PEN Atlas on the Radio: Soumaya Souse on XCP

Listen here [streaming MP3] as Soumaya Souse discusses poetry and Palestine with Leonard Schwartz.

Soumaya Susi: Tonight on XCP!

Soumaya Susi, one of the wonderful Palestinian writers whose work appeared in our Refuge in Words portfolio, will be reading and talking about her work "The City" on Leonard Schwartz's Cross-Cultural Poetics radio show today (noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern, 8pm GMT).

The recording was originally planned for May 15, marked globally by Palestinians and their allies as Nakba Day; Soumaya saw the broadcast as an opportunity to talk about how her poignant and precise poetry emerges from the broader political context and ongoing legacy of the Nakba. Due to frustrating and endemic problems with telecommunications, it wasn't possible for to make contact by phone to do the recording. Leonard and Soumaya made contact on Friday 22nd, and it sounds like they had a fantastic conversation. You can also hear me talking a bit about the Atlas.

You can listen online on KAOS 89.3 FM Olympia Community Radio (mp3 stream or Real Player stream) or listen after the broadcast (mp3 format) via PennSound.

Soumaya Susi: The City

The City
What will this sad, silent, fallen city by the old sea oppressed by time give you? It will give you a lot if you listen to its nightly voice strewn amongst the rustling of the trees and the lapping of the waves. No one tries to listen to that angelic voice emanating from it. Everyone only hears his own voice and strives to search for himself among the city’s heaps.
Often I think if only geography wasn’t so clever, if only it bestowed the city with a few more coastal kilometers and released it from its existing borders; how would your seashore look oh, Gaza? Which ships would reach you? What would be the state of your residents, teeming with feelings of exile, cries, and fear?
Perhaps it is the constant thought of escaping the city’s boundaries weighing on me, or at least the idea that my city is without borders, drowning in isolation. A city where whoever enters is lost, and whoever leaves writes himself a new life story.
Now there is no leaving and no entering. A city of imprisonment that consumes its own inhabitants and which everyone wants to escape. To be more precise, they are not trying to flee the geographic location itself. But rather, they want to find what was lost. They want their freedom that was caught unawares in circumstances that they had never, for even one day, dreamt of. The city was becoming more confined each day, with new chains forced upon it each year. After it was completely open to the outside world, it was seen as too narrow to encompass all its residents’ desires. How is this so and yet the contradiction of aspirations wrecks all attempts to survive. How are love, death, and life all possible on one street? How can you shake hands with your brother’s murderer and reply to his ‘good morning’?
Before Gaza transformed into a city of conflict, I was a participant at a poetry conference in Paris. What surprised me was that everyone I met was stunned when they learnt I hailed from Gaza.
Gaza, this magical word! No sooner had the others heard it than they looked at me with all the world’s amazement and astonishment. They began to ask me all the questions that had crossed their minds, after hearing one day about this city’s existence and about its old and new troubles. I transformed from a poet participating in a conference with more than other thirty poets, to a representative for the common Palestinian people - the dwellers of the dark, unknown city. A city that does not disappear from the daily newscasts of cities the world over.
Their curiosity to know and their attempt to understand what is truly happening was greater than my ability to reply. When I returned here, there was a strange longing to go back to Paris. Maybe I liked it more through their eyes, and maybe I wanted to experience more of this city’s character.
I am taken by surprise upon my return. The city is no longer ours, and all that was in the past is mere rehearsal for what happened afterwards. The changes are visible in such a short time. There is a demand for everyone to erase what took place and live anew, as if nothing had happened.
Oh this paradox! I did not enter a state of shock, I did not change, and I do not understand - what happened? We went back to the daily routine that we know, only to find that the context had changed completely. But it was dialogues, more events, and more testimonies. Everyone knew what they had to say, and everyone was utterly silent.
Too many deaths. Many dreams run through the minds of those who live in this forgotten town and who continually occupy a large part of the media. No one truly tries to know what is being lived here, and no one wants to start changing anything. Perhaps this city’s misfortune is that whoever lives in it takes on a strange quality; it is the strength to endure and wipe away what one cannot live with. They do not grumble, they do not cry out. In silence they accept each new reality as if they were created for it. This capacity to adapt always used to amaze me. It clashes entirely with the personalities of those residing in this city, but they continue in their wordlessness and I in my astonishment. How then is it possible to go on living here, waking up every morning with a smile on your face and hope for a clear, new day?
There is a small secret. If you know it, then it is possible to carry on. In order to live in Gaza you must create your own secret world. This beautiful world which contains you and those like you; those who carry small dreams that come true in the rain on a winter’s day, or staying up late into the night with melodic music and friends. Because this matter becomes forbidden in the laws of the invaded city, you must search and you will find it inevitably. You will hide well your small secret and in that moment enjoy what you can from it; in order to create for yourself days contrasting completely from those of the news reports. Days abound with death, poverty, and foolish fighting that does not change anything. Or filled with nameless rockets releasing a sound resembling some sort of explosion, though unable to even harm a cat. You persist in your beautiful isolation and your ultimate wish to get tobacco at a price cheaper than in the market. You continue thinking about New Year’s night and how you can spend it outside the walls of your room.

