Hereinafter Denied, Hereinafter Forgotten:
No Sign by Peter Balakian and History of Forgetfulness by Shahé Mankerian
Artsakh is a sign, as is Mt. Ararat, where, according to the Biblical account, Noah’s Ark found its final rest. Genocide, the neologism coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe what happened to the Jews, and the Armenians, is also a sign, but for poets of Armenian descent—their literary forebears were first in line for execution on April 24, 1915—trying to make sense of such signs, with no sign of them anywhere, requires not only an awareness of each sign’s contingency, but their own. The attempts to obliterate a people, a place, and on top of that, to decouple Lemkin’s denomination from their history through denial—the continuation, that is, of genocide by other means—paved the way, last September, for the mass exodus of Armenians from their most spiritually significant enclave. On October 28, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention said that it was “disappointed with the outcome of the UN mission’s visit to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) on October 1, which took place after the entire Armenian population of Artsakh had already fled.”
If there is also no sign of what occurred in Artsakh in our discourse now, it is not because there are no Armenians left, or because Armenians were officially referred to as dogs and vermin by Azerbaijan’s president before their displacement, or because the blockade of the Lachin Corridor—the lifeline to the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh—took place in an age when the business of media is social, its ideology of “connection” the doublespeak that allows for the absence of any articulation of the social good from social media, it is because nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign. Under active efforts to eradicate, all counter claims to existence are de facto heresies (those blocking the Lachin Corridor fashioned themselves environmentalists), so when signification is exempted from the domain of the possible, the aim for the poet is the reproduction of its lack.
Peter Balakian’s latest volume of poems, No Sign, is densely allusive because it offers language retaining its totality only in what it elects not to say. Its eponymous middle section, a collection of numbered fragments, ostensibly about screening the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour with an anonymous auditor, is also a series of numbered grenades lobbed at all the many-sided meaning-making pretensions of poetry itself, and therefore, if not blowing up, at least disavowing the entire mission of this writer who has tried to make meaning even out of what he has called “ingesting violence,” an Adorno-like repudiation especially tragic for an Armenian-American poet who took from his slaughtered forbears the call to bear witness to memories of a vanishing world.
Once, Balakian’s literary forbears’ first-in-line status for extermination was proof, for him, of their power of witness, and proof, if only inadvertent—because, for the Armenian, only where there is language is there a place—of his claims for poetry as a house of being. This was enough to keep him at it, calling people out, taking names and, by going on 60 Minutes and accompanying its film crew to Der Zor, naming and bearing witness to the places of mass extermination. But now, in his late style, he lays down that mantle and enacts, in a kind of speech act, his own erasure, his own negation. Just as the churches in Ani once lent significance to his great-uncle’s mitre, ring, and shepherd’s crook, but now stand for, and signify, in their conversion to laundromats, Bishop Grigoris Balakian’s slaughtered brides, so too the monasteries of Artsakh, for the grandnephew poet, now stand for nothing but the impossibility of wringing significance out of such intergenerational and intersectional dispossessions—a task, if it were to be attempted, that would be as absurd and nonsensical as trying to write what it was like to sleep in the Ark during the flood while simultaneously carrying it down the forbidden mountain.
In 2010’s Ziggurat, and Balakian’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, Ozone Journal, there is still enough of hope to at least make the attempt to find, through poetry, spiritual significance in effacement. The Armenian, like the Jew, is studied in lamentation, and in the also-I of solemn occasion for each time and each place of disappearance. For the Armenian, such significance might be found in the way the light rises on Ararat, or nicks and sparkles on the surface of Lake Van, with the words about the light themselves a shield against disappearance and effacement, but in No Sign, Balakian gives up on such signification altogether. For “postmodern homo sapiens”—terms like this one fill No Sign—an ancient church, and an ancient faith, is an anachronism. With Balakian’s erstwhile goal now exempted from the domain of the possible, he not only seems to consent to the undermining of poetry’s meaning-making capacity, but in a shattering, re-orienting encounter with chaos, to enter, even affirm chaos. In the anonymous back and forth of “No Sign,” He asks, “Did our house fall down?” But since it’s a house that can no longer be seen, She responds, “Why should I believe you?” Armenia, and now Artsakh, erased, other erasures “appear:”
She: There was Dien Bien Phu—essential—
a ghost of grainy footage on some old reel
on which French soldiers slid down hillsides
like ants in glue—
the gray pixilated dissolve of 1954—the reality pill
down the hatch with no water—
He: refusal to learn from history.
She: Later—after Tet:
“We heard small Buddhist chimes ringing for peace in Hoa Bien.”
Hanoi Nagasaki Saigon Hiroshima
Keep saying it—it will sink in.
2019—here—again—no light at the end of the tunnel
no sign—
The poem’s metronomic, number-by-number recital of history’s disappearances also seem to correspond to the planet’s minute-by-minute, minutes from midnight tick-tock to its own extinction, the events recited stand-ins for the confetti of algorithmically generated single instances generating signs of the unreal that stand in for and signify reality today. Balakian is not trying to recite history per se, but by putting the reader simultaneously in the past and before a screen, he can give a history of our streaming present, our uninterrupted alibi for looking away. Asking why we are allowing it is like asking, as if we didn’t know, for whom our social performances are intended. Balakian’s only recourse is to personify the earth, to “listen” to it speak:
She: Listen to Gaea: “We broke apart—200 million years ago—end of Triassic—
magma rose from deeper in the earth
intruded into the sandstones and shales, then the molten rock spread, cooled,
hardened,
then—I was a sill overlaying softer rock—and the softer rock eroded.”
This conversation, in its ambiguity, its overlapping historical and mythic references, suggests times and places only to inhabit our “Netflix and chill” big box place that teaches real times and places are an imposition, a bore. If in the poem, “She” says, “Japanese cities burned in my dreams,” and later, “In the beginning there were alpha particles and gamma rays,” it is only because poetry once captured—as in some Midrashic interpretations of the silent aleph in the Hebrew alphabet—the awe that accompanied the speech that brought the world into existence. In “No Sign,” the awe-inspiring event is the mushroom cloud, and poetry’s erstwhile power to speak worlds and memories of worlds into existence, now reduced to offering elegies of those same worlds, is yet incapable of safeguarding the public’s perception of their reality, just one more advertisement for competing historical narratives.
