Hayan Charara

1 That’s right, I’m talking to you, not him or her. 2 You have been randomly selected for a security check. It has nothing to do with you, your physical features, or your name. 3 Do you now belong or have you ever belonged to a radical political organization? Do you have weapons training? Have you ever visited a training camp? Did you pack your own bags? 4 You people send your sons and daughters on suicide missions. You animals, you! 5 If you will please step aside. If you will please remove your shoes. If you will please come with me. If you will please leave the premises. If you will please not harm us. 6 May you live in interesting times. 7 As Americans, you know exactly what I’m talking about. As Americans, you may be subject to this. As Americans, you should be worried. 8 Is it you who are to blame? 9 We cannot help you. There is nothing we can do for you. 10 The agents came looking for you, at your father’s house. 11 They wanted to ask you questions. 12 I heard about you being suspected, detained, interrogated, jailed without charges, prosecuted with secret evidence, found not guilty. There’s no sense in you making a fuss— they let you go free, didn’t they? 13 Once you begin to see you differently, as separate from you, wholly other from you, then you can become like us. 14 What has history made of you? 15 Let’s get to the point: It was always like looking in the mirror— that face is you. I am you.

An assumption,a pejorative,an honest language, an honorable death. In grade school, I refused to accept the mayor’s handshake; he smiled at everyone except people with names like mine. I was born here. I didn’t have to adopt America, but I adapted to it. You understand: a man must be averse to opinions that have adverse impacts on whether he lives or dies. “Before taking any advice, know the language of those who seek to advise you.” Certain words affected me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel jockey. What was the effect? While I already muttered under my breath, I did so even more. I am not altogether sure we can all together come. Everything was not all right. Everything is not all right. Imagine poetry without allusions to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible; or allusions without the adjectives “fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,” “right,” “left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.” Language written or translated into a single tongue gives the illusion of tradition.A lot of people murder language—a lot fully aware.Among all the dead, choose between“us” and “them.”Among all the names for the dead—mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, child, friend, colleague, neighbor, teacher, student, stranger—choose between “citizen” and “terrorist.” And poet?Immoral, yes, but never amoral? Large amounts, the number between 75 and 90 percent of the estimated 150 million to 1 billion—civilians—killed during wars, over all of recorded human history.Anxious is “worried” or “apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans. Young, I learned anyone born here could become President. Older, I can point to any one of a hundred reasons why this is a lie.Anyway, I don’t want to be President, not of a country, or club, not here or there, not anywhere. He said, “I turned the car around because it began raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity— an as here could mean “because” or “when”; it makes no difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground, knew what would come next; it matters little when the heart rate in less than a second jumps from 70 to 200 beats per minute. What they did to my grandfather was awful—its wretchedness, awe-inspiring; its cruelty, terrible; it was awfully hard to forget. Just after 8:46 AM, I wondered awhile what would happen next. At 9:03 AM, I knew there was going to be trouble for a while to come. When in her grief the woman said, “We’re going to hurt them bad,” she meant to say, “We’re going to hurt them badly.” For seventeen days, during air strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot beside a kerosene lamp in the basement of his house.Besides a few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water, he had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions, none of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day, he died.Besides, he was eighty-two years old. I can write what I please. I don’t need to ask,May I? Like a song: men with capital meet in the Capitol in the nation’s capital. Any disagreements,censored; those making them—poets, dissenters, activists— censured. The aftermath, approximately 655,000 people killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland); School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University (Baghdad, Iraq); in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The figure just cited—655,000 dead—resulted from a household survey conducted at actual sites, in Iraq, not the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom, or someone’s imagination. Of course, language has been corrupted. Look, the President, who speaks coarsely, says, “We must stay the course.” The problem with “Let your conscience be your guide” is you must first be aware,conscious, of the fact that a moral principle is a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ’em out