Translated by Sawad Hussain.

Soumaya Susi: Gaza, The First Sip from the Sea's Breast

Gaza, The First Sip From The Sea's Breast

When the wind sips the silent cloud
Floating around you
You seem as if you are
Death embracing the sea
Lashes absorbing fear,
A barrier concealing the very first tear,
Suspended by the day palm,
You were not as I wished,
When I met you on a day of no tale
The same fairy held between the waves' rips

My lady, you were
A strange spirit not bearing the beach's seed
A chopper binding to enjoy my thorns,
The wind does not clap for the absence
Of your ancient half from
The stage of memories
It does not curse the other face
Which emerged before you
It was like a hanging finger
Desiring the time of travel

Frankly,
I desired flowing over your rips
Sans curtain
As invited by all cities
And, despite being subsided,
I'm fluttering an apparition,
A song
A bunch of things not formed without your breath

You, the first sip from the sea's breast
You, sadness' seed inside us
O, city encompassed by curses
How shall we walk without voices?
Without springs carrying beach hues?
How shall we talk with your shreds?

You, an ancient secret,
A painting consumed by the song's star,
A morrow not baptized by the sun's light
When the time-vines emerge from your sides
Looking from your western terrace
Trying to return your mare to her summer
Winning a little victory
Then trying to sneak through the dawn's blue
To a slumbering ship
Residing there and vanishing
Into the basements of victory

Translated by S. el-Omary

Soumaya Susi: Thoughts in the Dark

Soumaya Susi is a local government researcher in Gaza as well as a striking poet. Her work has been translated into many languages, and appeared in English in Nathalie Handal's The Poetry of Arab Women.

PEN Atlas are proud to present a new poem and two new short stories by Susi on the blog, thanks to our translators Christina Phillips, Sawad Hussain, and S. El Omary.

Thoughts in the Dark

The darkness brings fears and ideas you’d never dare to think in the light of day. You’re good at this game. The daily interruption to the electricity forces you to think in a particular way, according to a completely different logic. You give up your usual rituals and adopt new ones in keeping with the imposed darkness. You contemplate the romantic nature of candles and the night-time voices you’ve forgotten. You count the stars like the ancients did, except stars these days are deceptive; you think you see one but when you look for it the next night it’s changed course in order to carry out another task. You return to the old broadcasts which you assigned to a distant, forgotten past but are now forced to listen to learn about the death, roar and destruction going on around you. You relax a little and wait for morning, when you can listen to everything that happened while the lights were out last night on the radio in the taxi on your way to work. You go to work ready for new thoughts, desperate to find yourself amid the heap of routine. Normal work means perseverance and carrying out daily tasks assigned to you or the area you work in. It means collecting your salary at the end of the month to spend on necessities, though it hardly covers them.

Then your salary suddenly vanishes without any explanation for your children, who are dreaming of new summer clothes, new games, or even just some sweets. It vanishes and thoughts about getting along without it, an advance on your salary or recuperating some of what you’ve earned in the past few months grow. You get a bit of cash from here and there and you take out everything you’ve saved during your working life only to find yourself surrounded by columns of debts that crowd your thoughts whenever you try to sleep.

You keep going. Walking, eating, drinking, going to work every morning, meeting up with your friends, or those of them left. Something appears on the horizon and strikes the electricity station. The debates about how to manage your money are replaced with new worries. Do you have enough candles for tonight? Is there enough gas to light the long evenings? What will you do with all your time without electricity, without television or the computer, even without a fan in a summer whose heat took you by surprise, as though it was joining forces with everything else against you.

What will you do?

Nothing!

You sit in your room and tell yourself that you’re better off without fans and air-conditioners. You smoke a cigarette and discover things around you that you hadn’t noticed before. You recall conversations with your children for the thousandth time. You wait for the current to offer you a window onto the world and take you out of your lonely prison in this stony city.
Your endeavour to live by a different logic, one that befits your new lifestyle and the altered social and economic circumstances, is usually successful. But it leaves scars inside you. It leaves a burning in your soul for the life that is escaping you, the days that are slipping away from you while you are silent and ignorant of what’s going on around you. Perhaps everything around you is ignorant of you too. Forgotten in a remote corner of the world, you’re good at isolation and intentionally drift into it. You hear many melodies but don’t find your own. You read a lot of books and novels. The world goes on around you but there’s no place for you in it. Perhaps in an effort to release you from your addiction to communicating with others over the internet electricity has become your ally, for it prevents you communing with the hypothetical life that you created for yourself and lived happily with in all its details. You’re forced to withdraw, unable to refuse or complain, acquiescing to your options in a stony country on a forgotten shore. What do you think about?

Perhaps of nothing!

Of what will happen.

Of the contradictions around you.

You keep smiling, in an effort to remind yourself that something will change.

Translated by Christina Phillips.