In Balakian’s “age of fission,” where that which has no sign and no mass is still, like a quark, something which, though with no location—like Artsakh—is both center and periphery at once, poetry must be likewise invested in the obliteration of all referents, invested, like advertising, in making us see something that isn’t there, something which, like a converted monastery, or like one of the thousands of Armenian churches converted to laundromats, are both at the same time real and unreal. If something without apparent physical reality is not adapted to our rational powers of description, its definition requires some kind of metaphor, or figure of speech where, if words no longer signify, they at least can serve as markers for that which is no longer there, that which bears no sign. The Armenian Church, on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide, made all one and a half of its million victims saints. Caracalla, also by fiat, made all Roman subjects citizens.
The relationship between poetry and extremity—events of genocide, for example—is likewise only sometimes a means of connection and expression of shared grief by which we can process, cope, and persevere in the wake of the unspeakable. If we rely upon the poem to articulate our despair, connect us through a common catharsis, and provide the platform for transformation, it may instead, particularly when we are in isolation, work contrapuntally against this intention, and give emotional energy to the very despair it was asked to ameliorate. Risky encounters can be shattering, but also reorganizing. If poetry about genocide is meant to counter, in some sense, language aimed at maintaining and validating genocide, language like that which came out of the Azerbaijani regime last year which, though now read retrospectively, clearly did not require an AI (Artificial Intelligence) large language model to find in it bureaucratic justification for democide. When Azerbaijani authorities renamed one of the streets in Stepanakert after the perpetrator of the Armenian genocide, it was ignored by the international community, including the academy, suggesting the rightness of the aesthetic turn of this academic and poet of genocide—that the clearing in a dark wood, the longed-for end of the journey, will always wind up being a mass grave.
Anti-Armenian animus, if not as universal as the antisemitic kind has been, is in certain parts of the world not far behind. Likely, there is something biblical, or at least religious in it. Just as the Jews created monotheism, and the invisible, disappearing God, so the Armenians, in 301 AD, became the first Christian nation. As the Old and New Testaments come together, so too these twin persecutions: Armenians had to flee Artsakh because they were Armenians, just as Jews, because they are Jews, have heard, even before October 7, from the river to the sea on college campuses. These particular victims are always blamed for their victimhood—the UN, created to prevent atrocities, shows up, for the Armenians, only after the fact, and will host its climate change conference in Azerbaijan in November, and as for the October 7 massacre and kidnapping of Israeli concert-goers and kibbutzniks, the UN Secretary General, on October 24, condemned the attack by Hamas while emphasizing that it “did not happen in a vacuum.” He did not mean that Jewish populations have been expelled from cities for thousands of years or the antisemitic memes spread easily now that we are all “connected” or that the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in 1975 asserting that Zionism was a form of racism—though perhaps his predecessors, who included Kurt Waldheim, the Nazi, are within the unintended ambit of his “vacuum.” Ten months later, tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, most of the population is displaced, and Armenia itself has recognized Palestine, as Armenians identify with Palestinians. Turkey, too, boasts of standing for the Palestinians, and when Armenia officially recognized a Palestinian state on June 21, it drew praise from Turkey.
In any case, readers, especially academics, tend to like the literature of Jews and Armenians—readers especially like a faith that doesn’t make sense, a faith that fascinates and enrages at the same time because it persists despite any outcome, and suggests a God that might be wholly other, of whom there is no sign—the experience paradoxically reinforcing the meaning it is supposed to deny. Balakian’s books stand upon one another, but his “No Sign” sequence, inserted into a book of more traditional poems, suggests an ontological crack that haunts from within, an alliance made with the very thing that undoes him. If the aim of the author, as Edward Said wrote in his analysis of late style, is no longer synthesis, for Balakian it is also the reproduction of its lack—in his case, the presence of silence within the poet’s own critique of silence. In “Ozone Journal,” the New York City subway is flooded during Hurricane Sandy. In “No Sign” there is a suggestion of a more permanent kind of a flood, and a new beginning of an ominous kind:
15.
On the fifteenth day Hiroshima was covered with cornflowers and gladiolas,
morning glories and daylilies—a strange fertility emerged
This “beginning,” a reversal of “how the heavens and earth rose out of chaos,” still has something of the biblical cadence, but with the boundaries broken between meaning and nonsense, consent and non-consent, a different kind of poetry is born, “a strange fertility” that does not even pretend to take possession of the meaning of its signs. Balakian is not only the great-nephew of the cleric Grigoris Balakian, but the translator of his memoir, Armenian Golgotha, which details the experience of Gomidas, the great composer and Armenian priest, who could make no sign for what he had seen on a forced march to the Syrian desert and went mad in France. Balakian’s “advance,” then, into his late style, is not merely to say that there is no synthesis or sense to be found, or to reproduce its lack, but to become an agent of that non-sense, a spokesman, for what Adorno, along with Celan, say lies beyond the reach of language—this a particular tragedy for a poet whose most intimate literary kinship is with the poets massacred before him, and who were killed because language was seen by the killers as a form of mimesis. But language now admitted to bear no relation to reality, indeed, part of the problem, and so suborned to its current role of facilitating the uninterrupted stream that monetizes our attention and makes us look the other way, makes us party to an aesthetics of human disqualification, so it is no accident that the speakers of “No Sign” are watching a screen as they converse about the end of the world:
29.
He: What caused the K-T mass extinction?
She: Darwin was aware of the discontinuity at the end of the Cretaceous—
He: Why is ocean acidification so dangerous?
She: “It changes the microbial communities”
toxic algae, falling ocean pH—CO2—
impact of human greed=carbon fossil fuel fire—
He: You saw Paradise, California on fire; you saw Java and Sumatra
crash in the seismic sea—
read the sign—
She: Remember what Lucretius said:
“unless inclines to swerve all things would fall.”
The planet on watch, a doomsday clock, but with our wrist restraints removed, “read the sign” implies few believe it:
15.
