Over the telephone, the cadence of Nathalie Handal’s voice resembles her nomadic life. Daytime in New York and she sounds like the city she is living in; groggy with sleep at 4am in the morning. Inadvertently woken by the search for an errant email, her voice has the mellifluous tinge of a French accent.
Born in Haiti to Palestinian exiles and having lived in Europe, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, the writer-poet-playwright is acutely aware of the commonality of the human experience and of the fact that ‘we don’t exist in the jointed way that we should”.
She feels this most in the US’s ‘material consumerist society”, while in places like ‘Africa and Latin America political unrest and a certain type of hardship forces you to look outside, beyond ourselves and the small space we live in”.
Handal, who has taught at Columbia University, cites the previous night’s appearance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the world leader’s forum of the university’s school of international and public affairs, and the preceding debate over free speech and whether he should have been allowed that platform, seeing the debacle as a signifier of an insular, ‘disengaged” American ‘comfort zone”.
But she does not shy away from her sense of being an American or the realisation that ‘I do participate in some way in this conquest”.
‘Today I feel deeply connected to the world. Yes, I am Palestinian, but I am also French, Latina, American.
‘People think that fragments cannot be whole. I don’t view it that way. I cannot separate myself from all that is me. Just like I cannot separate myself from the world — being attentive to the life-beats around us is what is most divine in us,” she says.
The author of two poetry CDs, Travelling Rooms and Spell (accompanied on tabla by Egyptian musician Will Soliman), and two poetry books, The NeverField and The Lives of Rain (shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series), Handal admits to having ‘navigated borders most of my life … Dislocation has not been an easy place to exist in. It is a place where the dark is suspended around me all the time, but I have also found, in this exilic journey, windows of sensual light”.
Her poems dealing with Palestine, such as Bethlehem and Ephratha, are beautiful, ethereal at times, yet also imbued with desolation and emptiness. About her first visit to Palestine as a teenager, Handal says the land felt ‘intrinsic” to her, ‘natural to navigate … it was as if I was always there. I know Palestine. It is the pulse inside me,” she says of a land she ‘return[s] to as often as I can and, every time, I feel more devastated than the last”.
Of writing, she says: ‘I experience words as miracles. I often feel like I am a passageway for them to come into the world … Everything inspires me, the mysteries of silence revealing itself to us when we least expect it, the dew collecting secrets in the early morning when everyone is asleep. Writers are observers of details.
‘I write the chaos inside. I write what disturbs me and seduces me. Whether it is about Palestine or the kiss I long for,” says Handal, who believes ‘in the transcending and transformative force of art. Art forces us to become aware of ourselves, of the universe around us; it challenges our safe havens and demands of us to think, to head towards what is evolutionary instead of what is destructive; it engages us consciously or subconsciously with what we want and don’t want to know. It is the commotion of reverie. And a tranquil tune.”
Having completed her MFA at Bennington College and her postgraduate degree at the University of London, she began working on an anthology devoted to the poetry of Arab women — an ‘invisible tradition to the West” — in the early Nineties.
The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology became an Academy of American Poets bestseller and won the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles award.
Handal considers editing anthologies as ‘research projects”: ‘I do not make a call for works and gather an anthology. I believe in spending years reading and discovering the works, understanding the literary history, as well as the socio-political history of the region I am working on. And it is my way of participating in what I call literary activism.”
Of a forthcoming anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, a collaborative effort with Chinese-American poet Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar, an Indian-American poet, she says it is a response to the negativity of the post-9/11 milieu: ‘We went to the human voices that have enchanted us and transformed our lives and spirits. As a result, we have gathered a symphony of voices, hundreds of poets from the East — Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. We hope this book will add to the dialogue between East and West,” she says.
The 11th Poetry Africa Festival
Nathalie Handal will participate in the 11th Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre from October 1 to 6.
Other international poets on the programme include Oni the Haitian Sensation (Canada/Haiti), maloya blues musician and poet Danyel Waro (Réunion), Senegalese poet Habib Demba Fall, Korean-American ‘firebrand” Ishle, who combines slam poetry and guitar in her work, and Kenya’s Shailja Patel.
The festival includes a Zimbabwean section, entitled Hello Zimbabwe, which includes the iconic performance poet Chirikure Chirikure, mbira player Chiwoniso, winner of the 1999 Unesco Prize for Arts, and Comrade Fatso, a purveyor of toyi-toyi poetry, an urban street form that ‘combines Shona with English, mbira with hip-hop and poetry with the struggle to survive”.
South African participants include poet and playwright Angifi Dladla, Napo Masheane, Haidee Kruger and the book launches of Vonani Bila, Kobus Moolman and Gail Dendy.
For a full line-up of poets and the programme visit www.cca.ukzn.ac.za or call 031 260 2506