where they died of famine and tuberculosis.
such large scale dispossession drastically re-shaped the fabric of Jewish communal life. great wound of modernity. nation-state formation.
conducting this research during the ongoing genocide in Gaza has plunged me into questions of time, language, and power. how to map the underbelly of history while refusing sentimentality and nostalgia? how to expose technologies of State-craft in media res?
here is there is everywhere.
i feel as if i’m building a new language, one in which my past cannot be rearranged into a weapon. making sense is the least of my concerns.
i’ll be traveling to Latvia again this summer, visiting my family’s village and continuing my research. Latvian Television produced a small feature on the project, which I’ve linked below. (it’s mostly in Latvian, but there’s some English, too!)
may a new dimension of sight open before us. i’m in the long middle of revolution with you.
yours in poems,
emet
poems:
The giver (for Berdis) by James Baldwin
Even the Gods by Nicole Sealey
One more story he said In a restaurant in Amsterdam by Philip Metres
Vietnam Ghost Story: Đà Lạt Lovers by Hoa Nguyen
Don’t Hide the Madness by Nhã Thuyên
other things:
“Genocide begins with the idea of Genocide” writes Esmat Elhalaby in“Towards an Intellectual History of Genocide in Gaza.”
“One needs to kill the empire within oneself” from an interview between Lina Attalah and Oxana Timofeeva about Homeland and resistance.
“What if I walked right through the wall?” she asked her mother. “I jumped so high I landed on the other side and visited my aunt,” he recollected,” from The Principle of Return by Adam HajYahia.
Dianne Seuss’ recent interview on the mattering of poetry— thank you to poet Naomi Azriel for tossing this my way!
events:
I’ll be reading some writing on Wednesday, April 17th at nGbK gallery alongside dear comrades and curators. Join us! More information here.
save the date: Thursday, May 16th at 19h. I’ll be facilitating a poetry panel on literature and politics at Spore Initiative entitled “Carrying Two Watermelons Under One Arm.”