of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking is conscious of his conscience at work. Am I fully conscious of how I arrived at this? The continual dissemination of similar images and ideas. The continual aired footage of planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling to the streets, dust, screams, a continuous reel of destruction, fear, as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours a day, every day, any time. For a while, I couldn’t care less about war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked just like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since, I couldn’t care less why anyone would want it. In 1982, any one of those boys could have been me. Now, it’s any one of those dead men could be me. The Secretary of State offered such counsel to the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations Security Council nodded in favor of war.Criterion easily becomes criteria. Even easier: to no longer require either. The data turned out false. The doctrine of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we both speak English, our languages are so different from each other, yours might as well be Greek to me. When the black man in the park asked, “Are you Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?” and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn. Someone don’t like you very much,” I understood perfectly what he meant. The President alluded to the Crusades because of (not due to) a lack of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement, worried it might offend the Middle East; it never occurred to him the offense taken was due to the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You are either with us or with the terrorists” (September 20, 2001). “You’re either with us or against us” (November 6, 2001). The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air, a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet) to the problem of terrorists in our midst—he meant in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder did he know he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers, neighbors, passersby, New Yorkers, Americans; did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians, Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; did he realize he was eliciting a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon? Among those who did not find the remark at all illicit: the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor, the governor, members of the House, the Senate, the President of the United States.Emigrate is better than immigrate. Proof: no such thing as illegal emigration. Further proof: emigration is never an election issue. I heard enthusiastic speeches. They hate our freedoms, our way of life, our this, that, and the other,and so on (not etc). Not everyone agreed every one not “with us” was “against us.” Detroit was farther from home than my father ever imagined. He convinced himself soon after arriving here he had ventured further than he should have.Fewer people live in his hometown than when he left, in 1966. The number, even less, following thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment. First(not firstly) my father spoke Arabic;second (not secondly) he spoke broken English;third(not thirdly) he spoke Arabic at home and English at work; fourth(not fourthly) he refused to speak English anymore. Not every poem is good. Not every poem does well. Not every poem is well, either. Nor does every poem do good.“To grow the economy” is more than jargon. Can a democracy grow without violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to grow tomatoes this year, despite what was done. Several men, civilian workers, identified as enemies, were hanged on a bridge, bodies torched, corpses swaying in the breeze. Photographs of the dead were hung with care. I can hardly describe what is going on. Day after day, he told himself,“I am an American. I eat apple pie. I watch baseball. I speak American English. I read American poetry. I was born in Detroit, a city as American as it gets. I vote. I work. I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car. I make mortgage payments. I am not hungry. I worry less than the rest of the world. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I eat several types of cuisine on a regular basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip. I have central air conditioning. I will never starve to death or experience famine. I will never die of malaria. I can say whatever the fuck I please.” Even words succumbed;hopefully turned into a kind of joke;hopeful, a slur.However, I use the words, but less, with more care. The President implied compassion; but inferred otherwise. This is not meant to be ingenious. Nor is it ingenuous. The more he got into it, the more he saw poetry, like language, was in a constant state of becoming. Regardless, or because of this, he welcomed the misuse of language. Language is its own worst enemy— it’s the snake devouring its own tail. They thought of us not kind of or sort of but as somewhat American. Lie: “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put or place something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy like lead; its use—uranium shells—led to birth defects. When in his anger the man said, “We’re going to teach them a lesson,” I wonder what he thought