He: In the film it went like this:
Lui: You made it all up
Elle: None of it
Balakian, a professor of English, understands environments where arbitrary impositions of “truth” bring shared inquiry to a halt. In some postcolonial and subaltern analyses, for example, the Armenian Genocide was not intrinsically racist, the Ottoman Empire, therefore, innocent, and borrowing colonialism as a survival tactic, and so deploying, like the United States, the rhetoric of national security to suppress, the genocide no longer an event to be known, but a talking point to be manipulated and mastered. When genocide is admitted, it is only to make the point that Armenians were fleeing genocide into a land of genocide in the United States—truth cipher to a bold front, the fate of Artsakh can go unremarked. Humanities departments where aesthetic principles rationalize exclusion of the privileged from the ambit of sympathy, can also rationalize denial, the last stage of genocide. American academics, like the politicians they criticize, are sometimes creating careers, not scholarship:
She: And now. The inconceivable,
with Trump everything’s a moving target—
including the Earth—
He: Trump signing Bibles after a tornado in Alabama—
She: the price of losing reality.
When academics and politicians alike employ language exclusively in the service of their own interests, where is the poet to stand? History may indeed be just the anamorphosis of contested tropes, with every assertion a catachresis under which something monstrous lurks, but with Trump signing Bibles, a dictatorship of relativism goes to scale. For the poet of genocide, and for Armenian Christians, a formlessness, a shapelessness that once might have signified the ebbing and flowing of the Holy Spirit, now shares space with what the viewer, and the poet, in fact, are already watching—prepared, and softened for what comes next; the poet not subject, but object, his words emerging from somewhere else, someone else—the poem a reperformance, in a more elevated setting, of what is on everyone’s screen, a form of self-expression that is really self-censorship which, under the guise of “speaking one’s voice,” shows how the political agenda is the real speaker, the poem the primer as well as the program, asking only for corroboration. In the poem where Pan meets Gaia in the Palisades, Pan is not one, pipes in hand, who delights, but one who brings panic—is panikos come to earth:
35.
She: Remember the shadow cast by the sun, axial spin of the Earth—
time // stone // self = postmodern homo sapiens—
remember the heat of the pre-Cambrian sun remember Pangaea
36.
He: When will the sun bloat into a red giant—after the oceans are boiled away
and the Earth is bleached—
She: But now Sauternes light coming down over the Palisades
Solid to liquid to gas—H2O—to CO2
tree as life—
Pan meeting Gaea.
37.
He: Remember—the air was still, trees motionless, the sky touched my chest—
here at the rocks on the river edge I came to feel:
—how does the soul speak?
Does it come out of the blue or out of some recondite preparation—
unknown to us in day?
38.
She: I was under the illusion that I will never forget Hiroshima.
He: The flash was a giant yellow light–bokuzuki were useless
the houses in the neighborhood evaporated—
She: The illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry.
He: What else can a tourist do?
39.
She: We’re heating up—biotic attrition is just a euphemism
a quarter of all species heading into the black hole—
He: what about the phyla of books, music, art, zigzag of buildings-to-god
going in the slow flash—
40.
She: “Nothing can be brought back into nothingness nor be created
out of naught” (Lucretius)
He: “Who teaches the soul?” (Juan de la Cruz)—
how the daemon comes and goes not like a bolt
but like the breeze of a curtain opening.
In the other sections, Balakian writes as a cosmopolitan, but poetry his metropole he can only peer out at the Turkish/Armenian border where “the word Armenia appears nowhere on any sign or wall—outlawed by the state.” In places, “graffiti wipes out the Armenian words,” so he is worse off than D.M. Thomas’ Rozanov, the poet who, in Ararat, cannot sleep because he knows that very night the Solidarity Movement is about to be crushed, or the George Seferis of A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-51 “wandering about with open wounds,” who remembers his “last days in Turkey burned out amid crates, formalities, and handshakes.” Balakian’s life is hidden from him, and as he writes in “Stalled in Traffic,” there are limits to his knowledge, and limits to his power to rectify disappearances:
All I know is my father left Constantinople
in 1922, on a train in the dark snaking into Thrace
and his mother’s hand became a trace of history,
a U-turn of collapsing latitudes
as the tracks disappeared into Greece.
By the time they arrived in Vienna
the Prater was hypnotic—a shattered wheel
of glass through which to see the
Bosporus sludge and iridescent
petrol from the docks where the caiques
wharfed and the mussel shells poured
like black gems. In the Armenian cemetery
of Scutari my grandfather stone-rubbed some
names—the shapes of flying dragons
my father passed to me.
and my head was back in the white van with the 60 Minutes crew,
winding through the buttes and roadside gullies of the Syrian desert,
to the Armenian memorial in Der Zor,
before going to Palmyra, where I sat under
30-foot Corinthian columns—
the corners chipped by wood and sand
in late May when it hit 110 F at noon
and the sun melting the plastic rim of my cell phone—
as our driver appeared out of nowhere with stacks
of za’atar bread and Diet Cokes—
we found some shade under a portico
as the visionary pillars disappeared into blue sky.
3.
Outside students were buzzing through the gates
of UCL and the brown brick of Bloomsbury was lit up
with sun after rain—
Inside the Wunderkammer of Hans Sloane
stuffed with the stolen stuff from the Middle East—
(“What is the Middle East,” my Turkish publisher
asked an audience at NYU—
“Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Srinagar?”)
you kept asking: “What is year zero to us?
Didn’t our war destroy some temples and museums?”
I called the curator on the phone at the info desk
to leave my complaint on the message machine
about the signage:
“Zatala wasn’t Armenia Minor / NE Asia Minor—
it was central Anatolia—make correction.”
4.
What questions were we asking,
staring at the misinformation on the wall
and the beautiful Armenian head of Anahit?
Why was I back in Der Zor at the chapel
digging Armenian bones out of baked ground—
scratching the marrow and dried mildew?
5.
In the age of throat slitting on Twitter,
the imperial shock and awe of the burning Tigris—
the lynching of Saddam on the internet,
vanishing tomb of Jonah—
Who owns fetishized objects…whose museum?
In “No Sign,” there is no takeaway except disappearance because only disappearance can speak for disappearance. As once in eastern Turkey, now in Artsakh, no sign can speak for no signs—and now that once again cultural and religious monuments dating back thousands of years are being taken, annihilated, destroyed, erased, one can see what cultural appropriation really looks like, see not just the “co-opting” of ideas by the dominant group, but a disappeared place where there isn’t even the possibility of a cultural exchange to pathologize. We can conveniently excuse ourselves from history, embrace historicism, but for the Armenian, as for the Jew, if condemning hate on college campuses is a “context dependent decision,” then it is easy to ignore what happened to Armenians in Artsakh. Never again loses its force when it is derided as just another form of essentialism—there are few calls on college campuses for the right of return for Armenians to Artsakh or for Azerbaijan to cease its erasure of sites of Armenian heritage, including its 686 religious monuments.
