You are currently browsing the daily archive for April 13th, 2008.
I was invited to lunch, which I thought would be a lot of people, but it turned out arriving at Yantze there was just Linton, Vickie, Chris, and Phoebe. Which I like of course (since I prefer smaller groups). As soon as I walked in Vickie exclaimed, “So cute!” LOL. I had this half-length-tie-in-front purple clothing item that I had bought awhile back (maybe even a year ago?) but never wore in public (because it’s different for me) that I finally wore over a red tank top. And I wore my plaid red cap. Yeah, I look cute ;-P I ate their leftovers (or rather, Phoebe’s leftovers, although I had eaten at home). Linton went to take Phoebe back, so Chris went to Juicebox for a drink. Vickie went there to change, and I ended up getting a parking space just as the two of them were finished. Outside the place, Vickie bumped into Cindy? (from HCC?) so we said hello.
Afterwards we went to play basketball (also with Linton and Laurie) at T. H. Rogers. Vickie left for San Antonio, then Jeannette came. I hear she’s a pretty good basketball player (on the team in middle school?), but she is also such a light-hearted person, playing around with me like sticking out her butt and waving like a maniac. I can tell when everyone isn’t playing up to par around me (like the guys), but otherwise I’d be crushed, haha. Linton had to leave around 5:30, so we ended then.
I still went to football. I pulled up just as Robert C got into his vehicle to leave. I came up to Jesslyn and James talking. I wasn’t sure if I was interrupting the couple, but I wasn’t about to go up to Nathan Kim and the other guys surrounding Wilson (they looked like a team going over plays). I was lamenting on there not being any girls, but James pointed out that they were flying kites! So I ran to join them. The Hello Kitty one was a cinch to fly (but the winds were so strong to break off the string after awhile), but the butterfly wouldn’t go up at all. James and Alison and I tried and tried and tried. We thought maybe it was too heavy and took off some of the plastic rods. We tried flying it upside down. We tried all directions (the wind was flying all directions). Finally we headed over the main field. Lindi had bought a pack of bubbles, so we all took a bottle. They were having trouble, but I just utilized the wind - ingenius ;-) hehe. James ended up wrestling with Robert H, who ended up fixing our kite problem. It was apparently assembled to in effect not utilize the wind (instead of buoying itself on the breeze). Thanks! Yay!
Afterwards, we headed to Boston Market for dinner again. This time Alison, Lisa, Lindi, Robert, James, and I shared the chicken group combo deal. The sides we chose were garlic mashed potatoes, vegetable casserole, greens in cream, cream corn, and other creamed items. Discussion involved guys needing to take leadership, how us females need to respond (in one case you don’t want to say anything to the guy because then the guy will be nagged on and feel they have not made the decision even if the best gentlest encouragement was given), if we females need to wait/pray it out, etc. And sometimes, James admitted, he just doesn’t want to do something so he should just say he doesn’t want to do it instead of giving excuses of too busy and things like that because at the end of the day it’s, he could’ve made time to do it if he really really wanted to.
Later, I joined the others at Robert C’s house. There was already a group there playing poker. Katie Chong was there reading/studying the lecture video on her laptop while playing. Andrew, Wilson, and Chris Lu (who asked me to leave the door open as I was leaving because it was cool outside/hot inside) were also there. Robert H came because he wanted to play Nertz (and Jeff Tang had expressed interest, because he was simply watching them play - since they were really betting, even if the money was nominal). But first, we were like, where did James go? So Robert and I headed upstairs into his room. I said, “Let’s sing!” and I didn’t realize it but Robert sort of teased/imitated my hand gestures and then gave this “Um, ookay” face about my suggestion. But the three of us really did end up singing the songs we sing in church while James played his keyboard. At one point I thought, oh wait, is Robert C sleeping? But James said that Robert has told him in the past that he doesn’t hear anything since right behind the wall is the bathroom and not the bed. At times Robert Hwang and I would switch voices (I would sing low and he would sing high). David Zhao came up to take a shower, and he commented that he thought there were more girls besides me, haha! Katie asked if I could take her home, which I obliged, but then she changed her mind for some reason. She was all sunburned because she hates the texture of sunscreen (reminds me of Nathan Kim). We were all like, well, better than getting…skin cancer?
Palestinian-American doctor turns suffering into song, wins top U.S. prize
By FRITZ LANHAM
fritz.lanham@chron.com
There’s that crack about poetry that, unless you work for Hallmark, you can’t make a living at it. Which is why poets have day jobs, mostly teaching in colleges and universities.
