Nathalie Handal's Multilingual Life in a Country Album
"Though award-winning poet Nathalie Handal is of many cultures, in her latest collection, Life in a Country Album, she brings [a] particular Palestinian sensibility to her poems and to her encounters with her many countries and languages of the text," writes Lena Khalaf Tuffaha in a review for the book at The Rumpus. More:
Handal’s upbringing spans continents, and she is at home in English, French, and Arabic, just as she is in many countries, from her birthplace of Haiti to her familial homes in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and in the cities of Europe and the United States where she is in constant motion. Life in a Country Album, her sixth collection of poems, chronicles her life between two nations in particular: the United States and France. In multilingual poems, Handal explores speech and its fractures through the lens of belonging and diasporic wandering. The intersections of the two aging empires, the traffic of refugees and immigrants within and between them, and the worlds that thrive despite their colonial histories inhabit and animate these poems.
The book is divided into “albums” and it’s possible to read them as songbooks, or collections of photographs, or both. Many of the longer poems are arranged as a kind of pastiche of voices, strands of songs that frame time and place. Each album is comprised of a series of mementos—I would describe them as mementos of experience— specific to the speaker’s life: recollections of love, desire, estrangement, and belonging. In Handal’s capacious poems, these mementos transcend the personal and open up to the reader, becoming albums of our own lives and losses.
In the first section of the book, “[album français],” Handal opens with the long poem “Les chemins lumière” (in English, “The lighted paths”). The poem alternates between quoted fragments of prose, Handal’s lines of poetry, and the italicized refrain: Are you French? The first fragment is from Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu Blanc Rouge, a novel that offers a searing critique of the lives of Africans in post-colonial France. “He spoke French French. The famous French of Guy de Maupassant… We didn’t speak real French.”
Read on at The Rumpus.