There is little contemporaneous, eyewitness literature of genocide because its victims are too busy being killed to write it. For the next generation it is not a matter of appropriating the past in whatever manner one chooses, but of having to escape it, and escape it repeatedly, again and again, and if writing, reenacting that escape in sentence after sentence, so the task often falls on the second generation, or even strangers. When two copies of Akram Aylisli’s Stone Dreams, the first Azeri work to acknowledge state complicity in the Armenian Genocide, made it into Azerbaijan, all of Aylisli’s books were burned, and a politician offered $13,000 for Aylisli’s ear—a bizarre if not apt historical rhyme of Carolyn Forché’s, “The Colonel,” one of the most anthologized prose poems of the last century, in which a military officer pours human ears on the dinner table. Aylisli wrote Stone Dreams when he became infuriated that his own countrymen bulldozed Armenian churches and graveyards in his hometown of Aylis, the city from which he took his nom de plume: “If a single candle were lighted for every murdered Armenian, the light from these candles would be brighter than the moon.”
The Muse can arise out of the failure to mediate an event not completely assimilated, which the repetition, parallelism, and anaphora, as well as other figures of speech mirroring and enacting, in the work—the haunting reality of the mind’s ability only to interrogate, not integrate, the experience. Trauma is ingested, to use Balakian’s term, and without a protective shield, Freud’s characterization for what he called the chief role of consciousness. The Australian poet, Les Murray, who died 100 years after the end of the war he depicts in his epic novel-in-verse, Fredy Neptune, describes the birth of his young sailor-narrator’s mysterious disability/ability when Fredy witnesses mobs torching Armenians in Turkey. As the body of “facts” grows, the event itself disappears. For Balakian, even the historical artifacts and archival data become advertisements for lies; the death of symbolic truth our spiritual nadir.
It is in his essay on the poetry of witness, “Vise and Shadow,” where Balakian speaks of the Armenian lyric poem as “ingesting violence.” There is no systematic way to relate to genocide: the Enlightenment? Voltaire, Rousseau? Industrialism? For Balakian, only ingesting it will do; creating a kind of lyric knowledge as well as a sense-drenched theology—the only way to formulate a valid picture of God without abandoning God. Given that there are some universal truths (Israel could be nuked, and it would be blamed on the Jews; Artsakh obliterated, and it is blamed on the Armenians) understanding the Armenians’, and the Jews’, particular histories without the Bible as some form of objective reference—the Armenian genocide victims often refused, on pain of death, to convert—is impossible, if only because its perpetrators saw it that way. In the book’s last poem, “Walking the Ruined City”:
11.
Mandelstam who loved Yerevan’s baked scroll,
Bonnefoy who was haunted by Armenia’s churches—
come graze on the stone of free verse: aubade of buttresses,
ghazal of barreled vaults, terza rima of blind arcades, villanelle of niches,
sonnet of squinches, pantoum of pointed arches, sestina of cylinders.
O piers of the radiating arches of Holy Redeemer—wall ribs and colonettes,
O the vigilant powers that keep changing color in the rain.
Who envisioned the cruciform dome plan? Who made the barrel
vaults and pointed arches?
All the forms of poetry noted here are border-creators themselves and suggest, for the poet, by their very exigencies, his immersion in something he cannot himself control. The form which we are permitted to see suggests also what the form is meant to conceal:
Black holes of caves suck me in like sour pucker of the dried-up days of 1920.
The wind comes in from the Black Sea; the silence is a monk’s breath;
the rain comes and goes; who drank from the chalice here,
were the frescoes Chalcedonian?
During the Council of Chalcedon, convened to fight the heresy of Nestorianism in 451, the Armenian Church was too busy helping defending itself from a Persian invasion to attend the proceedings, and so broke ranks on the nature of the border between the divine and human in the single person of Christ. On one side of the Armenian/Turkish border, the Armenian operates as a ghost, an absent cause, as in “No Sign,” his catastrophe hidden in the belatedness of trauma representation, in the silence that is still somehow speaking. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “After the last border, there is no land.” He might have also meant no language—the term “genocide” is banned in Turkey. Israel, whose Old City hosts the Armenian Quarter, also sells weapons to Azerbaijan and does not formally recognize the Armenian Genocide. Balakian’s poetry must pass the acid test of being on this border, so his forms are not transcendent, Platonic, but rather grounded, and girded, and collapsed. If there is “no sign,” there is neither signified nor signifier. If the genocide is denied, there is neither its reality nor its representation. Balakian’s particular task, as poet, is to live on the border between these denied and dismantled components—a border which, because it separates two nonentities, is a place where signs cannot exist, where language finds its “black hole of caves.”
The perpetrator’s attitude towards the victim—whether the Armenian (Azerbaijan’s president routinely refers to Armenians as jackals), or Gaia—is always reductive and instrumentalizing, its language denuded by its interest in conserving itself as a subject separate from its reliance on the object it is seeking to suppress. Its poetry suffers, even as its language wins the marketplace by replicating the network of power and propaganda that is its own subject production, a disembodied apparatus which can only destroy poets, never make them—as in Henrik Edoyan’s, “Hey, Turkish Poets”:
If one, only one of you had tried:
“Spare that innocent girl. Why
kill any more?” We might have uttered
your name in ordinary poems.
If one, only one of you had taken sides
“Let’s not kill the genuine poets
at least not them.”
You too could have been the real thing.
Every Balakian poem is a record of this marketplace in which the purpose of every historical narrative is the generation of silence, and no sign. Balakian’s 60 Minutes cameras lingered on its real-world results, the same way his poet’s eye now lingers on Gaia, and the crimes of climate catastrophe. “History, Bitterness,” the volume’s first poem, opens to a phone booth where Balakian’s friend hands him a “sweating receiver” and is bidden to “Go ahead—say hello” and the young poet thinks to himself, “What could I say to James Baldwin who was dying in the south of France?” Soon enough Balakian is “sitting at Les Deux Magots”:
And it hits me: just over Pont de Sully my great uncle
sat in a big treaty room in 1919 representing Armenia (did it exist?) in a fancy
hotel with others who hoped for a nation in return for the slaughter.
Baldwin knew Sartre and de Beauvoir, he saw Camus pass by.
It was 1958 and the Algerian cabby who dropped him off drunk
on the curb was half-blind from the revolution.