they would learn. In a war, a soldier is less likely to die than a civilian. He looks like he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them like I do. He looks as if he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them as I do. When in his sorrow my father said, “Everybody loose in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It may be poets should fight wars.Maybe then, metaphors— not bodies, not hillsides, not hospitals, not schools— will explode. I might have watched the popular sitcom if not for my family—they were under attack, they might have died. Others may have been laughing at jokes while bodies were being torn apart. I could not risk that kind of laughter. Of all the media covering war, which medium best abolishes the truth? I deceive myself. I will deceive you myself. In the Bronx, I passed as Puerto Rican. I passed as Greek in Queens, also Brazilian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous, good-looking American movie actor. As Iranian in Manhattan. At the mall in New Jersey, the sales clerk guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford was born, my hometown, I always pass as Arab. I may look like the men in the great paintings of the Near East but their lives, their ways, I assure you, are in the past. Plus, except in those paintings, or at the movies, I never saw Arabs with multiple wives, or who rode camels, lived in silk tents, drank from desert wells;moreover, it’s time to move past that. Did language precede violence? Can violence proceed without language? It broke my father’s heart to talk about the principle of equal justice. The news aired several quotations from the airline passengers, one of whom was a middle-aged man with children, who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them on board.” He used the word “them” though only one, an Arab, was on the plane. Being from Detroit, I couldn’t help but think of Rosa Parks. Then I got angry. I said to the TV, to no one in particular, “If you don’t feel safe, then you get off the goddamn plane.” You can quote me on that. I was really angry—not real angry, but really angry. The reason? A poet asked me why I didn’t write poems about Muslim and Arab violence against others, and I said I did. And then he said he meant violence against Americans and Israelis, respectively, and I said I did, and before I could go on he interrupted to ask why I didn’t write poems about mothers who sent their sons and daughters on suicide missions. As if, as if, as if. I respectfully decline to answer any more questions. Write your own goddamn poem! Does this poem gratify the physical senses? Does it use sensuous language? It certainly does not attempt to gratify those senses associated with sexual pleasure. In this way, it may not be a sensual poem. However, men have been known to experience sexual gratification in situations involving power, especially over women, other men, life, and language. My father said, “No matter how angry they make you, invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee, be polite. If they stay long, ask them to sit. Otherwise, they will try to set you straight.” When in his frustration he said, “Should of, could of, would of,” he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine the problem further.” Because (not since) the terrorists attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world than ever before. This is supposed to be a poem; it is supposed to be in a conversation with you. Be sure to participate. “No language is more violent than another,” he said.Then he laughed, and said, “Except the one you use.” Do conflicts of interest exist when governments award wartime contracts to companies that have close ties to government officials? From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton, which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, near Bush International Airport. Would they benefit themselves by declaring war? Please send those men back home. My grandfather lay there unconscious. For days,there was no water, no medicine, nothing to eat. The soldiers left their footprints at the doorstep. His sons and daughters,they’re now grieving him. “Try not to make too much of it” was the advice given after two Homeland Security agents visited my house, not once, not twice, but three times. I’m waiting for my right mind. The language is a long ways from here. After the bombs fell, I called every night to find out whether my father was alive or dead. He always asked, “How’s the weather there?” Soon enough, he assured me, things would return to normal,that(not where) a ceasefire was on the way.Although(not while) I spoke English with my father, he replied in Arabic. Then I wondered,who’s to decide whose language it is anyway—you, me?your mother, father, books, perspective, sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed, customs, energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God, dog, cat, sister, brother, daughter, family,you, poems, nights, thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances, breaks, memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire, sex, funerals, metaphors, histories, names, tongues, syntax, coffee, smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper, fingers, skin,you,your,you’re here, there, the sky, the rain, the past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe

