by Catherine Fletcher

From her first collection, Nathalie Handal’s poetic language has been a personal patois of English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Her poetry has explored and fused images and sounds, moments real and imagined from her many lives in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Palestine. As both critics and fellow poets including Tom Paulin and Lisa Suhair Majaj have noted, Handal’s work reflects a life in motion, of permanent transience in the Dominican Republic, France, the United Kingdom, or her own memory—“C’est comme cela, tout change habibti”. As she has moved, she has depicted her encounters with “betrayed souls”, fortune tellers, soldiers, immigrants, gods and prophets, named and unnamed lovers. She has travelled between the past and the present, living with ghosts in many forms, exploring the borders and spaces which separate people and the forces which draw us to one another but, as Carolyn Forché has noted, “It is a poetry of never arriving.”

While alternating stylistically between the narrative—tinged by the Romantic tradition—and the slightly surreal, much of Handal’s work is also marked by various forms of fragmentation. She writes primarily in free verse, tending toward short lines rather than long, and frequently employs enjambment. In The Neverfield (1999), short interior ruminations stretch over some fifty pages and three sections with lines sometimes just a single word: “I,” “echo,” “lost”. Words and phrases resound: “come… come”; “give… give”; “the field never even sighed… in the neverfield”. In “Lives of Rain,” “In Search of Midnight,” and, below, “I Never Made It to Café Beirut; Nor, I Heard, Did You” from The Lives of Rain (2005) she takes seemingly straightforward narrative poems and fractures lines, fractures stanzas:

You told me that I should wait
at the Lebanese border. You told me not
to fear the Hezbollah, the gunshots,
the missiles or grenades, told me
that I would not see the shadows of corpses
in the stained grey clouds, would not see
the refugees and the UN trucks waiting for God…

Her 2010 collection, Love and Strange Horses, contains poetic collages like “Portraits and Truths” and “Love and Strange Horses—Elegía Erótica” (“A horse. A stranger. An Anthem. An impossible thereafter. / A lonely rift. A grove of trees. A touch. A cry. A murmur.”). Other more recent titles—“Black Butterflies, A Lost Tango”, “Here and There”—suggest the poet’s simultaneous presence and absence. Within poems from all three collections, she often deconstructs the bodies of her subjects into their parts and houses into their elements: doors, walls, and windows.

In Poet in Andalucía, Handal places her poetic self in a single geographic area—southern Spain and northern Morocco—for the first time. A resident of New York, she in her own Preface writes that she had “consciously set to recreate Lorca’s journey in reverse”, spending nine months in the home region of the author of Poeta en Nueva York and writing a ten-part collection that mirrored his work. Many of the threads Handal has followed, juxtaposed and interweaved in previous works meet again here.
Her opening poem “Ojalá” (“Hope”) marries history and the present, Islam and church bells in its first two stanzas:

He holds on to the force
that stretches the narrow light
and finds himself somewhere behind history.

He thinks,
All we have left
is to invent God,
to find an infinite number to hope in,
to touch the grounds of La Manquita,
say Insha’allah,
and wait for the church bells
to remind us of who we have become.

She continues, “There are different varieties of loss…” However, constrained by the Lorcan framework she has chosen for herself, the poet’s perspective shifts subtly, and several of her aforementioned motifs manifest themselves in new ways in this collection.

Handal delves into fragmentation and wholeness in “10 Qit’as” (Arabic for “fragment”). These short forms were originally occasional poems with a single theme and less formal than ghazals (love poems) or qasidas (panegyric odes). A sort of decaptych in which the elements of individual poems dissolve into one another, this suite of poems often feels like pieces of Andalusian tile configured to create a pattern. In “Acitara” she questions the rupture of a whole into parts. In “Ajaraca” memories conjured by ornamental loops cause a house to reappear. “Ajimez”, named for a pair of windows which share a central column, juxtaposes the unexpected division of windows with the unexpected absence of a wall:

We hesitated to
see the bent,
maybe we divided
our windows
to have a clearer view,
we gave birth
in languages not our own,
we wanted to hang
their photos
but
there were
no walls.

ajimez: mullioned window, from Arabic samis. One of the distinctive features of Islamic buildings in Spain, especially noticeable on minarets.

Each qit’a is accompanied by an etymological note, revealing additional layers of meaning. While the bodies of the poems often focus on what can be destroyed or what has been lost, the notes focus on what remains, what is hiding in plain view.

Handal’s Constelación en el Ateneo de Sevilla section operates similarly, with seven poems named for members of the Generation of ’27—an influential group of writers in post-war Spain—such as Rafael Alberti, José Bergamín, and Lorca himself. Each piece is complemented by a quotation by the titular writer, offering additional meaning to Handal’s lines; her Bergamín poem, for example, meditates on the nature of time and is accompanied by Bergamín’s statement: “No tengo más realidad que la irrealidad del tiempo.” (“The only reality I have is the unreality of time.”) And in “The Book of Toledo”, at the end of Convivencia, a series of poetic epigrams concerning war, home, loss, and prayer are illuminated by knowledge of their speakers, information which Handal includes as parentheticals.