Bang bang bang goes the heart. Mr. Baldwin was dying in a sensual village
in the south of France. After a week at Versailles my uncle came to that hotel room
where in the closet of his head a big white sheet floated over the Black Sea.
What did rape and massacre mean? Fail-proof, shattered, bitten-off
words that floated over the bridge into the carnival horns of night.
Now “[D]id it exist?” also reads as the elimination of Artsakh, as later in the poem the “map of the dispossessed” and the “ghost map” of his uncle and his grandparents also read as its refugees. Throughout the poem he inhabits himself both as a young poet, and through Baldwin, the older writer he has become:
A few years later Baldwin moved just miles
from where my father was born in Istanbul—a few years after the Armenians
were expunged from Turkey and my grandparents left the ghost map
on the wall. It was 1919 and the flu along Saint-Germain where
my grandparents met my uncle that fall. I knew Baldwin’s heart went hollow,
languid, and sizzled with the need to get out of America; it even led him to
the place my grandparents fled—before they landed a couple of miles from Baldwin’s
apartment in Harlem.
Are these degrees of separation? Or just my way of thinking about that strange
moment in a phone booth at an artist’s colony in the summer of ‘86?
My friend said: “If you love Jimmy’s work, I know he’d love to hear
from you. All good news means a lot, especially at the end.”
What could I say to Mr. Baldwin? He’d helped me understand the bitter
history that trapped me—that was trapped in me.
Istanbul, New York, Paris. No name. No street.
I was sweating into the phone. Mr. Baldwin’s voice was frail but unmistakable.
The poems in Shahé Mankerian’s first volume, A History of Forgetfulness, seem, at first, because of their subject matter, to argue for the injunction never forget. As a child of war, he is one of those trying to forget who cannot forget, who, therefore, does not want the world to forget. For Peter Balakian, this “forgetting” has to be seen in the context of the fact that the Armenian genocide is officially forgotten in many places—forgetting genocide part of genocide, a restaging of genocide, and poetry about genocide some form of the ingestion of that violence. There is no Armenia without remembrance. The epigraph of Mankerian’s book, from Kahlil Gibran, suggests that the fate of the perpetrator does not include forgetting, and that efforts at suppression operate in hydraulic fashion, memories coursing around their blocks:
If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury;
but if you injure him, you will always remember
Mankerian, a child during the Lebanese Civil War, knows something of this phenomenon. His poems are narrative re-enactments that at the same time own up, and implicate. He looks for the power that comes from writing from a child’s lens—even if there are parts where he is looking back holding the child’s hand. Like Gibran, Mankerian left Lebanon when he was 12 years old, and also like Gibran, he writes in English, his adopted language.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out who is doing the remembering and who is trying to forget because there are events the adult wants to forget but the child cannot, and vice versa. Mankerian’s childhood memories of the war stop when he arrives in Los Angeles. In the volume’s first poem, “Educating the Son,” he writes, “I witnessed death / before I could live:”
I got my schooling at the morgue:
a summer job, my mother thought,
would keep the streets out of her son.
It was a booming business, death.
The year was 1975.
A civil war was brewing and
morticians needed a better help.
I was in charge of clipping nails.
In early poems, Beirut is not yet completely riven by war, and the poet’s father, at least when in his cups, is “still pumping.” In “Baker’s Son”:
He was an artery
still pumping
like the streets
of Beirut
But “pumping” only when his father is smoking and imagining that he is “childless.” In Part IV the surprising source of the poet’s trauma is depicted:
My fingers
have collected dirt,
20 years of panic,
and his footsteps.
I feel
uncircumcised:
yellowish
unclean.
When I smell
burnt bread,
my stomach
heaves.
This is your father
in you coming
out yellowish
unclean.
The poet’s private war—epitomizing, to be sure, the larger war in which father and son are submerged, and in which mutual recognition between factions seems likewise unattainable, or if found, found only in mutual rejection—looms as large in these poems as it does in Hisham Matar’s The Return, but Mankerian is not, like Matar, seeking out a missing father, but dreading his very present father’s every appearance, just as much as the day-by-day bombing and gunfire. For a poet, the father is also language itself, and the mother, the mother tongue, but for someone like Mankerian, whose work does not begin until he is in another country, early education does not include conventional training in the building blocks of his vocation. In “Books”:
We didn’t go to school
that day because a bomb
was found, still ticking, near
the cafeteria.
We were euphoric—wild.
Who said war didn’t love
the children?
In “Homecoming,” the children must resort to contrivances lest their father explode: “My brother / practiced the piano” because “We wanted him to think / he was stepping into something perfect.” Mankerian’s father was born in Haifa, and forced to leave Palestine in 1948, found himself, in 1975, just upon finally establishing a business in Lebanon, the victim of another war. The poet’s father can find no fatherland and in “Picnic at Mt Sannin,” the son writes, “Thirty-seven years later, / I still remember the slap”:
No one comforted her;
—I wanted to, but I was too young
And had a slingshot
dangling in my hand. She fixed
her apron and added crushed
wheat to the tabbouleh.
In Mankerian’s childhood “father” and “war” were interchangeable, fused, ingested, and his poetry is the birth of the struggle to separate them, the poems themselves also a recital of that history, of the fruitless attempts, launched again and again, to reconcile with one father and forget the other. In “Discovery of Cycle,” we see just how far that confusion went—an Oedipal interdiction extended into the poet’s future:
In the kitchen,
Mrs. Ibrahim’s hushed report
about the ceasefire and the children
coming home consoled Mother.
“Inshallah,” she said and remembered
a brother still missing in the village
of Zeytoun. Mother rinsed her hands
after slicing pickled green tomatoes.
I didn’t want to interrupt, but the smell
of vinegar and the bloody terrycloth
made me clear my throat. “I found
this in the bathroom,” I told Mother,
“I think someone’s wounded in this house.”
If the child cannot distinguish between what is war and what is not war, for the adult, these remembered fragments of distress must be, as Walter Benjamin said, like “digging the earth to find dead cities.” In “Samir 3:16”:
God sold marigolds under a green
awning that cupped the summer rain.
Sweat dripped from His forehead
on orange petals when He yawned.
We stood in front of His wooden cart
and prayed His blind dog wouldn’t smell
the slobber of sorbet around our lips.
The smear of pomegranate sap
on our palms reminded Him of His only
begotten son Samir who was nailed
to the planks of the railroad track.
