week 7: Strange Cartographies
lecture transcripts about poetry of the third space
I’m teaching this semester, a poetry class within an anthro department, looking at writers and writing that work in different “Englishes” shaped by their intersecting identities. Each week, we read a packet of poems and essays, and I deliver a short lecture at the beginning of class. And I’m sharing those lectures here! This one was from March 25th. The packet included an excerpt from Carol Fadda-Conrey’s “Contemporary Arab-American Literature” and the poems “Adaptation Portraits (Strange Cartographies)” by George Abraham (from which this unit borrows its title), “Ars Poetica” by José Olivarez, “Afghan Funeral in Paris” by Aria Aber, and “Haifa Love Letters” by George Abraham.
Strange Cartographies
March 25, 2025
José Olivarez writes, in the poem Ars Poetica, “I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion. Let me try again: I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned.” In the 1996 preface to Born Palestinian, Born Black, Suheir Hammad writes “Borders are manmade, and I refuse to respect them unless I have a say in their formation.” I want to be clear, in working to articulate a poetry of the third space, that I am not necessarily bemoaning an existence in this third space, if the alternatives on either side are assimilation into the host land or uncritical nationalist glorification of the homeland. In José’s poem I recognize my own reluctance to reproduce ideas of belonging predicated on the viability of the nation-state. In what functions as a sort of statement of poetics when he declares “My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned / My work: to imagine,” I find an invitation to world-build, to community-build, to choose. To have agency in choosing my belonging.
For so long I think I functioned from the idea, lived from the idea, wrote from the idea—that where I am from and where I exist were drastically different places, irreconcilably different, even. But to think that way is to first and foremost reinforce one of the main beliefs of Orientalist thinking, this binary between East and West, here and there. I find myself growing increasingly disillusioned by the governance of the border as a marker of anything, the governance of geography as a measure of figurative distance.
In the poem Adaptation Portraits (strange cartographies) George Abraham writes, “most of my ancestors lived unremarkable lives,” going on to describe the myth-making and hyperbole characteristic of diaspora with the anecdote about their grandfather rewriting a story about getting beaten up into one of victory over eight older boys. And in the lines “bite into / that same unremarkable / fruit every morning” I hear a gentle jab at the tendency of diasporic literature to reduce the homeland to images of fruit, like in last week’s conversation about the mango, always sweeter than the fruit in the host land. There is celebration, too, in the fruit being unremarkable, in the lives left behind being mundane—it does not have to have been exceptional, or hyperbolic, or perfect, to be worthy of grief, to be considered a loss.
And in In the Presence of Absence Mahmoud Darwish raises the question posed to all exiles who return to a homeland that does not align with their dreams of its perfection, its paradise:
Has he come closer to the place, or has the place departed from his imagination? […] The older returnee is prone to making comparisons, perplexed as to whether he should prefer the imagined over the real. As for the one born in exile and reared on the beautiful attributes of exile’s antithesis, he might be let down by a paradise created especially for him, composed of words he soaked up and reduced to stereotypes that would guide him to difference. He inherited memory from a family that feared forgetfulness […] He inherited memory from the steady refrains of anthems glorifying folklore and the rifle, which eventually became an identity when the “homeland” was born far away from its land. The homeland was born in exile. Paradise was born in the hell of absence.
The homeland is, in many ways, an invention, an imagining, because a country is, at its root, an invention and an imagining. In his introduction to Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, whose title references this very imagining, Benedict Anderson quotes Ernest Gellner as ruling that “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Anderson’s reading of this assertion determines that Gellner
assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.
Rather than taking this as a dismissal, I find in this line of thinking an invitation: if all forms of community are invented, imagined, then where can our imaginations take us beyond allegiances to the state as a measure of belonging? Again, José Olivarez in Ars Poetica: “My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned.”
Earlier in the same poem, he writes: “Question: is migration possible if there is no “other” land to arrive in. My work: to imagine.” Echoing Darwish’s “I came, but did not arrive, I came, but did not return,” these lines trouble the binary of arrival and departure, of leaving and arriving, of here and there. The imagined, perfect, safe country does not exist, in a world marked by state violence, by painfully cut borders, so there is no arriving in that way, at the kind of safety that does not exist at the level of the nation-state. I’m thinking also of Darwish’s “the homeland was created in exile”—in the same way that arrival is an imaginative construct, so too is any idea of return not marked by complication, by the passage of time. The homeland for the one who left does not remain frozen in time until they return, and so the homeland that one has left behind will never exist again, will be a new place in a new time when the one who left re-enters it. So the work, as referenced in Olivarez’s poem, is to imagine alternate belongings that are not predicated on the viability of the nation-state, belongings that do not equate belonging with citizenship, with bureaucracy, with paperwork.
The viability of the nation-state requires the existence of an Other in order to uphold the “us/them” binary, explored in José’s poem (citizen)(illegal) that we looked at a few weeks ago. In order to draw its citizens close into the fold of citizenship, in order for its citizenship to be considered valuable, the nation-state requires a border to point to, a darker Other to point to as the threat required for the ranks to close. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson qualifies limitation as one of the fundamental characteristics of a nation:
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation.
The existence of an “us” requires the existence of a “not-us”; the existence of the “citizen” requires the existence of the “alien” as a counterpoint to delineate itself against.
This is often a complication present at the heart of diasporic literature: how to mourn a lost homeland without glorifying the nation-state. I want to tread particularly carefully around this question when discussing literature by Palestinian writers. It is one of the goals of the occupation to erase Palestinian identity by trying to erase the existence of a place called Palestine, and increasingly and violently restricting Palestinans’ access to their lands of origin, so the question of land, of return to land, of home as a place with a name, cannot be extricated from the conversation about belonging and homeland. However, Palestinians continue to be Palestinian, no matter where in the world the occupation has forced them to relocate. So I hold it to simultaneously be true that belonging is not predicated on the nation-state and can be reassembled anywhere that people choose to gather and be accountable to one another, without creating any opening for the case against Palestinians’ rights to their actual land being restored and honored, or the case against the existence of Palestine itself.
The poems and essay in this week’s reading all contend with mapping new kinds of belonging, what Carol Fadda-Conrey calls “new configurations of belonging” which run counter to
dominant US national discourse [which] perpetuates such separations by insisting on uniform and singular affiliations to the nation-state. Disrupting such tendencies produces a transational vision […] to negotiate antihegemonic and antiassimilative forms of […] belonging.
Transnational belonging, extranational belonging—all worth dreaming about, worth imagining in an imagined world.
I’ll keep these un-paywalled for the first week after posting! Next week’s unit is called Psychogeography.
xoxo
S