Also in Convivencia, “Two Ghazals Two Tzvis” brings together homages to the Andalusian Arabic ghazal and its cousin, the short, erotic Iberian Hebrew gazelle or tzvi, under a title which means, in Spanish, “living together”. Each poem, a series of couplets, has a distinctive flavor— “Ghazal/1” is more abstract like the independent couplets of classical versions, riffing on music and the heart, while “Tzvi /1” is more narrative (like its Hebrew counterpart), describing a charged moment in which two potential lovers meet as a bucket spills water onto wet tiles. “Ghazal/2” continues with the musical theme but with greater narrativity, while “Tzvi/2” is the reverse of “Tzvi/1”, and more abstract. The quartet refracts different aspects of the same theme: how to hold onto moments of beauty, how—after even the briefest encounter—we belong to one another. And how we don’t.

If your heart is not mine,
the kiss you placed on my neck is mine,

the word you drew on the palm of my hand is mine,
your touch, that afternoon on the banks, is mine,

the continent you placed by the chariot is mine,
but what about this paradise, who is it for?

We knew we were both in it. We also knew,
we can’t lose a paradise we’ve seen.

Derived from other Semitic languages—Aramaic and Ladino respectively—additional poems in this section examine who and what is inseparable—“Awón/Sin”—and what happens when departure occurs—“Abásho” (“below” or “departed”, also with the connotation of the dead).

Elsewhere in Poet in Andalucía, the second section, Maktoûb, the Moor Said (named for the Arabic word for both destiny and letter), examines the failings of memory and different versions of home. Alleys and Reveries, particularly “On the Way to Jerez de la Frontera”, explores those things which we need to invent about ourselves—countries, flags—in order to have identities. By the Door, or Is It Death focuses on fate of a different sort, and The Poet Arrives in Tangier offers the mingling of cultures from yet another perspective, just across the Straits of Gibraltar. Non-English words appear throughout, but Handal’s use of them is tied to geography (French, for instance, does not appear until the reader arrives in Morocco), and this more formalistic use gives the work a greater sense of place than in previous collections.

Perhaps the collection’s most intriguing poem is “Alhandal y las Murallas de Córdoba.” A meditation both on the etymology of the poet’s name and the source of identity, it is one of the few pieces in which Handal, a frequent visitor to the past, uses the future tense:

I will be
the well where water meets water.

I will invent my own languages,
images,
streets and sins,
my own walls and my own cities.

I will be
the two doors in the fading light,
the echo that burns his lips,
and the canvas that keeps the cry wet.

With a sense of possibility, she continues to mine in greater depth today’s ever-present questions: “Who am I?” Where do I come from? than when she first noted in The Neverfield, “the name I carry,/the murmuring of my blood/that/is/my only claim/the only one that really matters…”.

I find myself elsewhere
especially everywhere here,
but mostly in the ruins.
I see myself in the stranger’s face,
I hear my voice in hers—
what language am I speaking,
what am I wishing for,
am I entering or exiting
prayer or the alphabet?

I dream what I must.
The day you
told me,
Here is a bitter apple—
that’s the meaning of your name—
it will help you find the days
that taught you who you are.

She sifts through the Andalusian landscape, sifts through her memory, ponders her own future disappearance, investigates the appearance of her name on a Spanish announcement spelled in a way she had seen previously only in her native Bethlehem. In her journey she finds “things no one can take away”: “the taste of date on our tongue”, “the poems of the Sufis”, Córdoba’s legacy of tolerance, the Spanish language, orange trees, and her own name and its origins—the colocynth, a bitter medicinal plant used by Arab apothecaries.

Handal’s work, so beautifully protean, has questioned and examined what can be lost: a country, languages, a missed rendezvous between lovers, the music of the earth. The transitory nature of life is common to the human experience—the bitter apple we all taste: so much of what we live and who we love just disappears…

While Handal intended Poet in Andalucía to parallel Lorca’s Poeta in Nueva York, her work also shares common ground with his last collection, El Dívan del Tamarit, whose gacelas and casidas were a vehicle for him to reimagine Andalucía and the cultural legacy of Al-Andalus. Lorca’s poems had the veil of death over them; love and sensuality ripple through Handal’s. Poet in Andalucía recasts southern Spain through Handal’s eyes, exploring impermanence but also possessing a sense of ojalá. Some things can and do endure.

Everything we hear
is the echo of a voice we can’t hear,
everything we see
the reflection of something we can’t see.
The heart like a star
gives light to the color blue,
to the ruins of Córdoba.
And by la Mezquita,
by the walls
I give you alhandal—
to save you—
and you say my name for me.