Militiamen accused the boy of blasphemy.
The whistle of the fast-approaching
train muffled the howl of the dog.
God the father is added to the child’s lexicon of incomprehensible and bad patrimonies, and in its echo of John 3:16, Mankerian’s railroad tracks, rather than representing a place where people of goodwill will eventually try to create new forms of community, are an assertion that there is no form of spiritual life disarticulated from the will to power and grandeur. “A Mother’s Prayer,” a sonnet Mankerian wrote as a graduate student, is accusatory towards God and includes the line: “Your sons are guilty of a Holocaust.” Given the context, this is not the Nietzschean deicide but the articulation of experiences that show the false promises of religious rule. Even though, at least in an Anselmian sense, “God,” as a concept, has broad shoulders, they are not broad enough for a poet’s compulsive repetition of returns to this same question. “That Summer” includes a direct reference to the work of the author whose epigram begins the book:
While playing hide-and-seek
beneath the railroad bridge,
we found her bicycle
before we found her shoes.
Her body had a shape
still dressed, sun-dried, but green
with algae. Who was she?
A sewer creek was near.
A leech was her third eye.
We found the bullet holes.
A sniper had a field day
locating her spine.
Gibran was close at hand.
The Prophet warped, unleashed
out of the backpack. Torn
to pieces—not the book,
but pages from her life,
unread, incomplete, cold.
That summer ended quick,
the day we buried her.
In Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forché urges each reader to think about the poem and the poet as both having emerged from historical contexts and political events that include “military occupation, warfare and assassination.” In Mankerian’s poems, the only witnesses are children. In “Brioches in Beirut,” no one, except, presumably, the child, sees the Druze cabdriver on fire, that child now forced to be that cabdriver’s Lesser Zadkiel:
Pregnant Fatimah didn’t mind
the mold on the leftover crumbs;
she devoured them
as she crossed the checkpoint
full of pungent militiamen.
No one noticed the Druze
cabdriver on fire.
Fifty years later Lebanon is a failed state, if a state at all. In 2021, it lost its only surviving political connection to its post-civil war era when Saad Hariri resigned, citing sectarianism and rising Iranian influence. Now run by Hezbollah, more interested in lobbing bombs into northern Israel than governance, seventy percent of its population lives in poverty.
As an Armenian poet, Mankerian is likely called to explore the intersection of personal and public history, but this does not absolve him of having to understand the source of conflict within himself—the Dantesque blending. In a cycle of repetitions that reproduce the thought of what cannot be undone, cannot be redressed, the civil war repeats itself in distressful feelings as the headmaster now living in California. It is an event, fixed and unchangeable, but, perhaps because of this, one that continues, or needs to continue, as the only way to keep it alive for possible redress. Only Gibran’s epigraph offers a way out of the countless and difficult and painful recurrences of the child as victim, and as victimizer.
Forché has delimited a category of poetry that Balakian says “has been defined by what she calls ‘political extremity.’” These poets, Balakian says, “sometimes create epistolary modes; use religious language; resort to irony, paradox and surrealism…and employ the poetic fragment.” Mankerian employs the religious language of prayer. “A Mothers Prayer,” the sonnet Mankerian wrote as a graduate student, is a reverse theodicy:
Dear Lord, your Sunday sky is glazed by frost;
your handiwork is underneath the bridge.
Your sons are guilty of a holocaust.
My husband’s upper half is in the fridge.
His feet are still beneath concrete and steel;
I want to find his shoes, his fingernail.
He wore your cross around his neck to seal
his faith. He must have entered heaven frail,
his soul divided like the traffic. East
away from west. I haven’t stitched his head;
it’s frozen, Lord. I asked the local priest
to resurrect my husband from the dead.
I might be selfish, but you’ve let a man
die…split…I want my husband, Lord. Amen.
In “Lord’s Prayer: Age 28”:
Dear Jesus, snap
the cables and let the box
full of monsters fall.
I’m used to wearing socks
under the blanket,
but today I will stand
barefoot on the grass.
If he tries to crawl back
out, I won’t run.
Now, he’s so fat he can’t
fit under my bed, and
the closet is too dark.
The last time he fell
asleep, I wanted to steal
his dentures. He snored,
coughed foam full
of mucus, toy cars, slingshot,
then cursed you, Jesus.
That was the last time;
he puffed a lone breath as
his ribcage sank.
I fed him cakes
of dirt and watched the box
disappear from view.
The relationship between the events of war and the imagination may be lyrically confrontational, as in Mankerian’s prayer poems or discursive and oblique, as in Pound’s “Pisan Canto LXXIV.” If the Lebanese Civil War can be construed as a legacy of the colonial period, it is harder to lay responsibility for its current status as an Iranian proxy on its colonial patrimony. There is intergenerational but also intersectional trauma, and the question, for Mankerian, includes how one lives as the heir to a family of victims and perpetrators. In “Homecoming: 5th Day”:
She was gone for four days.
Father knew she’d come back
to feed his boys. Every morning
he cracked some eggs and squeezed
blood oranges. We didn’t clean
the table because we kept waiting.
He drove to work, and we walked
to school at opposite directions.
We held hands to cross streets
but refused to discuss the fight
even though Dad finally hit her.
We fried more eggs for dinner.
On the fifth day, when we got home,
she had cleaned the dishes, wiped
the table, and the kitchen seemed full
of steam from the pressure cooker.
In Part I of the book, the child learned how to hide his trauma—home a beating, school a beating, war a beating—giving the lie to the idea that boyhood knows only its own priorities. In the epigraph for Part II, from Idries Shah, “You have not forgotten to remember; you have remembered to forget,” the title of the book is interrogated again. In “The City of Lost Children,” Mankerian seems to double down on the theme of damage done to innocents, but given that he serves now as principal of the St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena, California, there is also the suggestion that even now the classroom is one part of the past he can’t escape:
I can’t remember how I felt the first time
I hid behind a skirt in Beirut. Boys couldn’t
play in the same playground as girls.
When the headmaster didn’t pay attention,
we snuck in. I learned girls chewed gum
secretly. I learned they giggled in unison.
I learned they pulled their skirts up to show
more thigh when the boys came near.
When we heard the whistle, we hid under
the staircase, or behind the trashcan,
or the column that held the church dome.
I hid behind a skirt, unshaven, staring
at a pair of dirty ankle socks, completely safe.
