‘Autopsy of an Arab’
— Joyce Chong
Skin open,
like a prayer book
by the wind.
No one notices.
The words that we see on the page are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to language, this complicated thing with years and centuries and even more behind it. Language holds a history of action and inaction, of privilege and power and violence, something that is juxtaposed vividly with Fahmy’s poetry, and in the imagery and words that both physically and metaphorically bisect the page. The poem works to re-contextualize language, to change the way we perceive it, underestimate or overlook it. Again, I’m drawn back to this idea of language and identity as two inextricable things. It sits tied and tangled inside this poem, runs a current underneath it without explicitly declaring itself. Mother tongue as tether. Language as erasure.
Rotting history
overwhelmed the body,
a bloodstream fighting itself.
The imagery is strong, evoking the idea of sepsis, infection, of a foreign feeding in your blood. How much can a body take before it forgets itself? Where does the self and the external end, and how do we come to terms with these unsteady bridges we walk on?