—For Dioniso D. Martínez Take Detroit, where boys are manufactured into men, where you learn to think in American. You speak to no one unless someone speaks to you. Everyone is suspect: baldheaded carriers from the post office; old Polish ladies who swear to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary; your brother, especially your brother, waiting in a long line for work. There’s always a flip side. No matter what happens, tomorrow is a day away, or a gin bottle if you can’t sleep, and if you stopped drinking, a pack of cigarettes. After that, you’re on your own, you pack up and leave. You still call the city beside the strait home. Make no mistake, it’s miserable. After all, you bought a one-way Greyhound ticket, cursed each and every pothole on the road out. But that’s where you stood before a  mirror in the dark, where you were too tired to complain. You never go back. Things could be worse. Maybe. Detroit is a shithole, it’s where you were pulled from the womb into the streets. Listen, when I say Detroit, I mean any place. By thinking American, I mean made.

At a college in Dearborn, Michigan, I read a poem about watching girls at camp hold their breaths under the showers so I could see their breasts swell. Some people call Dearborn a hub of “terrorist” activity. I’ve placed the word terrorist between quotation marks because “Arab” or “Muslim” or “people who look like the terrorists we fear” is what they mean. In the poem about the camp I also use quotation marks around the words “pussy” and “chicken-shit,” but for different reasons — I’m waiting in line to jump over a dam into a river where other boys have drowned, and I hesitate, until someone shouts “pussy” and “chicken-shit” and you don’t need me to tell you what I did, what I had to do. A famous poet says for a speaker to express authority, he must possess three virtues, one of which is passion. After the reading a young man approached me. He turned out to be the younger brother of someone I knew and wrote a poem about, a lifeguard who saved a drowning girl. The child pulled from the pool could have been a boy — I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter. I care about what I’m saying — that matters. Passion is a deep-seated conviction, says the famous poet. You need to believe that I believe. I told the young man in Dearborn about his brother saving a life, as if he didn’t already know. He listened, politely, until I stopped talking and then he said I was out of line and had acted inappropriately. How, I asked. He said I shouldn’t use words like that. Which words, I asked. He was getting flustered. I asked him again. I wanted him to say “pussy” and “chicken-shit.” He said I should not use words like that in front of women. By “women,” he meant Arab and Muslim women. Maybe he meant all women. I don’t know, I didn’t ask. A lot of Arabs and Muslims live in Dearborn. That’s why some people think of it as a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. The phrase “a hotbed of Islamic terrorism” should probably appear between quotes every time people use it, even if they are Arab or Muslim, like me. The other virtues a speaker should possess, says the famous poet, are discrimination and inclusiveness. By “discrimination” he means the speaker should come to his position without ignoring but considering opposed positions, and finding them wanting. By “inclusiveness” he means the speaker immediately sees connections between the subject at hand and other issues. Also, the speaker needs to make the reader believe he is doing his subject justice, that he is relating it to the world. This makes his voice communal, speaking not for any community but with the goal of making communities, the first of which is that of speaker and reader. The young man speaking on behalf of Arab and Muslim women told me that my poems were “indecent” and “immoral,” that I should be ashamed, that I was a terrible Muslim. “Go fuck yourself,” is what I wanted to say, but — maybe he was right — so I smiled, I thanked him for listening, and I told him I loved his brother, and, “Please, will you say I said hello.”

Some will call the suicide bomber a coward but seeing him you think only,Hungry, stumbling as he is toward you, to the tent where pilgrims stop to eat and drink. Behind you a woman in a black robe scoops rice with her fingers. Beside her a girl, restless, runs out onto the dusty two-lane road that the bomber now crosses. This is happening at the end of forty days of mourning, the anniversary a martyrdom. The girl returns breathless and the mother gives her a glass of clean water. You watch the ripple down her throat, and out of sunlight the man approaches— his eyes, like yours, are brown. Now you hear someone say,Sit, sit. It is the mother talking to the daughter. And now someone is shouting, and now there is the terrible noise. Every person is a story. You are the man who walked out as he walked in, the bomb went off, and you lived to tell.

A book with poems about Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, William Tell, W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Sitting Bull, an otter, a fox, and a hare won the Pulitzer Prize in the first year of the war. In the second year, the year of insurgency, of bridges, corpses, blindfolds, and dogs, a poet who wrote about the only species that commits suicide received the prize. In the year of boycotts and stained fingertips, the third of the war, the prize went to a retired life insurance executive who lived on acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska. Disappearance, from one life to another, was the subject of the prizewinner in the year of growing sectarian violence, the fourth of the war, also the year of verdict and hanging. In the fifth year, of surge and black water, the civil war continued, and the prize was given to a book about our civil war, which ended 143 years earlier. In the sixth year, the prize was granted to a poet who wrote a lovely poem about war, the war in Europe, where white men killed each other by the millions; his poem still mentioned an Arab, a young man who performs an act of purification, removing hair from his body, before flying a plane into an office building, an act that took place fifty-eight years after the war the poem is actually about. The prize was shared in the sixth year of the war, the other book evoking pleasures (of family, beaches, and dogs) and horrors (of young men purifying their bodies with speed and conviction). In the seventh year, the year of ceasefire and effigy, the prize was presented to a book about loss, memory, and the continuum of time; the book was named after a dog in the sky. The war went on, for eight years now, and many soldiers (300,000) were returned home, and many others (not soldiers, too many to count) were returned to the earth; this was the year of exit strategies, and a book described as filled with “little thought-bombs” won the Pulitzer Prize. In the year of renaming, the ninth, a new dawn replaced freedom, and the prizewinner had served as United States Poet Laureate in the war’s sixth, seventh, and eighth years. The last year, the year of withdrawal, the prize was given to a book named after life on another planet, which is a yearning for another way to live, which is also another way to die. Long after life on Earth the depleted uranium in the Tigris will reach its half-life, four and a half billion years after the tenth year of the war, which is the end of time.