Many of the poems in the second part of the book—even “The 17th Parallel in Beirut”—take place in the classroom:
Unless you’re bad,
unless you count the rat-
a-tat-tat of the M16s in the distance,
unless the caged
window to the alley
becomes your cinema. I come from
a divided classroom where
boys don’t sit
next to girls—the teacher talks
about Hitler’s mustache,
but you leave your desk
hypnotized and walk
to the trash can. You find
sharpening a pencil more
engaging than all the Nazi
speeches about war.
You stare deep into the crumpled
world of papers. You might find
a love letter. You might get
your ear pulled, dragged
back to your corner.
The teacher might scream at you
and change your seat.
And all along,
that’s what you wanted—
to be bad, so that you could sit
next to a girl and start
daydreaming about her thigh.
In “Madame Bshara’s Black Skirt” the classroom is the father of the suppression of one language and the birth of another:
Her ruler poked me.
I stared at the maroon
lipstick and the chalk
prints around her breasts.
I couldn’t speak. She
wanted to choke
my Armenian.
Her tongue looked thick, guttural.
She even walked
in Arabic; her hips swaying
right to left; her nylons
sparked in anger.
She pulled my ear
to her desk and demanded
I read her index finger,
blocking letters full of snake.
I couldn’t read or recite.
“Say something!”
I wanted to amaze her,
but my lips quivered,
and then the whisper,
“Gibran—Kahlil Gibran.”
That’s all I knew.
He sounded like Bshara,
thick, black and guttural:
“Kahlil—” that’s all I knew.
And the rest felt like poetry:
Gibran, Gibran, Gibran.
In “Thank God for Judas,” as in many of the classroom poems, Mankerian can at least insist, like Milosz, on his own role in the drama, that “poetry can, at least, demand that language have integrity and not be in connivance with official lies”:
During the Passion play tryouts,
even Suzan, who loved to bite boys,
wanted to play Jesus. She insisted
her long hair and the contour
of her waist seemed perfect
for the cross. But she was fat,
and no one dared to say that
to her face. Even Mrs. Shnorig
had difficulty dissuading her.
Suzan’s parents were lawyers and
controlled the principal
with letters of threat. I didn’t care.
I secretly liked Suzan; she smelled
like buttery croissants when I sat
next to her. Everyone knew she’d get
the part, so I couldn’t wait to play
Judas and kiss her at rehearsals.
If the concept of “voice” is passe or “improper” now, and the Lebanese Civil War “wrote” both the experience and the behavior of the child, it cannot be said to have written the poems themselves. At some point the child becomes the adult, the apprentice the artist—even if only to hear the different voices coursing through. Cosmopolitanism can be local and stay local—Immanuel Kant and Emily Dickinson can never leave their locales—and still engage in a transhistorical conversation with poets and “voices” from the past. The contemporary can be defined by simultaneity and by tradition. Mankerian is at his best in the implied conversation with Gibran, an Arab, and their coming together suggests a way of coming together of victim and perpetrator—unclear terms in the context of the Lebanese Civil War, which took place from 1975 to 1990, and was fiercest at the “Green Line,” the demarcation between Christian east and Muslim west, and near the site of the disastrous US Marine bombing. In “Captured,” there is more than one way to die:
Mother did not always have Medusa curls.
The black and white picture before marriage
shows Mother smiling, content, with darker hair,
with generous lips, her eyes in focus.
This was Mother before marriage, before 1964,
before Father serenaded her in jazz clubs
all along the rocky seashores of Raouche.
This was mother with no children, no peacock
husband, no war in Lebanon. This was her
with bruiseless neck and tumorless breast.
This was a woman ageless. She did not drive;
she walked, shooting dust on peacocks.
Her head erect, not titled or dyed. This was
a woman I did not know, existed once,
before this picture, smiled, and was captured.
Pre-“capture,” the poet’s mother is illegible and post-“capture,” when the only literacy is violence, impossible to picture. She also speaks to her city, the erstwhile Paris of the East, now likewise illegible, captured by ethnic and religious hatred. In “Armenian Politics in the Kitchen”:
Father did not want Mother to
spend money on eggplants.
He refused to eat Imam bayildi
“the Imam fainted”
or karniyarik “slit belly”
even if Mother drenched
the pot with olive oil
and puree of roasted garlic.
She couldn’t fool him.
He knew she soaked them
tenderly like limp mice
underneath layers of minced
onions, shallots, parsley,
and the bloody paste of tomatoes.
Turkish recipes tasted suspicious.
When Father inhaled steam,
his nostrils protested.
Mother shooed flies out
of her kitchen as she lit
coffee grinds by the windowsill,
but Father claimed he smelled
liars from Istanbul simmer
like rodents on the metal base of
the pressure cooker.
In “Geography Lessons,” America, too, is mistaught and misunderstood:
In a classroom full of mosquitos,
I envisioned America with statues
of Washington at the entrance of grand
bazaars, bathhouses, and hookah lounges.
We stared at the map many times,
but no one explained the peculiarities
of the landscape. I wondered if low
flying jets rattled windows and blew
crumpled newspapers on makeshift
backgammon boards. Did idle men snap
at their wives and curse Israel for lack
of foot traffic? I knew Lebanon trumped
Delaware in size, but who fed the skeletal
cat by the mosque? Where did they bury
the child, while jumping rope,
she overlooked a landmine?
In America, a poet was writing “Geography III,” but more aptly, the analogy would again be with Seferis, who wrote often of wandering Ulysses. In “Resourcefulness”:
In the rat’s alley, we found a chopping board
inside the butcher’s bin. Midas Misak fetched
the hammer his father kept next to a sickle
as a Soviet shrine. Jesus Koko held rusty nails
between his fingers like bullet shells. We stole
rubber bands and cat’s eye marbles from Bizarre Bolivar.
While the rooftop sniper slept, Catlak Garo
removed clothes pins on tiptoes to make flippers.
We play deaf to the sirens from the seaport
like those sailors Ulysses employed on his black ship.
Carcasses floated on the Mediterranean. We huddled
between battered buildings, witnessed a game
of makeshift pinball, and wished St Charbel
replaced the lint in our pockets with liras.