The classroom can certainly be a site of pain, but poet Fady Joudah’s day job involves contact with suffering of a more elemental sort. He’s an emergency-room physician at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.
He’s also done two stints as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, in refugee camps in Africa. As a Palestinian-American, the son of refugees himself, there’s a certain irony in that, not lost on the author. Joudah, in his poetry, writes about those who are stateless and those who suffer, and tries desperately to do it without condescension or false simplification.
He seems to be doing something right. He’s the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Started in 1919 and open to poets younger than 40 who haven’t published a book, it’s the oldest annual literary award in the United States, and in the rarefied world of poetry it’s a big deal — previous winners include such iconic figures as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander and W.S. Merwin.
A historic win
Joudah is the first physician and the first Arab-American to receive the honor. Yale University Press publishes the winning manuscript, which typically gets far more review attention than most first books of poetry. Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic lands in bookstores this week.
“It puts me in a happy state,” Joudah said, when asked why, after a long day patching up vets or ministering to refugees, he distills experience into verse. “Even though my poems don’t seem to be happy, I think I like to sing.”
He and I are talking in the small living room of his apart-ment in Montrose. It’s a fairly spare place, with simple furn-iture and a dining-room table that does double duty as his in-house office. In a back bedroom sleep his physician-wife, Hana el-Sahly, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, and the couple’s newborn son. They also have a 10-year-old daughter.
It’s Monday, Joudah’s day off, and he’s opted for lounging-around attire — khaki shorts, no shoes, loose-fitting shirt. At 37 he appears fit, skin taut over a handsomely shaped face. He’s polite, accommodating and gentle-seeming in that way you want a doctor to be, especially when you’re lying on an emergency-room gurney.
But as soon as he starts talking about his poetry you glimpse his intensity, a mix of pride and anxiety about his literary work. This, you sense, is a guy who wrestles with things in his head.
Giving back
You can see an inevitability to how Joudah became a poetry-writing physician. Drawn early to literature and science, he was encouraged in both by his parents. Although he grew up mostly in the Middle East, he’s a Texas native, born in Austin in 1971, the second of five children. His father was 14 in 1948 when he fled Palestine following the creation of the state of Israel. Joudah’s mother, whose family hailed from the same village, was born in 1949 in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Joudah’s father eventually emigrated to the United States to finish a doctorate in history, returning to Gaza to marry Joudah’s mother. The family moved to Austin, where the elder Joudah taught at the University of Texas for a year before accepting teaching positions first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where Joudah attended junior high and high school.
His father introduced him early to classic Arabic poetry — reciting lines, talking about technique, linking those beloved poems with his own life as a boy. “I always had the feeling that poetry comes through us in a very mythical, legendary way because it forms our experiences,” Joudah said.
His own first efforts to write came in middle school. But medicine attracted him as well. His father gave him a shrewd piece of advice, Joudah said. “He reminds me to this day that he kept telling me, ‘Son, you can always be a writer or a poet after you become a doctor, but if you become a poet, you can’t become a man of science.’ He reminds me that was one of the wisest things he ever told me.”
Notions of idealism
Joudah heeded that counsel. He returned to the United States for college, attending the University of Georgia. By this time he was fluent in English. While he had burbled in English as an infant in Austin, he grew up speaking Arabic. He mastered English in his teen years, studying it intensively during family summers spent in Austin. After finishing his undergraduate degree he completed medical school in Georgia and moved to Houston in 1996 for his residency. He joined the Veterans Affairs hospital in 2000 and has been there ever since.
Joudah never saw himself becoming a conventional private-practice physician or medical researcher. He felt drawn to public-service health care. “It’s the privatization of medicine that I had a weariness of,” he said.
That led him to the VA hospital. “For me the VA is first and foremost a hospital system that provides medical care as a basic human right,” he said. “I think most of the people who come to the VA would not have decent services otherwise.”
This idealism prompted him in 2001 to join Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, French nonprofit that delivers emergency medical care to people victimized by war, epidemics and other natural and man-made disasters. In 2002 he spent six months in Zambia, working in the oldest refugee settlement on the continent. In 2004 he did six months in Darfur.
In a sense he was paying off a debt. When his parents received medical care in refugee camps, it was always a foreign doctor providing it.
But the most immediate effect of his first trip to Africa was to free him from his obsession with his own private tragedy as a Palestinian, a person without a homeland.
“What I felt was, OK, what I can do is universalize suffering and not just privatize it. It’s not just me, me, no one’s suffered more than I have or my parents have. It was great in that sense. I felt a great relief.”
