Rattapallax--Suheir Hammad

ZaatarDiva

Suheir Hammad

ISBN-13: 978-1-892494-67-2 / 1-892494-67-1
LCCN: 2005926126 / BOOK & CD / $12

Fresh from her Tony-Award winning stint in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway and a subsequent 51-city tour, Suheir Hammad has written her first collection of poetry since Born Palestinian, Born Black, published when she was just 22 years old. ZaatarDiva is poetry about love, politics and art, all coming out of Hammad's bag of zaatar. The poems in this collection are at once seductive and dangerous; they are possessed by a singular lyricism and awaren

"Suheir Hammad's ZaatarDiva summons through moments of lyrical insight and urbane wit, again and again, and before we know what has happened, we are hooked. Here's a poetry that urges a wholeness - a crossing of borders - as the personal is woven into the public, whereby a 'prodigal daughter' possesses her own knowing voice. Each poem in ZaatarDiva is heart-driven by the urgent, raw orality of need. And, there is a glistening barb in each turn of phrase - a lure of quicksilver accuracy." — Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.

"Suheir Hammad knows the sight and smell of war first hand as she recites "Daddy's Song." Her physical beauty and gracefulness pulls you into her quiet storm as it rips your mind open to the stew she's brewing. Her thoughts are poetic, but her message is beyond real." — San Francisco Bay View (by David Alston reviewing Def Poetry Jam in SF)

Comments about Suheir Hammad's ZaatarDiva

"For the elegantly beautiful Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian from Brooklyn with formidable lyrical gifts and a distaste for always being seen as "the exotic," lovemaking is continually disrupted by flashing thoughts of the traumatic events and brutality unfolding around the globe." — Chicago Sun Times (by Hedy Weiss reviewing Def Poetry on Broadway)

“This is a book of love poems for the world, Suheir Hammad’s world and our world — the streets of Palestine and Brooklyn; her father’s shop and her lover’s skin; baklava, prisons and poetry. She celebrates the lives of those who speak from the shadows, who see clearly how much damage human beings can do to each other and who still struggle to survive and keep their humanity. Hammad’s compelling voice carries an urgent necessity and an angry honesty, and yet it can also speak tenderly with great compassion. It’s a voice we all need to enter, a new reflection for this young and troubled twenty-first century.” — David Mura, author of Angels for the Burning and The Colors of Desire.

"In her rich and true second collection of poems, Suheir Hammad asks and answers the question, what is a Zaatardiva? The truth she offers readers is fierce, clear, and beautiful. These poems continually find their way through the wretched tangle of the world's inequities and contradictions to a place of lucid and elegant testimony. The poet Suheir Hammad has sharp eyes, full voice, and open hands." — Elizabeth Alexander, author of Antebellum Dream Book

NEWPAGES: Zaatar: Arab spice mix, made of thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds. Before sprinkling zaatar on your pita bread, brush it with some olive oil. Fresh from her Tony-Award winning stint in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway and a subsequent 51-city tour, Suheir Hammad has written her first collection of poetry since Born Palestinian, Born Black, published when she was just 22 years old. ZaatarDiva is poetry about love, politics and art, all coming out of Hammad's bag of zaatar. The poems in this collection are at once seductive and dangerous; they are possessed by a singular lyricism and awareness, and her call to action has a major presence in her work. (March 6, 2006)

The world should know Suheir Hammad. They should know her bravery through the striking and descriptive words that fall from the pages of her newest poetry collection, ZaatarDiva. This review will surely not do justice to the passion in her pen. It will not demonstrate the raw honesty and soft beauty that makes Suheir Hammad one of the most deep and intensely emotional poets writing today. Hammad thrusts the reader into the story, no matter how uncomfortable it may make them. She is critical of oppression in many forms, and demonstrates a love for the world and the people in it like no other. My copy came with a tiny bag of zaatar and a CD that includes a selection of the book's poems read by the author herself. In all honesty, I'm not a fan of poetry, but there's something about this writer that makes me keep reading and seeking out her work. That's some deep shit, yo. (Review by Estella Rae) -- Altar Magazine

"Brooklynite Hammad may be the first Palestinian-American to make it big in the spoken-word, or performance poetry, scene: she took part in Russell Simmons's Tony Award-winning Def Poetry Jam and has read on (among other venues) National Public Radio. Her first collection is also the first book from the Cypher imprint, edited by spoken-word elder statesman Willie Perdomo. Inspired both by her links to the Arab world and by the styles and stances of such earlier poet-performers as Nikki Giovanni, Hammad celebrates and defends her heritage ("i want to be open and hide/ the children of Palestine within me") and can be equally passionate about daily life in her home borough: "if you can make it here/ you got nothing to fear," the poem called "brooklyn" says. With the book comes a CD of Hammad in energetic performance, including a brief interview with the poet's father (subject of her poem "daddy's song"). Leading off the CD is one of Hammad's best poems, the ironic "mic check," whose title refers to sound equipment and to an airport search performed by a hapless guy named Mike." — Publishers Weekly

