The Funambulists: Women Poets of the Arab Diaspora

A compelling title gives this analysis of six contemporary Arab women poets its unique approach. A funambulist is a tightrope walker, as in The Walk, the 2015 film portrayal of Philippe Petit's 1974 highwire jaunt between the then-extant Twin Towers in New York City. Here the balancing act is not literal but cultural; Lisa Marchi's imagery presents the various negotiations in which the poets engage as Arab women living, working, thinking, and writing within the overlapping contexts of ethnic and gendered identities and transnational realities: “a tightrope stretched out across continents, cultures, and faiths.” The book presents a selection of well-known and lesser-known authors, Naomi Shihab Nye, Iman Mersal, Mina Boulhanna, Nadine Ltaif, Maram al-Massri, and Suheir Hammad, whose work derives from their various experiences as daughters of Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and their daily lives in Europe and North America.From the first, Marchi rejects the categorical labels “migrant” or “immigrant” that often attach to transnational authors and their works. Such labels could not apply to Nye, an enduring, far-reaching presence in American poetry circles—concentric circles as they often are. Instead, Marchi embraces the term diaspora, not as a trendy term for second-generation, third-generation, and so on ethnic communities in the West, but in its original sense: a forced displacement and dispersal of a people under conditions of duress and the humanistic consternations it produces—including, as she points out, creative phenomena such as powerful poetry. Diaspora is, for these poets, the more or less recent yet inevitably present condition that occupies their poems. The six women “funambulists,” as Marchi observes, are at the forefront of a multilingual, multicultural trajectory that responds to the question currently inhabiting literary and cultural theories: how has globalization impacted literature and experience?Marchi's book is not an anthology but an erudite work of literary criticism and cultural studies. Although her discussions refer to specific poems as touchstones of the funambulist adept, she refrains from excessive textual quotes, preferring instead to isolate relevant passages for examination. Most space is given to the analysis of the works on their own terms. Marchi brings to bear her own nuanced understanding of current events in the Middle East as well as an imbricated review of criticism from literary theorists writing in English, Italian, French, and Arabic. (All foreign-language passages are translated into English.) Special delight resides in Marchi's learned observations about the cultural history of books, vocabulary, events, and people that extend the perspectives offered in each section. She moves with ease and interest among such topics as the Palermitan court of Roger II to Andalusia to an appreciation of medieval Islamic love poetry to the old school Cairene pop diva Umm Kulthum.The Funambulists presents a pair of poets in each of its three sections who work in a similar vein. The section entitled, “Encounters,” brings to mind the feminist adage, “the personal is political,” as it examines the work of Nye and Mersal and their portrayals of the everyday as quiet battles for dignity and respect. Marchi renders a sensitive critique of the magically real “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” in which Nye transforms, via her poetic protagonist, a pair of shoes into twin lovable skunks who morph into a valentine and then into poem, thus revealing the inherent charm and value of things (and people) too often disregarded or dismissed.The second section, “Crossings,” presents the work of Boulhanna and Ltaif, immigrants to the West from Morocco and Lebanon, respectively. Boulhanna's short career in the 1990s is belied by the power of her poems that deal with the troubled rapprochement of “the Italy that was and still is in Africa [and] the Africa that has historically been and currently is in Italy.” Marchi sees Boulhanna as a forerunner of later writers who shed light on Italy's colonial history and the more recent crisis that centers the Mediterranean Sea as an unhappily globalized space marked by the “overloaded boats” of desperate refugees and besieged coastal communities, as depicted in Domenico Rosi's 2016 documentary about Lampedusa, Fuocoammare.A stand-out among the selections is Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese Canadian who writes in Québécois French. Ltaif juxtaposes the serenity of an afternoon in Montreal with the sound of shelling in the streets of Tyre, Lebanon, and finds a deafening, local indifference to the plight of her homeland. A hemisphere away, she prepares lunch at her kitchen counter where, with surreal precision, the sight of a colander recalls the bullet-ridden edifices of the once-familiar Beirut neighborhood she has toured recently as a camera-toting stranger. Her work attests to the diaspora, physically and emotionally, of those who have escaped the ground but not the scenes of war and their intrusion in a “new world” less of self-reinvention than of extrapolation.The Funambulists rounds out in the third section, “Breaks,” with the examination of two relatively more contemporary authors. Maram al-Masri is a Paris-based Syrian poet whose works speak with frankness about physical love and female lust. She is the author of the bilingual collection, provocatively titled A Red Cherry on a White-Titled Floor. In this image, Marchi finds resonance, if not precedence, with a fragment by the ancient Greek poet Sappho that extolls “the sweet apple that grows red on the lofty branch,” a tantalizing treat that remains out of reach. The other poet in this section, Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian who grew up in Brooklyn, brings to her poems the beats and styles of African American and African Caribbean spoken word/dub poetry. Hammad “adapts the Arab classical practice of publicly reciting incandescent verses to the needs of the present time.”With its fresh perspective, Marchi's book is a welcome view on globalization's imbalances and those who nimbly, courageously, make their way.

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