In the Country of My Dreams: Poetry by Elmaz Abinader

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Summary: In The Country of My Dreams
Review: "The Note Held Strong" Review of Elmaz Abinader's In the Country of My Dreams

Elmaz Abinader is a writer whose words resonate, finding home deep inside our bones. A performance artist, essayist and novelist as well as a poet, Abinader brings to the written page the energy of the spoken word, the flame of passion, the current of commingled celebration and grief. Her previous book, Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey, distilled this flame into poignant family narrative. In her long-awaited volume of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams (Sufi Warrior Publishing, 1999), Abinader speaks in a voice rooted deep in family, history, politics, landscape, and a poet's finely tuned perception, interweaving Arab, Arab-American, and other contexts in a music of fierce resonance and beauty.

The two sections of the book, "Arabic Music" and "Mooring in the Quiet," are roughly divided between poems focused on Arab and Arab-American experiences and histories, and poems evoking other emotions and experiences, set in various landscapes. (Like other Arab-American writers, such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Abinader brings to her writing a breadth of travel experience.) But these two sections are linked by a uncompromising engagement with the world and all its histories, and by a penetrating awareness of the self in the world. In "Rest in Reason and Move in Passion," Abinader exhorts, "Be afraid only of what holds/ you still...Stand away from it. Give into your passion, let / it move you onto rocky waters and into dark/ unknown nights. You will discover waves/ and stars." This willingness to explore the terrain of living, with all its waves and stars, informs every line in this book, giving rise to poems of fierce passion, quiet grief and lyrical beauty.

The title poem, "In the Country of My Dreams," is dedicated to Khalil Gibran and Marcel Khalife, Lebanese artists whose poetry and music have linked Arabs and Arab-Americans across the century. In this poem, images of Lebanon are juxtaposed: immigrant memories of a land where "apricots are as big/as oranges and as bright as the sun" and "Christ once walked its hillsides" confront newspaper reports of a warring, violent land where "a fire burns, ...wicked and consuming." But for Abinader it is Lebanon's poets and artists that define this "country of [her] dreams" and of her own heritage. "From the edge/ of the sea, it's our poets who set sail," she writes. "To produce such warriors as these:/ Gibran and Khalife, takes a soil luscious/ and fertile. A fact the books overlooked;/ the newspapers failed to see."

A poet whose words and artistic presence inspire and challenge, Abinader is herself one of these cultural warriors. Drawing strength from this heritage of "the note held strong/ the stroke of the painter, the string of the oud,/ the beat of the drum," Abinader speaks out with a voice grounded in both Lebanese and American landscapes. Her voice is timbered with the undertone of what is sustained, what is left behind, and what is created anew in a new place. "I look into a mirror and see/ a thousand mirrors behind me," she writes in "New Year's Morning." "A vast history, an unknown life/ begins."

The problem of how to express this vastness provides an implicit focus of many of these poems. "How can I press an ear to the night/ to bring/ its wind inside of me," Abinader asks in "The 4:05 A.M." For a poet, this is the constant question: how can one open oneself so fully to the world that a language can be found to hold its immensity? The answer, Abinader suggests, is to focus on the moment of perception and articulation -- not the finished product, the fixed memory, but the dynamic moment of art. As she tells us in "Pleasure is Freedom-song," "The pleasure is in the writing." Or, as she writes in "Places We've Been, Places We're Going," "What we have brought / Are the curves of our faces... / Each day we examine our faces in the glass. / Looking for what our hands can do."

What Abinader's hands and voice do is to shape a poetry that is informed by familial and communal legacies, by the workings of history, but that is, nonetheless, deeply personal, completely her own. "I borrow nothing and have neither my mother's/ nor father's hands," she writes in the book's concluding poem. Yet her writing is leavened by the awareness -- sometimes tender, sometimes fierce -- that we are all part of something larger than ourselves. The lines traced by her hands delineate a story that becomes clearer each time an Arab-American writer publishes, each time an Arab-American artist paints or a musician plays or sings. It is a story we receive like "letters from home" - a story whose language we are finally coming to know.

Lisa Suhair Majaj Al Jadid

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Summary: Lyrical poetry by an Arab-American author and playwright.
Review: Elmaz Abinader is a noted Arab-American author and playwright who's lyrical poetry is debut within the pages of In The Country Of My Dreams. Abinader takes on the beauty and brutality of the world of her family, her country, and her culture. Her poetry speaks to exile, abuse, love, displacement, the confines of ethnic stereotypes and geographic domination. What We Leave Behind: Winter pushes into my room. I waken/And walk to the porch. Windows rattle/Threats of falling. Fragments of glass,/Veins of dark wood/I hold the window still, watch the trees/Struggle in the cold. Winter mists/From my mouth. Invisible fire./Cold flattens against our cheeks, faces us/Steals the warmth from the goblets/Cupped in our hands. The sun cannot/Sink into tops of our shoulders./We do not walk the field from end to end/A name you hear makes you shiver:/The pages I am writing mark my day./When I place my hand upon the glass,/The print released is no longer mine/I do not want to be alone. Without amber./Without the steam rising on a city street./Back in my room is a whirlpool o flight/I leave thumbprint and palm, and the porch/Becomes ruins behind me.

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Summary: Celebrating Contradictions or Reconciliation
Review: In this book Abinader takes us in a long journey through different places, different historical eras and different psychological states. We go with her from the Arab world in the East to Europe and America in the West. We explore with her the past and the present. We feel with her this labyrinth of belonging and alienation, the dilemma of many Arab-Americans. She tries very hard to find a reconciliation for all these contradictions: Arab and American; old generation and young generation, western modern woman and eastern conservative one; dreams and reality. This book makes us feel what does it mean to be an Arab-American.