lisa minerva luxx on poetry, memory, and breathing.
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My grandfather died before I heard his voice. It is said he recited poetry his whole life, right up until his final breath. He held competitions in memorising verse for his children. His last words, uttered just beyond the mountains surrounding Damascus, were from a poem I’ve not yet been told.
Years later, while locked in a police cell somewhere between night and day, I struggled to remember any stanza of any poem I held dear. ‘What sort of poet did not carry words with him, closer than his clothes?’ Philip Metres writes, recalling being asked by the mayor of Belfast to recite a poem. When you are stripped of all else, you will need poetry.
It’s not that I’d always been unable to remember poetry. Before the apocalypse of 2020 – Beirut being blown up in the middle of a global pandemic – I would recite my own poems and the poetry of others on stage, hakawati-ish by inheritance. Long Covid infringed on my body in a multitude of small ways, but nothing deflates me more than what it took from my practice. Memory loss is an erasure that we measure by the plain mass of forgetfulness. But that is insufficient. It erases the immeasurable, too: who I am; a descendent, carrying poetry in flesh, blood, hand gestures, and absent mind.
The introduction to the recent Poems for Palestine chapbook says ‘[poems] vibrate between us, move between languages, and connect memory to memory.’ In an unprecedented time, a time of a live-streamed genocide, my instinct was that poetry was superfluous. But Palestinians have told us differently. The words of Refaat Alareer echo between our bodies and murals, vigils and monuments, tying the collective together in a song of remembrance and promise. ‘If I Must Die’ is being carried through the world, one pallbearer to the next; it is the first time I am witnessing people, en masse, hold poetry with such sincerity.
The memorisation of poems has become a yardstick by which I calibrate steadfastness. When Wole Soyinka was kept in solitary confinement for 22 months between 1967 and 1969, in what he called a ‘vegetable existence,’ he was deprived of reading and writing materials. Still, after his release he published a volume of poetry composed in his psyche while imprisoned – poems that he fossilised through the steadfast belief that there would be a time when he could tell them. In A Shuttle in the Crypt, Soyinka, in his own words, ‘maps the course trodden by the mind.’
That is more than memorisation. That is devoted attention. It is Mustafa Khalifa wrongfully imprisoned by the Assad regime for ten years, writing a line a day in his head and repeating it over and over, adding another line the following day and reciting it again, then the next day, and the next. Each passing week and year, as they rolled into one, he would gather more fragments into the narrative he was building. When he was freed, he wrote down all he had carefully devised in solitude, just as it had been stored in his memory. It was published as a novel called The Shell.
There is a distinction between me and those I reference here. I have not found myself in the position of Soyinka or Khalifa (alhamdulillah). I am, however, acutely aware that none of us are immune to such an experience. As a member of a militant pro-Palestine, anti-imperial group in the UK, my movements are well-tracked by British intelligence, and I am constantly waking to news of comrades arrested in the night. One, who is currently facing sentencing, says she favours drinking water and reading poetry now – ‘to prepare myself for the depravation of imprisonment.’
In The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, translated by Hazem Jamjoum, Ghassan Kanafani writes that, in the 1930s, ‘popular poetry held the kind of power we now associate with mass media.’ The political zajal – sung poems – encapsulated the hopes and anxieties of the working class and peasants. The struggle was captured not through books, but through travelling verse; the rhythm of a common language, a collective consciousness. When I visit my uncle in Lebanon, he mutes the television to recite a poem he wrote 50 years ago. He stops in the forest to recall another – by Keats, by Qabbani. His body is a poetic archive. Travelling with those poems stored in me is an act of exporting revolutionary ideas and heritage. When a child learns refrains from their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, it’s a way of carrying fragments of territory across borders and time.
Harbouring a poem within you acts as a compass for the everyday. The faithless are missing that accompaniment to the struggle. Yet I believe contemporary, award-winning poetry in the UK often writes against memory. Not intentionally, no, but because the stylistics made popular don’t offer the reader or listener an undeniable pathway to recollection. These are writers who are following the lineage of the Language poets – whose work does excite me, but to whom I’d rarely turn in a crisis. What else can we expect from an epoch of Western writers who’ve had little necessity for the steadfastness of memory?