Seferis was writing his world elegies about the same time as Eliot was writing his. But Mankerian’s poems witness the self before it is capable of making art out of its experience, ingesting, to again employ Balakian’s term, the world which will later be the material out of which the artist makes his elegy. In “Like Eliot’s Prufrock”:
Like a slab of meat etherized upon a table
she felt obligated to clean her fiancé. A nurse
pulled the curtain and left her alone with a limp
rag and a bedpan full of warm, lathery water.
From the unfinished department to the ambulance,
she used her unfitted wedding gown to wrap
his punctured belly with shrapnel shells.
The doctors cut the dress like a gauze. She dabbed
his foaming mouth with the veil. They didn’t have
a balcony anymore. Torn pages from his dissertation
covered a pool of blood. Soap residue stained
his torso, the floor tiles, his diaphragm.
In Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” the words generate a semantic system of their own, so eventually violence and beauty are not separable in Shulamite’s ashen hair. Language in which an image intersects and conveys moral force can be found in other poems which ingest violence like Dylan Thomas,’ “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” or Primo Levi’s “Shema.” In “Inner City with Father,” Mankerian turns to a final image that elides the presence and absence of all his fathers:
In our last conversation, he sat
on a milk crate, held the unlit
cigarette like a fountain pen,
and kept tapping the filter against
his weak heart. As if he wanted
to offer a final walkthrough
inside his chambers, dispose the
melted snow of Mt. Ararat,
wrap the warped Kamancheh of Sayat
Nova in rags, tuck Mama’s grape
leaves like love letters in the left
ventricle. Beethoven blocked
a coronary and a cadenza full
of sonnets pushed against his aorta.
“That’s the ashen smoke of Beirut
That’s the bloated bridge of Bourj,
and that’s you,” he said,
“my failing tourniquet.”
These words kill the son but launch the poet. The reader, too, snaps to attention and is immediately cast into the present where he is still trying to save himself from his father but now trying to save himself in a way that he can grant his father the same saving power over his own (father)land. The best antecedent is Ezekiel: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are on edge. Now the poem from which the volume takes its title can finally appear:
She might finally forget
my name when she’s dicing onions
on a chopping block.
For now, Mother can’t pinpoint
my daughter’s birthday; she recites
random months like, January
and August, until I remind her
it’s in July. She forgets to swallow
her blood pressure pills,
so she leaves church early.
After she calms her heart, she drinks
Turkish coffee. No one knows
why she clips coupons for Campbell’s
tomato soup. She makes illegal
U-turns just to make sure the burner
under the pressure cooker is off.
She can’t sleep at night
because when she closes her eyes,
she remembers everything.
Forgetfulness can finally take another form; even while it ends the same way all earlier attempts at forgetting do, the Campbell’s soup reference suggesting his mother’s history finds its diaspora in consumerism. The poet must be able to convey both the public “event” and the private suffering. The event may be collective, but the suffering is not, cannot be—what makes it suffering is the fact that it cannot be shared. One can see in Mankerian’s parents how traumatic memory returns—how images, dreams, and hallucinations, all in fragmentary moments, become tropes organic to the poet’s vocation.
There are no formulaic, coopting forms or strategies for Balakian’s ingesting violence, and the poetry of witness is double sided. For Mankerian, the Kahlil Gibran epigram suggests that the public reckoning must include an encounter with the aggressors in ourselves. Indeed, the implication of the Gibran epigraph is that by our wounds that we are healed. In a history of forgetting there is always repetition and rarely in ways that reflect change. For Jews and Armenians, history is not “progressive.” Like Balakian, Mankerian becomes more like his father, not less, and forms of organizations that oppress reproduce themselves in family relations. Mankerian as an adult arguably falls foul of his own position towards his father, and we might, as readers, question the stability of binary pairs that need their opposite to make sense. The child, of course, has no sense of the history into which he is born. It is a child’s vision of the Lebanese Civil War just as it is a child’s vision of the father. What drives the poet will not survive the poem.
The Gibran epigraph suggests that we identify with the perpetrators—if only because, Mankerian might be implying, they are not all that different from ourselves. But when the signifier begins to untether from the signified, it can be so destabilizing that we revert to the arbitrary definitions we have been trying all along to escape. If given a chance to read our indictment against the gods, we might discover only our own capacity for hate, our affidavit against the universe absurd on its face.
Now Balakian and Mankerian, on different trajectories, meet as role models for the poets of Artsakh. No one came to their aid, and once again Armenians were on the run, a problem “solved” by their elimination. In a region that traces their history back 8,000 years, there is only the destruction of historical and sacred sites, mattering little to the world next to oil revenue—and only the poetry of witness on the serpentine road heading out of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In its echoes of death marches past, out of the democide of Artsakh, the Armenian poet will once again have to create out of nothing. Every Armenian is a poet because of this, is self-caused, the ground of his or her own being. At least in the poem there is a world, something rather than nothing, a world within the world separate from the world that looked the other way, gave little attention, inveterate antisemitism drawing it to other places where “genocide” itself is but a historicizable cultural phenomenon. Thus, not so much the “Poetry of Witness” but the poetry of causa sui, ex nihilo, bootstrapped by itself into existence.
When the bodies of these poets are at work they weigh more than cedar, because by setting themselves off against time they generate their own time and place, their own country. In Armenia the monuments are more likely to be of cultural figures. For the first time in thousands of years, Artsakh has been evacuated of Armenians. Their “voluntary” exit has created another blank page. The International Criminal Court has its sight set elsewhere, and there is silence from the academic community, so again the poet’s page will have to be both the physical and imaginative locus holding all the events, the only site where the country is maintained, the official record and the gap in the official record, the place for the poem and the place for the disappeared.
One a first book, the other, late work by a master—Mankerian seemingly straightforward as possible, Balakian condensing to the point of opacity—but since both books are also efforts to overcome the indecency of our new established church of streaming and looking away, looking past, their language is always on high alert. Their separate styles meet in the person of the last poem of Mankerian’s book, “A Conversation with Taha Muhammad Ali”:
I tell him, My father is from Haifa.
“I already know this from your hazel eyes;
your mother must have drank olive oil
during pregnancy,” he smiles.
“Who’s your father?” Nazareth.
“Like my city,” he says, “but no coincidence.
You and I have the same wild blueberries,
pomegranates, and black, pitless cherries
in our blood.” I misunderstand, pitiless.
I say, Father died in ‘94. “I know this,”
he says, “because you never buried him;
he still lives on your tongue. When you come
to Nazareth, we’ll lay him to rest behind
the church, deep in the overgrown lilacs.”
