“The Textu poem has only one hard rule: that it be exactly 160 characters long,” Fady Joudah writes in the introduction to his 2013 volume Textu. The limit is taken from SMS (short message service) text messages of the time, and when he says it’s a hard rule, he means it; spaces, line breaks, and titles (including the line break after the title) all count towards the total. The result is a series of 100 constrained gnomic bursts, mostly arranged in three couplets—a bit like haiku, a bit like old Twitter, a bit like foreshortened Rae Armantrout.
Because
no touch no lover
except in the mirror
neuron all lovers betray all lovers
pray to the mirror
someone’s singing in the shower
glass of glass of glass
Like the texts which inspire them, Joudah’s poems are intimately private; they’re often like in-jokes or part of a personal conversation where you’ve missed the more important half. The poem “Because,” for example, may be talking about a particular lover, or an absence of a lover. Many of the lines function as off-kilter mirrors, the first half imperfectly reflecting or echoing the second. “No touch” turns into “no lover”; on this side of the glass you see “neuron all lovers,” on that half, “betray all lovers.”
The failed communication or failed self-reflection maybe reflects (imperfectly!) the way text messages work—you talk to a screen which is and isn’t another person and is and isn’t you. The poem’s a misfired message, which shows the writer and the speaker distorted through, or near, each other. The words are a mirror, or mirror neuron which invents its own other, an infinite reflection (“glass of glass of glass”) that isn’t.
The sense that Joudah is talking to himself, or someone else, even as he’s talking to you, makes the poems speaking too near or too far away for you to understand them—a disorienting doppler effect of meaning which makes each short poem a series of shocks of sudden understanding and confusions. Joudah’s poem to Emily Dickinson—one of his obvious inspirations—starts with odd, off-the-mark musing and then wanders even further afield.
Emily
I used to think you part Black or Wampanoag
those lips that nose
no dashes here auburn all burned
In his grave Celan
turns my name
tastes to me of sand
Joudah says Dickinson’s photograph led him to believe that she was Black or Native-American (Wampanoag). Joudah’s Palestinian-American, and his misperceiving of Dickinson could be him seeing himself in her or thinking of her as a textual (or texting) partner.
Dickinson was neither Black nor native though; on the few occasions where she mentions Black or native people in her poems, she could be racist. Joudah isn’t her; he uses “no dashes” and his hair isn’t auburn but “all burned” (or black?). So he moves to another writer of short, private, opaque lyrics—Paul Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor. The last two lines, “turns my name/tastes to me of sand,” could be a Celan poem, and suggests (again) identification—Celan’s holding Joudah’s name as he holds Celan’s.
Is Clean turning his name, though? Or is Celan turning in his grave; an implied rejection that leads Joudah to feel that his name has turned to sand in his own mouth? It’s not one or the other, but instead a recognition of the way that the relationship with Celan, like that with Dickinson, is difficult.
Celan’s pained quest for, and refusal of, meaning in trauma can speak to a Palestinian’s history of dispossession, occupation, violence, and genocide. But Zionists have also used the Holocaust as an excuse and justification for just those atrocities. Celan, like Dickinson, is a reference and an interlocutor, but the messages between them are, to some degree, truncated, misspelled, missent. The poem which begins with Joudah speaking wrongly of a poetic forbearer, ends with a (mis)recognition of the ways in which Joudah’s own sources and inspirations talk around him, or bury him. There are no dashes to bridge those spaces, no sand to fill up those holes.
Some of Joudah’s poems string a few texts together to create longer statements, but I prefer the greater compression and its more sweeping refusal of explication and explanation. One of my favorites is composed of translations of classical Arabic lines.
Anonymous
People are a vast deep sea
Oh to be away from them
is a ship
& dearly beloved when I think of thee
I shudder like a wet sparrow
Graves don’t thirst
“Anonymous” here refers to the writers of the lines, who are unknown; it also, perhaps, suggests that the self-created by this assemblage is nonexistent, unknowable, not really an identity. The use of collage is a nod to the way that text exchanges are collaborative and accretive. The poem embraces its own heterogenous non-sequiturs—lurching back and forth between almost meaning something and sailing away to shudder like a wet sparrow, between the dearly beloved and the grave.
The poem, in not exactly being by Joudah, sums up the frustrations and the joy of Textu, where the unique voice comes from the sense of not being sure who’s speaking or texting you, and which uses its tight constraints to wriggle out of, and into, saying and sense. As Joudah writes in the title poem of the volume, “I light & light/you up with sound profile/threading the image habit/of pleasure.” Text is sound is image is light is what you send to your friend. And it’s also what you receive back from who knows where or who—characters clattering together in clusters, but not too many.