Mahmoud Darwish’s passages on making coffee in Memory for Forgetfulness come to me every time I prepare my coffee in the rakweh and watch the bubbles rise over the stove’s blue flame. It is a poetry that can be recalled in the seemingly mundane moments of the day, activating them as eternal opportunities to reorient oneself around one’s values. I make my coffee and think of sumoud, think of my ritual as sentient (a living relationship between myself and the qahwa), and I suture into my morning the necessary gratitude for not having rockets fly overhead as I wait for my cup to cool (may those who experience the rockets be protected).
Ahmed Fouad Negm’s words were the chants of uprisings in Egypt. When sung, the words of poetry were universalised, overcoming class associations of literacy. Negm would have his poems smuggled out of prison on cigarette papers, tucked into oranges; the short colloquial refrains were then memorised through music devised by Sheikh Imam, and once composed the written evidence could be destroyed. It illuminated memory as a revolutionary tool against censorship.
Recently, Nejma Collective brought together a group of poets and scholars to speak to a packed room at the Dalston Solidarity Cafe for an event centred on policing and Palestine. I’d learned a new poem I’d recently written, had tried to commit to memory. It was a poem about Ahmad Fouad Negm. It was only the second time in four years that I’d believed I was able, again, to recite my own lines. I’d practised, singing it as a song under my breath, on the bus, in bed. When I had the microphone, I stumbled. Just three lines in. I lost the thread. It was disappointing, but it wasn’t the same as when, during the opening protest of the siege on Leicester’s UAV Tactical Systems, the drone company who supply the Israeli military with warfare technology, I held the microphone ready to recite a poem and it, too, fell from the wings of my breath. This felt more than disappointing; it felt inappropriate.
I keep trying, because when I memorise what I wish to contribute to the world it no longer comes solely from my mind but from my body. To memorise, for an audience, is a consistent pursuit of clarity in belief and dedication. It removes the book from the vision of the author on stage. It is ideas over matter. Practising cognizance and recollection is an act of loyalty to communal remembering; the decolonial blade we must file against the blunting force of collective amnesia, a force we were starkly reminded of at the start of this month during Rishi Sunak’s speech against ‘extremism’. He claimed ‘Britain is a patriotic, liberal, democratic society with a proud past and a bright future. We’re a reasonable country and a decent people. Our story is one of progress, of great achievements and enduring values.’ To commit the poetry of others to heart, and write poems that may be memorable in return, is a small labour in resisting such violent erasure, for the sake of unwavering, people-powered futurity.
One thing I’ve learnt from being Arab in a neo-capitalist-colonial world – where destabilised political economies and vulnerability to warfare have become the norm – is to always have a go bag packed and a few poems memorised. Zionism is waging war on Lebanon in tandem with its genocide on Gaza. My people continue to make coffee under the fighter jets and drones, as we hear of mass funerals working their way up the country.
The tension of the times calls for action, resistance, and focus. When Metres was asked to recite a poem by the mayor of Belfast, he responded with these lines of Seamus Heaney, now made communal:
History says, don’t hope On this side of the grace. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.
If nothing else, prepare for justice: memorising poems takes concentration, which is never a bad thing to develop in a world defined by distraction, the enemy of revolution. It involves dissolving an individual into a wave of togetherness, too. Perhaps I am being called to decentre myself, to invite the poem to use me instead. To use my breath, stay closer than my clothes. Until its final exhale, like my grandfather, I offer this devotion to that which can neither be locked up nor worn down: the living poem.
lisa minerva luxx is an award-winning poet, playwright, political activist and essayist of British Syrian heritage. In 2021, luxx released Fetch Your Mother’s Heart, an innovative poetry collection which received praise in the national press. Their poems have been published in New England Review, the Telegraph (‘Poem of the Week’), Poetry London, Sukoon, wildness, Poetry Daily, and more. Their poetry and essays have been anthologised by Penguin, Saqi, Hatchette and more, and have been translated into Arabic, Italian, French and German.
In recent years, they wrote three verse plays including Eating the Copper Apple (produced by a team of Arab queer and women artists), what the dog said to the harvest (an experimental opera for decolonial climate justice) and The Moon is Listening (with young people from Palestine, Italy, Syria, Beirut and the UK).
luxx guest lectures at universities internationally on post-colonial and decolonial literary analysis, the queer body politic, and revolutionary poetics. In 2020, luxx founded Nehna Hon, an anti-racism community organising group. Before that they were co-founder of eLaa Beirut, an international organisation supporting the mental health services in Lebanon following the Beirut Blast of 2020. They are an active part of Palestine Action. Their short story collection, Raising Sun Son, is forthcoming.
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