“Suheir Hammad’s poetry is a deep resonant song in her bones, perfectly paced, funny and profoundly wise. In her radiance we can bear to be human beings again, we can feel that humble pride.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel and Red Suitcase

"Suheir Hammad is the first Palestinian-American poet to emerge, like an emergency, bringing the full Otherness to USA panoply. She's fierce and. political, human and loving, zaatar. And the poems, Honey, they are spicy as hell. She's the jazz of Brooks, the hiphop of Tupac, the humor of Hagedorn. This woman leads the way, except she won't have us follow. She wants us here beside her, shoulder to shoulder, the poem of people striding the world." — Bob Holman, editor of Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

“Suheir Hammad’s poems in ZaatarDiva sing Arabic romantic, proclaim Palestinian fervent and pronounce Brooklyn gritty the hard truths of heritage, history and love. The humility and generosity of her poems lament our dead, chant our prayers, entice our love, inspire our revolutions and comfort our distressed eyes. Like the pungency and tang of zaatar itself, these poems are a blend of devotion, redemption and recognition, delving into the large sorrows from Tunisia, from Palestine from New York City and the small miseries of heart, family, and legacy. Hammad’s musics are the gentle strings our souls need to breathe in the air so toxified by tyrannies large and small. I will cling to this book as realization and salvation.” — Elmaz Abinader, author of Children of the Roojme.

"Anyone reading Suheir Hammad's long awaited second collection of poetry, ZaatarDiva, will come to the conclusion, as I did, that when we talk about the future of American poetry we must include the name Suheir Hammad." — Sapphire, author of Push and Black Wings & Blind Angels

“Or we would have missed the luminous and seductively uncompromising Suheir Hammad, the Palestinian from Brooklyn, deepening the reach of irony with a poem about a ‘random routine check’ at the airport.” — Newsday

“Suheir Hammad proves gracefully sensuous.” — NY Post

bag of zaatar

brown paper
bags yellow blue
paper bags white
red paper bags

all tied up
with curled string
pretty

open up my bag
and out will spill

pieces of colored
glass bits of shells
see beads broken
some orange peel
cassava leaves velvet
slippers for a china
doll scraps of skin
baby teeth
hair lots of hair

open up my
bag seek
secrets closets
whispers whips
things deciduous
dead things
breathing things
amulets mirrors
cracked 7 years
bad luck 7 times
over and

sweet oils
sandals woods
honey rocks and earth
champagne chocolates
good chocolates
music music sweet

open up my bag
tell me what you see

daddy’s song

you always loved classics said
new music was shit just
like comedians couldn’t make jokes
without getting nasty no more
singers couldn’t sing

in your day there was sinatra presley
(you hated him wouldn’t let us watch his flicks)
and some cat named cooke

all the time
sam cooke can sing sam cooke sang real
songs simple and good

i was in high school
the first time i heard your mix
tape of cooke classics and
i fell in love with his voice smooth smooth

and i fell in love
with the daddy i thought all
this time talking about
some sinatra presley like guy
not this sweet sweet music

i was in college when we rented
malcolm’s life on video and
the one good thing spike lee ever
did was play that song your
song as malcolm i mean denzel
was getting ready to die

you cried in your easy boy reclining
your head to better listen that was you
daddy born by a river
in a little tent and i swear
you been running
running ever since

that’s my song too daddy
and one day i’m gonna sing it
for you in a poem

Poetry: Spicing Up Political Poetry (Brooklyn Rail)
by Anju Mary Paul

Three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad performed her poem “First Writing Since”during the debut episode of the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.

1. there have been no words.
i have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes s outh of canal street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna.
not one word.

The show went on to win a Peabody, and Hammad’s performance was lauded by The New York Times as “uncompromising [and] poignant.”

The following year, Simmons—founder of the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings and the Phat Farm clothing line—took this smash-hit “poetry-meets-street” concept to Broadway (picking up a Tony), and then across the country and around the world. Both on Broadway and on tour, tall, leggy, supermodel-thin Hammad, with her sharply angled face and riotous head of hair, was part of the original cast once again, feted as the country’s first Palestinian-American poet.

