Saying ‘This Is a Poem’ Asks a Great Deal – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

Start us at the beginning. Do you remember your early relationship with poetry? What sorts of poems you enjoyed as a young reader, and what you enjoyed about them? And then what brought you to writing?

Nour Balousha: Before I loved poems, I loved language. As a child I thought many times about inventing a new language and teaching it to the children my age, so that all of us could slip out of the world’s language in a way of our own. It was a childish, almost primal tenderness for words, and I still feel it in me.

Writing began in seventh grade, in the classroom of my Arabic teacher. He wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem so I could stand and read it to him. He taught me for three years, and I read everything he wrote. That is where my path began. At home my mother listened to every text I brought her and praised it, and her listening made those years warm.

Later I joined the Tamer Institute for Community Education and Yara’at, a team that cares for young writers and publishing. I entered the editorial board, and writing moved to the center of my days. That place gave me a deeper awareness of what I was doing. Writing became a long apprenticeship in language, in myself, and in the people around me.

How has your relationship to poetry (your own and other people’s) changed over the years?

NB: In my Yara’at years, I wrote the way a young person breathes, quickly and without asking permission. Every poem was also a small attempt to say: I am here, and I exist. Gaza was around us then. My family was around us, my community was around us, and we were inside a beautiful conversation about literature. Pain had not found its way into us yet. We walked down Al-Jalaa Street reading poems aloud. We sat by the sea. We stood in the gallery and let one story open into another. Poetry was light then, and so were we.

The words were alive. A street was a street, and the sea was the place where we went to breathe. A house was a house, with a door and a family behind it. I rarely wrote those words, because I never needed to. I wrote about love, about running, about trying again.

What I carry now is a heavy stone that fell into my heart and stayed there. The words were among the first to be wounded by what came down on all of us. The sea became one enormous tear, and displaced families sit in their tents facing it. The house is the house we lost. The street sticks out its tongue at everyone who crosses it. My vocabulary moved toward all of it, toward the children who fill the world with screaming.

How do you see the relationship between your human rights work (your day jobs) and your poetry?

NB: I work as a researcher in history and human rights, and that has made my relationship with writing more sensitive and more complicated. I have become alert to the politics of a text and to how dangerous a narrative can be. Sometimes this interrupts the direct flow of the writing. I catch myself watching what I put on the page, and watching what the text does to the Palestinian narrative as a whole.

Once I wrote the line “When will this war stop?” Then I replaced “war” with “fire”. The word “war” is wrong narratively, because what is happening is genocide and ethnic cleansing. Choices like this one come up all the time, and I follow them closely.

How does your view of your poetry change through translation (when you do it yourself or when you work with a translator) and what does the translation process show you about your work that you might not otherwise have seen?

NB: My poems have traveled into several languages, most of them during the genocide. They are in the Gaza anthology Is There Life Before Death?, translated by Abdellatif Laâbi, and in English in the book Love and War with Trace. I worked with Faten Nasreddin on a translation for ArabLit. My texts were translated for inclusion in research studies with Ghent University. I took part in events with Espace Magh in Brussels, and stood beside translators on stage at many readings while my poems were carried into another language, live. Today I translate my own poems myself.

I am deeply sensitive to translation. Every language has its own culture, its own feelings, its own senses. Some words have no home anywhere else. In Palestine we say something is “zanikh”, a rancid, stale smell. We smell it and we know it from the word. When I ask a friend who does not speak Arabic, “Do you smell something zanikh?”, they do not understand and tell me they smell nothing.

Language lives in the senses for me. I feel the translator is a messenger who lifts the text out of its own world and carries it into another. There is no promise that it arrives with all its inner life. Some of it is lost on the road: a piece of its human identity, the language of its senses, its tenderness.

Poetry used to appear in newspapers and be read out on the radio. And while it still does appear in those mass-media formats, people are probably more likely to access poetry now through social media. How do you find new poets, read & make space for poetry in your life? How would you like your poetry to appear?

NB: I read poetry anywhere, in any form I can find it. Social media has taught many of us to read in short breaths, and I am wary of how fast texts multiply while meaning goes missing. AI tools now take part even in making texts, so there are more and more writers and still no real poem. Saying “this is a poem” asks a great deal. To me a poem and a text are different things. Texts are everywhere. Poems are like pearls: they do not come every day, and they do not fit every frame.

What I love most is sitting with my friends. I read poetry aloud and they read with me. I care about poems more than about particular authors, and I believe a poem defines itself. I believe the writer is the space a text passes through, a messenger carrying an awareness that came from many places and was never the writer’s alone.

When I read my own texts from before the genocide, during it and after it, I believe this even more. The awareness left by fire, killing and wounds gave birth to new texts, in a language I had never known and that had no place in my vocabulary before.

I am now preparing my collection A Scream That Smells of Bonbon for publication. It follows the scream. I watched my text turn into a scream at one stage. At another stage the scream quieted and took a shape and a body. It became pain in a more present and conscious form, and perhaps a more painful one.

I want my text to meet people directly. I want them to put their hands on it, to touch it, to reach it. Sometimes I truly wish my text had arms to hold them. That is how I want it to meet the people who read it.

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