Customer Reviews

Arab on Radar

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a very poignant and varied collection of poetry. The author's beautiful imagery will speak to the heart of everyone who has had a feeling of alientation because of their ethinic identiy, but also to those who have tried to make a difference in society by advocating for peace and justice social issues.

If one can write about many things at once, taking into consideration language's additive nature of word plus word and sentence plus sentence, Angele Ellis does so with laser-guided precision and open-armed soulfulness.

Make no mistake, this book is political with a capital "P" but Ellis does not relegate her work to rant which passes as the ouvre du jour of political concern for our day. In contrast, her BLUE STATE GHAZALS juxtapose the personal torment of Cindy Sheehan, a mother and antiwar activist who lost her son in the Iraq war, with the imagery of a child's paper chain and "the invisible ink on the Bill of Rights appearing under fire." Simply read these poems to see how she makes those images work utilizing the ghazal, a traditional arab form of poetry, and appreciate your surprise from start to finish.

Like almost all writers, she writes about writing. In a poem simply titled "OK" she converges her first childhood scrawl in response to her mother's note and the mantra she repeats to herself years later when her life was anything but okay.

This collection, Ellis' first, is a panopticon of subjects with each poem reading like a tiny novel. Be prepared to be transported to Beirut, Lebanon, bombed yet beautiful, to witness the eviscerated prize her cat brings home or to experience the surrealist dystopia of "Gesture is Enough to Scatter Me."

And within all of this, is the story of immigrants and their reality in the harsh, promising land called the United States of America in a time when to be an American of Arab descent means that one will be celebrated, vilified, embraced, spied upon, arrested, protected, encouraged, ignored, respected, misunderstood and envied all at the same time.

Fortunately for us, the readers and Arab Americans everywhere, Angele Ellis can write about many things at once.

Naked Prayers

For many years, Angele Ellis has served as a community activist focusing on peace and justice and community enrichment. She has worked to foster understanding and tolerance in her work and her writing. (She is the co-author of the diversity workbook Dealing With Differences (Corwin Press, 1997).

Now, with Arab on Radar, her first collection of poetry, she speaks honestly and with some pain and much pride about diversity and dealing with differences in her personal life. She writes of her own family's immigrant story--the compromises big and small to become American, the losses big and small inherent in such compromises and her need to explore her arab american identity after 9/11 and to proclaim it in the face of the brutality, bigotry and fear engendered by the war on terror.

Her poems catch the imagination and the heart. As I read, it was easy to imagine her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters and to relate their stories to those of my own family--although our families come from different cultures with different stories, the feelings Angele expresses are shared by many immigrants and their children and grandchildren.

Her family's story is intertwined with war and cannot be told without reference to the state of the US and middle east today. Her poems give us a perspective that is virtually absent from our current events reporting.

In "The Beirut Ghazals," she writes of a visit to her extended family in Lebanon,

"The grapes are unripe in our great-uncle's arbor.
Powdery as the cheeks we kiss thre times in greeting.
"What do the American's think of us? our cousins ask
My heart lurches, as on the dizzying drive from the sea"

After that visit, she learns of the 2006 bombing of Beirut and writes in an agony, in "Paris of the Middle East,"
"7/14/06
you wake with different eyes
your history is blazing. "

and at the end of that same poem,
"the tears of the universe are neither rain nor stars
they are bombs."

She writes also of the losses and restrictions in our society today, and the effects of the war on terror on our civic lives and on our identity as Americans. On that score, I commend "On Hearing that FBI Anti-Terrorism Agents Spied on the Thomas Merton Center."

She does not stop in her examination of war and the effect on her Lebanon family, she also takes us on her personal journey and writes of her own personal strugggles with love and loss and survival.

To list all my favorites would have me posting a good bit of the book here. But, one of my favorites is "In Camera"

"The night you came back
Victorian floors made moan.
You took your photograph, the one I cherished through
three cities and nine houses.
A gift is always on loan.
Graven images turn hearts to stone.
Rage shuttered my optic nerve.
You left. Through a migraine filter
I focused on the naked wall, and wept.
Photographs are kept for the lie
of a moment, cpative light that warms,
the college darkroom, the acid bath,
your face emerging into form.
Quicker than a flash it snared me,
for decades held us fast,
a random shot of innocence
caught once, never surpassed."

I read this slim, interesting volume in several quick gulps and now want to go back and read the poems again at a slower pace. It's a wonderful collection of poems.