Thirty-two-year-old Hammad—author of three books, two-time winner of the Audre Lord Writing Award, and co-recipient of the 2005 Sister of Fire Award—is what you would call a “political poet.” This longtime Brooklyn resident sees her poetry as news, containing the power to influence and illuminate the world. She believes that she has as much right to write poems about hot-potato, topical issues—Iraq, Palestine—as the more common subjects of poets, like love and death. “Poetry has no greater vocation than transformation,” she tells her students during a class for aspiring poets at the Bowery Poetry Club. “We don’t need poems that just describe a moment.”

Hammad is the latest of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the World,” following a long line of poets that include William Butler Yeats in Ireland, Pablo Neruda in Chile, and June Jordan, born right here in New York City. She has used her poetry to protest against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, and to support the Palestinian freedom movement and women’s rights. In February 2003, after Sam Hamill’s invitation to a White House poetry event was retracted when it was feared that he would read an anti-war poem there, Hammad participated in the Poems Not Fit For The White House event—a Lincoln Center poetry reading that included Hamill, Sharon Olds, and Stanley Kunitz.

As a poet of the news, Hammad took on the role of reporter this September, after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. She helped organize a benefit called Refugees for Refugees to raise money and clothes for the survivors of the hurricane, and then spent three weeks in Louisiana, talking with survivors and listening to their stories. The poem she wrote after her visit was entitled “Of Refuge and Language.”

I am not deaf to cries escaping shelters
That citizens are not refugees
Refugees are not Americans

I will not use language
One way or another
To accommodate my comfort

I will not look away

All I know is this

No peoples ever choose to claim status of dispossessed
No peoples want pity above compassion
No enslaved peoples ever called themselves slaves

“Suheir is the greatest thing to happen to poetry since the invention of water,” says Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and producer of The United States of Poetry for PBS. He may be waxing a bit too lyrical, but he defends his over-the-top praise of her: “For most people, poetry is an obscure and elitist art. [And] for most U.S. citizens, the Israeli-Palestinian situation is an abstract and impossible-to-understand situation. Now we have, in a single individual, the exposition of clarity and beauty to communicate the truth about both poetry and Palestine. That’s the equivalent of discovering a new world or, say, the invention of water.”

But what raises Hammad above the cacophony of angry, idealistic, and downright demented voices out there in the artistic firmament is the fact that she is not just a political poet. “Suheir is not only a voice, but also every bit a formal poet on the page,” says Holman.

To Hammad, a poem that is political at the expense of being poetic is a failure as verse. She believes that a poet’s first responsibility is to meter and rhyme and precision and truth in her work. She is uncompromising on this point. “I don’t have to pretend that, just because I agree with your politics, I’m down with your poetry,” Hammad says defensively, as if this is an argument she has fought too many times with too many of her peers.

“The conversation should not be about whether this poem is political or not,” she says, taking issue with the increasing resistance to political poetry in this country from the White House down. “[The conversation] should be on mediocrity; the conversation should be about craft. If it’s not a tight poem, it won’t change the world. There aren’t three K’s in America—‘AmeriKKKa.’ Misspelling never saved anyone. If you truly believe the Klan is running this nation, show me in the poem.”

Hammad’s new collection of poetry, ZaatarDiva (Rattapallax Press, 2005), is full of poems to the “children of Palestine,” anti-war poems, and poems against racism and bigotry. But theyalso testify to the fact that Hammad’s political passions never take hostage her aesthetic standards. In “Mike Check,” one of her most well known poems that is included in ZaatarDiva, Hammad shows how to achieve that perfect union between metaphor and meaning.

one two one two can you
hear me mic check one two

mike checked
my bags at the air
port in a random
routine check

i understand mike I do
you too were altered
that day and most days
most folks operate on
fear often hate this
is mic check your
job and I am
always random

The title comes out of Hammad’s experience of being the outsider for much of her life. In 1973, she arrived on these shores as the five-year-old child of Palestinian refugee parents. She spent a restrictive childhood in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that left her with plenty of spare time to read, and read, and read. (“I’m the kid that could not go to the roller-skating rink or on class trips because they were held at night or at places where boys would be,” she says now, with self-mocking humor. “I was that immigrant.”)

Her mother used to make her sandwiches to take to school for lunch. But while “everyone else was eating ham or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Hammad recalls, “we had green shit all over our teeth.” The “green shit” was zaatar, a Middle Eastern spice-and-herb dip made from olive oil, thyme, sesame seed, oregano, mint, and marjoram, that Hammad’s mother used as a sandwich filling. Hammad realized then that the peanut-butter-and-jelly American life she saw on television and in the books she read—the dominant narrative then and now—“wasn’t always right and wasn’t always inclusive.” She chose ZaatarDiva for her new book’s title “to honor the memory of a childhood that as difficult as it may have been at the time, lent itself to an adulthood of trying to reach out to marginalized voices.”

