Suheir Hammad "Born Palestinian Born Black"
I visit Brooklyn about once a year, take the train to Pennsylvania Station and then the subway across the East River into Williamsburg. My aunt and uncle live there in a house that they spent well over a decade renovating. The basement is a music and art studio, the top floor is an Airbnb, the roof is a garden. Just down the block is Sal’s Pizza and an expensive cheese store. Suheir Hammad did not grow up in this Brooklyn.
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| Suheir Hammad https://medium.com/@mohammedelkurd/a-poem-for-suheir- hammad-by-mohammed-el-kurd-ed4303f6b5e1 |
No, she arrived there after displacement from Palestine at the age of 5, to a borough populated by minorities and distinctly impoverished. She was young enough to not have much of an identity herself, but despite that newness, the erasure of her life must have been apparent. That terrible washing out left her angry and empowered years later. But her voice, Palestinian for sure, was not something that those who had suffered like her were familiar with. It had a beat, not like the flowing, rhythmic tide of Arabic poetry. It sounded like the air in Brooklyn, like the bass tones of the Subway, brimming with hip hop music. It sounded like roughness, gravelly, but never dispassionate.
Suheir Hammad’s anthology of poetry, Born Palestinian Born Black, resounds with her target audience. In her original preface from 1996 she writes, “I’m not here to make anyone comfortable, least of all myself.” (12). Her experience, and the experience of other young, minority, immigrants, has always been uncomfortable. Hammad aims to transcribe that pervasive unease as organically as possible, in thoughts that arise like uneven breaths. They face poverty, violence, racism, profiling, and hate, all of which Hammad meets with a bandaged fist and sharp tongue.
For those for whom she did not write, Hammad’s poetry is uncomfortable in a different way.
To some, her anger is disquieting. To others, her language is coarse. To many more, her claims on the cover prevent them from taking her work seriously. How can she say that she is black, that she was born black? For black Americans, her attitude feels dangerously close to appropriation because she does not look like a black person or share their history. But to her, blackness is not just American or African. It is not an identity rooted in a specific place or gene or even experience. She describes blackness as otherness, “the Arabic expression “to blacken your face”/ meaning to shame….like the opposite of white/ the other” (12). Then again, she describes it as enlightening, “relative purity/ like the face of God” (12). Hammad’s black is discrimination and violence based on ethnicity, it is the art that arises from isolation and erasure.
In, “may i take your order?” she describes the experience of minority women, of being ambiguously exotic to every white man she encounters. What is she? Who is she? The power dynamics of that sort of lust add another layer to her otherness. In “99 cent lipstick”, she recounts the pain of cyclical poverty often inflicted on minorities in cities, of children dying or becoming imprisoned or giving up on a god they always loved. Where were the white children in this mess? “one stop (hebron revisited)” tells a tale that hardly any of us know, of Palestinians being murdered and no one talking about it. “brown bread hero” romanticizes spice and curry. It longs for their flavor in a western city infatuated with meat and cheese.
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For a child growing up in Brooklyn in the 70s, what is this kind of otherness and erasure and genius if not black? Black people were not even considered people at first in America, such that their otherness manifested in ugly ways. Their very names were replaced with new ones as they reached our shores. Yet they pioneered rap music, a genre today that has reached every corner of the globe and remains one of the most influential forms of art in existence. Hammad titled her work Born Palestinian Born Black because she rejects society-made labels. She calls for a reinvention of identity that emphasizes reverence for the labels you do choose to use. She is black because she is Palestinian, grown in Brooklyn, watered by rap music and a longing for justice to keep her alive.
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