Songs of the Unspeakable

Songs of the Unspeakable

On Samer Abu Hawwash’s Ruins and Other Poems

 

Ruins and Other Poems
Samer Abu Hawwash
Translated from the Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine
World Poetry Books. US $20, 144 pages. Bilingual edition.
November 2025

 

By Hilary Plum

“Something awakens amputated,” we’re told early in Samer Abu Hawwash’s long poem “Ruins.” Near the end of the poem, a changed refrain: “Something doesn’t arrive.” Exilic problems of presence and time take form throughout this masterpiece of a poem. When can loss that never ends be said to have happened? When will absence finally finish arriving? Who is the self if left partial, displaced from identity to be found neither here nor there? And if loss defines us, when may we be ourselves?

In Huda J. Fakhreddine’s mesmerizing translation, Abu Hawwash’s language is direct, spare, almost mundane—his poems work through reiterating nouns: morning, dust, wall, mirror, hand, eye, breath, shadow, memory, curtain, touch, name, window, stone, something, something. These nouns seem concrete—things that are here, things that may be there—yet Abu Hawwash uses these simple tools to refract the shape of an abyssal knowledge, insight from within the warp and weft of the Palestinian catastrophe.

Abu Hawwash is a Palestinian writer living in Barcelona; he was born in Lebanon in 1972. “Ruins,” a long poem in three parts, was published in Arabic in 2020. The six other poems in this translated collection are more recent, emerging amid the genocide in Gaza. As a whole, this volume renders the ongoingness of the 1948 Nakba—the catastrophe ever occurring, ever displacing, ever annihilating. Abu Hawwash’s poems proceed through negation, marking the absence of what isn’t here, isn’t there, the loss of past and future that is now. In his poetry, time and presence are destabilized, and so a linear, colonized timeline is refused, does not arrive. This poeisis through absence and negation yields something completely distinct, something vital forming here on the page—a paradox the poem represents. These poems of unending loss arrive with the force of creation. “What difference does it make / if we truly survive / from one evening to another, / or from a place / to a wound?” the poet asks in “Ruins,” an unanswerable question that deftly frames the state of refugeedom and exile. The poem is the possibility of that difference, a place where survival may live in the question.

Fakhreddine introduces the volume with an illuminating discussion of “the archetypal Arabic poetic form,” the qasida. The book’s title, Ruins, underscores the relevance. “The qasida always launches from a confrontation with time, from a reflection on ruin,” she writes. Then, there’s a poetic journey into the desert, “away from site of ruin.” Yet she notes that the telos of that journey can’t be taken for granted: “the poet’s journey is often in search of direction or destination” (emphasis mine). Lastly, “the final movement of the qasida is the arrival or return home.” This summary is brief—and I know little of this poetic form or its history, other than through echoes encountered across Arabic poetry in English translation—yet it’s of elegant use to the reader. Fakhreddine’s work in this book seems to me a tour de force of literary translation. The paratext supports and informs, yet does not overdetermine our reading, complementing the translator’s fluid yet insistently complex syntax within the poem.

Consider this stanza in “Ruins,” for example, which starts the poem’s third and final section:

Behind the breaths

neglected in the cracks,

Autumn slowly descends.

From the cracks in another ceiling,

it returns to cry

without reason.

Here, cracks in the walls—in this poem, we are often in a room or house that is disassembling—barely reveal the presence, the breath of others. And it is behind this suppressed presence that the subject of the image occurs: Autumn descends beyond the breaths within the neglected cracks in the wall. This is already an extraordinary construction, though by the time we reach it in this poem, we’re almost accustomed to how Abu Hawwash’s signifiers and signifieds shapeshift across space, time, and presence, continually obscuring and revealing something beyond. Any room “when struck by nostalgia / becomes two rooms.” Everyday things like walls, curtains, mirrors, letters, streets, and families become strangely interchangeable, permeating one another through actions of ruin that feel like observation, phenomena of loss lending reality the quality of a departing dream. In this poem, anything cyclical (morning, evening; autumn, spring) feels at once like promised presence and impending loss. In the next line of the stanza above (“From the cracks in another ceiling”), the house itself changes; somehow the season is arriving elsewhere, not even here, and sorrow persists but may not be understood (“without reason”). Behind each of these phrases is a simpler, lesser version of itself that either poet or translator could have lapsed into, but refused. This precise complexity results in a poem of fugitive presence and disordered time, a poem haunted by itself.

Because mirrors and shadows and clouds appear throughout, I first described Abu Hawwash’s poetics, to myself, as a redoubling of absence—absence that reiterates its own meaning, echoes back from further within a reminder of what was there. But that’s not quite it, I think. Instead, the poem pursues the impossibility of comprehending absence, comprehending loss—we are in search of loss even as destination. Perhaps our perception of loss clarifies when we mark our knowledge of how absence is not yet ours to know: “that eternal bewilderment / before a smudge / left by a hand / on the glass.” This image stayed with me, key to the poem. Looking out through a window, you perceive the glass’s presence because of the intervening smudge; the smudge is how you remember that the glass is there. And what you see beyond, through the window, is shaped by this focal point, a mark that’s the casual archive of a past presence, small smear of ruin that attests to real, fleeting life.

The six “other poems” that complete the collection continue Abu Hawwash’s poetics of negation: “It no longer matters / if anyone loves us,” one begins, and the next:

There, on a land, we were told was not our land,

under a sky, we were told, was not our sky,

my people live their death.

Where “Ruins” seems to speak from within a subjectivity like the poet’s—a boy and a man inhabit the poem, witnessing each other—these final poems often speak from or toward a collective identity. This “we” is called forth in horror, by genocide: “My people write the names of their children / on arms and legs, so they can find them / later among the massacred.” They seek to be “reunit[ed]” at least “in the same darkness.”

It’s hard to speak of these poems, which are songs of the unspeakable. Threaded strikingly throughout are images of stones and of names—so that we seem to be among burial grounds, among ruins, ending where we began, though differently. The poem “From the River to the Sea” repeats and incants the phrase “every name,” knowing each name as mark for precisely what has been lost, all that we can never know—the name like a smudge from a past living hand on the window, through which you must glimpse the loss of the future. The poem is filled with the absence of the dead, and this is a monstrous form of abundance, “a life / whose absence / keeps multiplying / in the air,” as “Ruins” puts it—or: “The images that faded / are also the images that stayed.”

I’m not sure how it was possible to create this book, and I think it exists beyond the reach of praise. Perhaps I’ll say: this book is an extraordinary, lasting work of literature. And its achievements are distinctly Palestinian.

Hilary Plum is a writer, editor, and teacher in Cleveland, Ohio. Her recent work includes the novel State Champ and the long poem Important Groups.