Nathalie Handal: “Music and photography are the flesh and bones of my poetry”

 

Born in Haiti to a family of Palestinian descent, Nathalie Handal is a well-known French-American writer and poet.

Her latest poetry collection, the profoundly erotic, passionate and political Life in a Country Album, received Palestine Books Creative Award last year. In conversation with Nathalie Handal.

Erotic, lyrical, “nomadic”, nostalgic, passionate, political, sensual, cosmopolitan yet deeply culture-specific, is your poetry -and your approach to its composition- a reflection of the multiplicity of your identity?

Being myself means being many different places. People often want one answer, but questions often have more than one right answer.

We are made of many selves, as well as images others carry of us. And we naturally show a different side to each group, but still exist in one body and have to negotiate our multiplicity.

There is a tendency to feel lost in between our pluralities, but I have found diversity balancing. And writing has allowed all my selves, cities, languages to exist tunefully together.

Life in a Country Album, your awarded latest poetry collection, is indeed loosely structured as an album -perhaps photographic-, and your poems often resemble photographic snapshots. How do you relate to photography as a medium?

When I held my first camera -a Canon AE-1- at fourteen years-old, I became conscious that photography would teach me stillness. I realized that photographs collect worlds and eternities.

Later when walking became fundamental to my poetic practice, I realized during my wanderings that my mind is always photographing.

With every book I am building a geography of many people and places. To take photographs is to take the world. To collect photographs is to collect worlds. To photograph is participating in another person or place’s transience.

And it has also been a vital way to witness and record my vanishing city of Bethlehem and its natives.

The collection consists of different albums both photographic and musical.

Music and photography are the flesh and bones of my poetry.

My dream is to live like poetry, be alive like music, and pause like a photograph.

“Music always takes us back/to the cities we are made from,” you write in Orphic. Which cities -and which music, among which rebetiko- are you made from?

My ancestry is the sea. I am made of many Mediterranean cities: Bethlehem, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Akka, Beirut, Tripoli (Lebanon), Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Marseille, Paris, Thessaloniki, Mostar, Zagreb, Malaga, Granada.

No landscape moves me like that of the Mediterranean- it plants my body in the land and still lets me be water.

My other cities are London, Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Santo Domingo, New York City; and to some extent Lausanne, Dublin, Yerevan, Saint Petersburg, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires.

They have all played a role in forming my identity. But my main instrument, my drum, is NYC. That is where all my cities converge. I would never have understood my complexities had I not become a New Yorker.

Music is a city. Like poetry it comes from a place I don’t know, yet am most intimate with. Music is memory is melody is magic.

Our playlist like our bookshelves is a biography- and mine are filled with global beats, languages and styles.

I first came to the rebetiko of the fin-de-siècle. The rebetiko that took me to Smyrna. To the songs that dived into the depth of displacement, exile, war, loss, social injustice, the lives of refugees, to Piraeus, ports, love and death.

The Greco-Turkish War took a lot of space inside of me. In certain ways, I feel it is part of my greater story. That of the Mediterranean- migrations and uprootedness. Also, my mother, I am told, has a Constantinople Greek surname.

It is said when they left Constantinople they went to Venice, converted to Catholicism, intermarried, and went to Palestine as Venetians. The family always spoke of their Greco-Venetian roots but it impossible to trace their routes. 

 I learned later the origins of rebetiko can be traced back to the prisons of Athens in the 1830s and to the Greek populations of Constantinople, Smyrna and other Anatolian cities, who created their own music based on traditional Greek and Eastern rhythms.

And in the 1920s these various musical traditions and styles merged together, creating what is known as rebetiko. This Greek urban blues caught me the first moment I heard it.

Many consider the 1930s the golden period of rebetiko, when it was most authentic. But I think of how rebetiko united Greece after the Nazi occupation and the civil war.

It didn’t matter what social class you came from, rebetiko became a voice for the oppressed. It’s extraordinary. Of course, traditions change so did rebetiko, and it is now a fundamental part of Greek culture.

One of my favorite moments is the taxími.

I have gone to taverns, bars, and concert halls to listen to rebetiko so I am not a purest. That said, rebetiko is not only music, it is a state of mind. In that sense, maybe it only existed when it was played in the fringe.

A special section of your poetry collection is devoted to your “conversations” with the emblematic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Do you consider him as one of your major influences as a poet and a reader of poetry?

I met him in Paris in my early twenties. He gave me my first writing assignment- to interview Allen Ginsberg, who died a month later. He was a major influence. Each time I return to his work, I am moved deeply and differently.

And our conversations continue to be a map of inquiries.

“But even in love/war inhabits me,” you confess in Even in Love. Do you refer to war as a state of mind or to particular wars as well?

Once war begins, it doesn’t end. It continues inside of us, follows us to death, and stays inside those we love and have left behind. War doesn’t bring peace, is ends it.

“Let me ask again- love isn’t a lie but a country is?” you wonder in Declaration of Independence. Is love a continent, a country, a terra incognita, or, indeed, a mirage?

Everyone has a map of a country in the heart but no one can be certain that country loves us the way we want it to.

Whether you decide it’s a continent, a country, a terra incognita, a mirage, all or none, love is difficult. It requires intelligence.

Love shouldn’t be about falling in but about stepping in a blank page like in poetry, and joining the silence. And in the center of that silence is sense.

You are an avid traveler and a genuine travel writer.

What do you enjoy the most in the mental preparation for a journey, its materialization and its literary reworking, and to what extent has the pandemic redefined your concept of traveling?

Touching the distance…

Knowing the journey invents itself. The most exhilarating is what isn’t planned. How the voyage translates you. How it transforms you but you only discover later, often much later.

The pandemic has stopped the constant traveling but I am always in motion. I miss the world and look forward to its reopening.

73 years after the Nakba, yet another brutal bombardment of Gaza Strip by the Israeli state occurred in May, while the “Western world” maintained an equal distance from the colonialist perpetrator and the resisting -and rightly so- victim.

No one is free until everyone is free. Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

What are the prerequisites of a truly just and viable solution to the Palestinian issue for you?

An end to apartheid, the occupation, the denial of refugee rights, an end to crimes against humanity, to corporate and state complicity like in the case of the United States which enables occupation.

Palestinians must be given their rights under international law.

The photograph of Nathalie Handal featured in this article has been kindly provided by her.

Life in a Country Album is released by University of Pittsburgh Press in the USA and by flipped eye publishing in the UK.

You may discover more about Nathalie Handal and her multifaceted work by delving into her personal website.