A house that looks like your laugh | Nasser Rabah
March 8, 2024
Emna Zghal, Gaza Cactus, 2024, collage, ink and paint pen, 72” x 72”
A house that looks like your laugh
1
He used to tell me the best stories, and throw the rose of his heart in the water, recite his verses to silence, and reach a point as if there’d been no life before it, the river that accompanied him on his afternoon walk was not one, it was a lineage of poems, and the house that looked like his laughter lived on the other side of light sleep, we were two and did not find a third other than a ladder of sighs, before he tucked in his return next to me every night. He used to tell me the best stories when I noticed a trace of his crying on the sand and then I could no longer find myself.
2
You’re the one who sat my heart on your knees the day it was a bird, and on your shoulders when it was a rifle, and you didn’t throw it in the river even when my heart became stone. Father, oh shadow of the only tree in the palm of the road,
the road whose tears were allotted to passers-by in complete fairness,
the road whose vagrancy no one but me traversed.
3
I know you were a soldier the day I was born, but why did you carry me like a rifle?
4
The child caught in your hand, Oh Father, joyous as a festive balloon,
became a father, and caught in his hand, are sad words.
5
When you came back from work tired, and you forgot it, Father, it wasn’t you I hated, it was the chocolate.
6
I answer your phone joyfully, tell your friends who didn’t know of your absence–
you left us, Oh Father, but your phone still rings.
7
I always thought shadows were walls dissolving from fatigue,
and that your heart was the tired shadow of an absent wall.
Translated from Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and lives there. Like all Palestinians presently in Gaza, he and his family have been forcibly displaced. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2010); Passersby with Light Clothes (2013); Water Thirsty for Water (2016); Eulogy for the Robin (2020), and a novel, Since approximately an hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, and Hebrew. The translators, Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal, are working on a collection of Nasser Rabah’s poems for City Lights, due out in Spring 2025.
Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum, among other publications. Noted public collections include the Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Africa Center, NY, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. emnazghal.com
Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Memories of Our Future (City Lights, 2001), and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books (Litmus Press).
Khaled al-Hilli teaches Arabic at New York University and is completing a doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center on the post-2003 Iraqi novel. His Sargon Boulos: “This Great River” Translating the Beats into Arabic, is due out from Lost & Found in 2024.