ZaatarDiva is the first book under Rattapallax’s new imprint Cypher Books. Hammad was selected to be Cypher Books’ first poet because, as Editorial Director Willie Perdomo says, “She reads the hell out of a good poem.” Having known Hammad for more than a decade, he sees an evolution in her writing from “telling [her] own story to telling other people’s stories.” But he still marvels at how when Hammad recites her poems, she can “galvanize large groups of people to action.”

That clarion call is the underlying thrust of all of Hammad’s work. She refuses to give up on the human race and insists that we are capable of more, of better. She says it best at the end of “First Writing Since”:

there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but breathing for sure. and if there is any light to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.

affirm life.
affirm life.
we got to carry each other now.
you are either with life, or against it.
affirm life.

Suheir Hammad’s “ZaatarDiva” (Left Turn)
Reviewed by Hadeel Assali

Palestinian sister, Brooklyn poet, woman of color, oh the many ways to describe the phenomenon that is Suheir Hammad. ZaatarDiva - just had to shake my head and smile at that one. But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I had been waiting to see what she came up with next.

Suheir Hammad does so fearlessly what many of us cower from – “us” meaning Palestinians, women, immigrant and exiled communities, people of color, people of consciousness, all of them combined; “us” meaning humanity. Her poetry is reminiscent of the desperation many of us feel yet often suppress, summoning and probing what most would rather ignore. As a fellow witness to the mindless madness surrounding us, I am deeply grateful that there is another who speaks out boldly, beautifully, and honestly. Having a sister like Suheir among us is immensely critical in a day and age where what she (we) represents is so dishonored – even by ourselves. It is reassuring that confusion and anger is also felt by a woman full of passion and love, a woman who has the gift of the pen, a woman who is selfless enough to share it relentlessly and eloquently.

It is tempting to read “ZaatarDiva” in one sitting. However, this book offers such a poignant mixture of experiences and evokes such a myriad of emotions that I had to put it down regularly to absorb and reflect on the intensity of her verses. As she pours herself on the pages, she shares valuable bits of wisdom and guidance, reminding us to pay tribute to where we come from, as in “jerusalem sunday”, “ramallah walk”, and “brooklyn”. She teaches us appreciation of ancestors, elders, and family, as in “sister star”, “daddy’s song”, and “mamma sweet baklava”. She questions the status quo in “valentine”, “no cover up, and “mike check” (which she rocked on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam). She laments the tragedies that befall women in “4:02 p.m.”, “of woman torn”, and “nothing to waste”; then implores us to remember our self-worth as women in “glitter girl”, and “lipstick”. Palestine is obviously heavy on her mind in “love poem” and “the gift of memory”, and she reasserts our existence as Palestinians in “post zionism (as it relates to me)” in defiance of Zionist propaganda.

Another valuable lesson she imparts is the importance of connecting struggles and recognizing the injustices that happen to others, which she has often done prior to the writing of this book. Many pieces in “ZaatarDiva” draw parallels between different oppressed peoples, question the racist policies many fall victim to, and call for solidarity with the dispossessed and exploited.

Suheir intimately bestows upon her readers her experiences with love and heartbreak. Her gracefully written love poems emanate with passion and adoration. One of my personal favorites was “precious”, a poem dripping with sweetness, yet leaving the reader with a feeling of tragic emptiness.

Another poem I feel compelled to mention is “bint el neel”, an elegant tribute to the woman known as the Voice of Egypt, Um Kalthoum. In this ode, Suheir describes the experience of growing up with parents who listened to Um Kalthoum’s long, agonizing songs, then finally learning to love and appreciate them yourself.

The book finishes with what is probably her most well known piece, “First Writing Since”. No other has embodied the convoluted emotions brought on by
9/11 with such a direct and reassuring approach.

There are certain women, Suheir Hammad, bell hooks, Um Kalthoum, Leila Khaled, Gloria Anzaldua, Rigoberta Menchu, Beah Richards, Arundhati Roy, Phoolan Devi, - just to name a few - who have inspired me throughout my life. Their courageousness and words of wisdom motivate me to remain steadfast on the path to righteousness despite all the odds. Suheir’s poetry is the type to be read and re-read, each time evoking contemplation and awareness of what it means to be conscious, loving, spiritual and honorable. “ZaatarDiva” does just that, and as always, will leave you thirsting for more and more of her brilliant insight.

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