Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
From “To Be Self-Evident”
Something About Living, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, is an impossibly timely collection—a fact that makes the poems particularly fraught and lamentable. Tuffaha centers the book on colonial empire and its effect on the Palestinian people. Though the poems resonate as a direct response to the most recent attacks on Gaza by Israel, Something About Living makes clear that these attacks are part of a long and deliberate genocide meant to eradicate Palestinians at any cost. Tuffaha writes of Palestine, empire, and resistance with adroit lyricism and radiating, often haunting images. This is one of the most important collections of the year.
Tuffaha opens the collection with “Variations on a Last Chance,” a litany which creates a series of counterpublics rooted in survival, variations that act as resistance to empire and invert the inevitability of death that Palestinians face. Tuffaha uses a loose application of anaphora through the repetitions of “the snipers” and “the bullets,” further emphasizing the legacy of violence, a strategy that upends perceptions of the most recent attacks by Israel as anomalous. What makes the litany most successful, though, is Tuffaha’s use of imagery to move beyond abstract political rhetoric and recenter the human condition.
Snipers miss their shots because they are busy “sexting their girlfriends” and taking lunch breaks, then gradually “lose interest in shooting at medics evacuating the wounded” and eventually “make eye contact with one of [them] and see.” The desert “blooms of its own volition” and “the wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread,” while “the boys’ sandals sprout wings” that lift him above the bullets. The final, wrenching act of resistance resounds in the final line, where the dead are buried along the fenceline and their roots “reach the other side of home.” Tuffaha effectively sets the tone for Something About Living with “Variations on a Last Chance,” rejecting the literal and physical barriers meant to suppress occupied peoples again and again.
The author often interrogates the place of language in both oppression and resistance, a meta device that questions the role of the poet in the face of empire. In “Beit Anya,” the speaker argues, “All language is littered with corpses / of words, the shrouds we make / for them, the sacred oils we spill,” but also that “All language is legend—we grow into its landscapes.” Tuffaha considers the trope of revisionist history in “To Be Self-Evident,” which proclaims, “Every empire tells its subjects a story / of revelation,” and “The children thrive on filtration, / their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.”
The most excruciating confrontation with language comes in “On Translation,” a poem in which Tuffaha inverts expectations by creating empathy around martyrdom, where a dying man tries “to break off their engagement / with his last will and testament” after confessing that martyrdom “was imminent.” The speaker explains how “martyrdom fails / Mira’s heart and her beloved’s” and refuses to translate his last words because “to translate is to believe there is a reader.” Perhaps more than any other poem, “On Translation” demonstrates how rhetoric can be applied to humanize or dehumanize, to render a people empathetic or villainous.
Something About Living crescendos toward its final poem, “Dukka,” where the speaker and a loved one share a meal. They “talk about aging and what is left // to risk” before offering a litany of resistance, each image functioning as a definition of love. Readers learn that “Love / is paying attention” and “the father / who plants an olive tree for every newborn,” “the elderly woman who stood inside / Damascus Gate, knowing the settlers / were on a rampage” and “the children we carried // at the protests.” The poem culminates in the speaker admitting, “I have no idea / what hope is, but our people / have taught me a million ways to love.” Readers have come to understand love as an act of resistance throughout the collection, but “Dukka” makes it explicit and forces readers to consider their own role in resistance, how it manifests and what a lack of resistance implies for those we claim to love.
Tuffaha’s most recent collection is essential reading. Something About Living should be in every classroom, every library. This is a rallying cry at its most lyrical, most poignant. I can’t say it enough: you need to read this book.