Go to the mother, to the father, to the house where no trees grow, to the bedroom, the door closed, to her fear and to his fear, and their shame, their longing, and to their bodies, their bodies young, their bodies separate, their bodies together. How far must you go back? Her womb. Her child body and his child body. Go to first hairs. To flesh, chests, arms, faces, buttocks, and stomachs. There, a wrinkle. There, color, nipples, and bellybuttons. Go to the eyes, see what she sees and what he sees. To the fingertips, which want what the eyes have made their own. Go to want, to love, to what wants more than love. Go to sins. What are your sins? Go to where the mother is not mother, the father is not father, and kiss her lips, and kiss his mouth. Do not be ashamed or afraid. The past is a strange land. Go because you can. Go because you can come back.

A king did not die, a president was not acquitted, a balloon did not fly around the world in twenty days, at 84 with white hair, Joe DiMaggio was not mourned. And air strikes launched street to street in order to bring peace, or a doctor convicted of doctoring death? No, and no, nothing happened, except flowers purple the year before bloomed white, but no viruses named after women spread across the globe, and the word “columbine” did not enter the consciousness of a nation. What about the bomb that made a mistake, or the famous son of a famous president mistaking the ocean for the sky? That year, the weather was unpredictable, that happened, and if anything else did, like shots fired at people praying, no one heard them, and if people prayed for war to become holy, those prayers went unanswered. In Turkey, the ground split open and the 17,000 who would die, let’s say, miraculously, they did not, not in 1999, the year two lifelong enemies shook hands and said there will be peace, but their palms never touched, why lie about that? Let’s say the child from Cuba arrived not an orphan but with his mother, who loved and did not sink into the sea. Let’s not talk about rampages, disasters, conflicts or coupes that never ruined a perfectly good year during which the sun shined on the moon, the earth, and six billion who, for once, got everything right and not a single thing wrong.

The mother says, I am afraid. The daughter says, I am afraid. The mother says, My feet are cold. The daughter says, My feet are cold. The mother says, The car is sinking. The daughter says Yes, the car is sinking. The mother says, The water is heavy, and the daughter says, The water is very heavy. The mother says, I am too young for this. The daughter says, I want to grow old. The mother says, I can see the sky, and the daughter says, I can also see the sky. How about the moon, the mother says, and the daughter says, I can see the moon. What else hurts you, the mother says and the daughter says, What about you. I forgot to tell your father something, the mother says and the daughter says, I forgot to tell my father something. The mother says, I do not want to die. I do not want to die, the daughter says. I wanted to be a good mother, the mother says. Sometimes you weren’t, the daughter says. Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter either, the mother says and the daughter says, I wanted to be good. I can hear my heart, she says. I can hear my heart, she says. I wish I loved Jesus, she says and she says, I wish I loved Jesus. She says, The thud is unbearable. She says, The thud is unbearable. What do you mean you wish you loved Jesus, she says and she says, The water is dark. My clothes are getting heavier, she says. Heavier, she says, and heavier. She says, The water is up to my chin now, and she says, It is up to my chin too. What if this is the last thing I say to you, she says and she says, What if this is the last thing I say to you. She says, I cannot hold on much longer. Please, she says, hold on longer. The water is at my mouth, she says, and she says, Even if it is at your mouth.

O father bringing home crates of apples, bushels of corn, and skinned rabbits on ice. O mother boiling lentils in a pot while he watched fight after fight, boxers pinned on the ropes pummeling each other mercilessly. And hung on the wall where we ate breakfast an autographed photo of Muhammad Ali. O father who worshipped him and with a clenched fist pretended to be: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. O you loved being Muslim then. Even when you drank whiskey. Even when you knocked down my mother again and again. O prayer. O god of sun. God of moon. Of cows and of thunder. Of women. Of bees. Of ants and spiders, poets and calamity. God of the pen, of the fig, of the elephant. Ta’ Ha’, Ya Sin, Sad, Qaf. God of my father, listen: He prayed, he prayed, five times a day, and he was mean.