Poetry as therapy
He’d started writing poetry seriously in the late 1990s, “just to get through the hell of residency,” he said. He read some of the younger American poets but deliberately steered clear of a deep immersion. “I didn’t want to delve too much into poetry in English until I was able to find my voice,” he said. He published his first poem, in a literary journal, in 2002.
Perhaps half of the poems in The Earth in the Attic allude to Africa. His experiences there and his legacy as Palestinian interweave in complex ways in his work.
“I wanted to do something different with poetry in the sense that as a son of refugees, exile for me was not a metaphorical state, it was a lineage,” he said. “All of my aunts and uncles have lived true refugee lives.
“I wanted to engage the concept of the stateless person as a theme. For me, being a physician, patients are displaced people, at least momentarily. I wanted to take that to a larger stage, a world stage. I somehow knew this didn’t exist in English literature, at least the way I’m doing it.”
The task, he knew, was fraught with pitfalls. He worried about falling into “narcissistic pity.” He worried about sensationalizing (”I’m still very paranoid about how much I failed to avoid that in my manuscript”) or transforming suffering into an op-ed moment. He worried about categorizing and dehumanizing refugees, putting them in a box readers could safely tuck away under the bed.
“I know our most natural tendency when we speak about the Other is to isolate ourselves as if we had nothing to do with them — they’re far away, in a different situation. I wanted the reader to feel we can’t just stop with the ‘they.’ “
No politics intended
He doesn’t consider himself a “political” poet but recognizes that because he’s Arab-American some will automatically read him that way. Louise Glück, in her foreword, calls Joudah “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession (as distinct from will and fashion) have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.”
One heartbreaking poem, set in an African refugee camp, begins:
Halimah’s mother did not seem aware Halimah was dying.
You should have seen Halimah fight her airlessness
Twisting around for a comfortable spot in the world.
She would gather all of the air she could
In an olympic snatch and curl
Then turn toward her mother’s breast to suckle,
But nothing changed.
“I wanted the reader to feel complicit and not some protected, objective observer,” Joudah said, in talking about what he’s after in poems like this.
Complicit in what?
“In not knowing. That’s the simplest way of saying it. Or in knowing but not asking the second question: What does one do with the task of redefining the meaning of suffering in the world?”
Others of his poems evoke a more benign natural world. Along Came a Spider contains that line that gives the collection its title and begins:
On mornings of this refugee settlement,
After the rain falls in stalks
Of mushroom clouds,
The spiders bloom anywhere there’s a web-hold
And the earth is like an attic.
Still others may leave you scratching your head. Landscape begins:
I am the distance from birds to Jerusalem
Is a metaphor I like, just because
It follows the laws of calculus …
As for the future, Joudah doesn’t plan to quit his day job. “I like being a doctor,” he says flatly. And he mostly likes being a VA doctor. “Most of the patients in the VA have very tough — and I want to say very American — lives in that they’re the ones who constitute a large part of our society, but they’re not the ones we see on TV necessarily.”
The Earth in the Attic isn’t his only iron in the literary fire. Last year the much-respected Copper Canyon Press released The Butterfly’s Burden, his translation of three books by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Joudah cites Darwish, one of the most important living Arab poets, along with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, as two big influences on him.
Now that he has two children, he doubts he’ll be going overseas again soon for Doctors Without Borders, although he remains active in fundraising for the group. As a poet he knows that if he hopes to be more than a one-book wonder he’ll need to expand his range of subject matter.
In discussing what poetry does, Joudah likes to quote W.H. Auden’s line about how it makes nothing happen.
“In the end,” he said, “I have to be humble and to know that my poetry, at its best moments, provides humanitarian relief for the reader. And for me. Especially for me, to be honest.”
From the sequence Pulse
by Fady Joudah
In paradise, hospital beds
Sit under ageless
Mahogany and sycamore that bear
Every kind of fruit.
Hot meals are autumn leaves,
Branches are waitress arms
And also poles for drips.
And birds drop the pills
In your mouth from bills
Of surgical precision.
For Aspirin the swallow.
For Benadryl the nightingale.
No harm befalls you.
The roots will sense your ailment.
The flowers will scan your organs.
Geranium for the spleen,
Poppies for the brain,
And where there’s a latrine
A jasmine vine will blossom.
FADY JOUDAH READS FROM THE EARTH IN THE ATTIC
• When: 7:30 p.m. April 28
• Where: Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross
• Cost: Free
