Nathalie Handal, photographed by

Poet in Andalucía

by Nathalie Handal

Federico García Lorca lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn in America, and myself a poet in New York of Middle Eastern as well as Mediterranean roots, I went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. I recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse. Andalucía has always been the place where racial, ethnic, and religious forces converge and contend, where Islamic, Judaic and Christian traditions remain a mirror of a past that is terrible and beautiful. Poet in Andalucía is a meditation on the past and the present. It renders in poetry a region that seems to hold the pulse of our earth, and where all of our stories assemble. It is a meditation on what has changed and what insists on remaining the same, on the mysteries that trouble and intrigue us, and on a poet who continues to call us to question what makes us human. Poet in New York is about social injustice and somber love, and the quality of otherness such forces produce. Poet in Andalucía explores the persistent tragedy of otherness but it also acknowledges a refusal to remain in that stark darkness, and it searches for the possibility of human coexistence.