Mohja Kahf. Photograph by April Brown

"Supplies of Grace": The Poetry of Mohja Kahf
By Lisa Suhair Majaj

If you do not yet know Syrian-American writer Mohja Kahf, odds are you soon will. The author of poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, literary criticism, academic scholarship, short fiction and most recently a novel (1), Kahf is a literary virtuoso, shaking the staid ground of predictability and launching her readers into new literary vistas. Whatever her genre, Kahf offers articulate, passionate challenges to commonplace perceptions of the Middle East, Muslim women and Arab Americans, striking notes of humor, compassion, outrage and celebration that resonate across the literary register.

Kahf has a keen eye for the creative dissonance of seemingly incongruous juxtapositions. As a Muslim feminist in the United States, one of her projects is to unsettle the rigid stereotypes that so often imprison Muslim women behind walls of misperception. Take the title of her poetry volume "Emails from Scheherazad". The image conjured up--of Scheherazad bent over a computer keyboard, veil flung back, manicured nails clacking as she types missives to American readers -- is quintessential Kahf. Emails? From Scheherazad? She of harem fame, who wove stories through the night to stave off her own death at the hands of her husband? Well, why not? As Kahf makes clear, Muslim and Arab women are part and parcel of the contemporary landscape, living American lives in the heart of the U.S. amid the "motley miscellany of the land." Indeed, in many ways Scheherazad -- the exemplar not only of "oriental" women but of storytellers everywhere -- is Kahf herself: the writer penning urgent messages to a world unprepared to recognize her wit, humor, lyricism, passion and intellect, and all too ready to negate her worth as a Muslim Arab woman. Like Scheherazad, Kahf is engaged in the act of saving her life through words.

In bringing Scheherazad into the 21st century, Kahf makes her human, modern, and recognizable. Here are the first lines of the poem "Email from Scheherazad":

Hi, babe. It's Scheherazad. I’m back
For the millenium and living in Hackensack,
New Jersey. I tell stories for a living.
You ask if there is a living in that.
You must remember: Where I come from,
Words are to die for.

In this depiction, Kahf unsettles assumptions about Scheherazad while also emphasizing aspects of the traditional tale that often get overlooked in western portrayals. Although much has changed, Scheherazad is still a quick-witted feminist who knows how to tell a great story. But while the storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights sought to save her own life as well as the lives of the virgins destined to follow her to the king's bed, Kahf's Scheherazad is following through on her feminist principles in different ways. Having divorced her husband, Shahrayar ("he'd settled down / & wanted a wife & not so much an artist. / I wanted publication"), she is no longer a captive, but rather a 21st century woman writer on a roll: a novelist on her seventh book tour who "teaches creative writing at Montclair State" and "share[s] custody of [their] little girl."

But Scheherazad has not forgotten that words are no light matter: they are "to die for." And as Kahf makes clear, despite Scheherazad's new engaging modern style, she cannot be so readily domesticated. In a poem titled "So You Think You Know Scheherazad," Kahf shows that the storyteller's power lies precisely in her ability to plumb unexplored depths while frustrating attempts to make her "just like one of us." "So you think you know Scheherezad?" asks Kahf. " So you think she tells you bedtime stories/ that will please and soothe,/ invents fairy creatures/ who will grant you wishes/ Scheherazad invents nothing/ Scheherazad awakens/ the demons under your bed/ They were always there/ She locks you in with them." Scheherazad's stories force listeners to "wrestle with Iblis/ whose form changes into your lover,/ into Death/ into knowledge, into God,/ whose face changes into Scheherazad--/ And suddenly you find yourself." Her stories become, that is, not so much a vehicle for fantasy and escape as for self-confrontation.

Scheherazad's role here is in many ways that of the Muslim woman writer in the U.S. Like Scheherazad, writers such as Kahf awaken demons that are already present within the culture. So you thought (without really thinking about it) that Muslim women are passive, helpless, victimized, trapped in an anachronistic world-view? You thought they need to be "saved" from their own culture? Beware, because Kahf will take those assumptions and turn them on their head, forcing you to confront yourself and your preconceptions. Muslim women, she makes clear, are as modern as the next person. But this does not necessarily mean they are just like you. And that difference is not their problem: it is yours.

Consider, for instance, the poem "Hijab Scene # 7." Here Kahf barrages the reader with a litany of the stereotypes that so often define interactions between non-Muslims and Muslims:

No, I’m not bald under the scarf
No, I'm not from that country
where women can't drive cars
No, I would not like to defect
I'm already American
But thank you for offering
What else do you need to know
relevant to my buying insurance,
opening a bank account,
reserving a seat on a flight?
Yes, I speak English
Yes, I carry explosives
They're called words
And if you don't get up
Off your assumptions
They're going to blow you away

Kahf's anger and frustration here are clear. Yet the poem also demonstrates absolute command of both the language and the assumptions of her interlocutors. The poem is likely to touch a nerve, challenging as it does deeply-held American conceptions about who and what Muslims and Arabs are: victimized women, terrorists, the antithesis of "American." But the speaker of this poem has no time for uninformed anxieties or superiority complexes. She does not need to defect or to be "saved." Whether she covers her hair or not is her business. And most important of all, she is "already American." That is to say, she is not foreign -- and this is not the poetry of a "foreigner." Rather, this is the poetry of someone speaking from the heart of America (New Jersey and Arkansas, to be exact): someone who has something important to say about life in the U.S. and in the world. One gets the impression that Kahf is not going to wait around long for the rest of us to get a clue. Either we wake up and come to some understanding of the world we live in, or her words are going to blow us away.

Yet Kahf is often humorous even in her anger. The poem "Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective" portrays a wonderfully comic, inventive and subversive "revolution" (thawrah) of the odalisques in Matisse's paintings: a revolution grounded in both feminist awareness and Muslim/Arab identity. After two veiled women at the exhibition walk past the paintings in the Matisse exhibit, murmuring sympathetic comments about how uncomfortable the poses look, the painted women decide to break free of their patriarchal and painterly bondage. However, they refuse to allow their bid for freedom to be contained within narrowly-defined revolutionary frameworks, whether western or Middle Eastern:

Statements were issued on our behalf
by Arab nationalists, Iranian dissidents, Western feminists
The National Organization of Women got annoyed
after some of us put on hijab,
and wouldn't let us speak at the rally,
but wanted us up on their dais as tokens of diversity
Then someone spread conspiracy rumors about us among the Arabs
Like, why had we hung around so long? In the capitals
of the Western world so long? With our legs so open?
You can see les implications dangereuses
It did no good to tell them we didn't choose the poses
we were painted in. Or that, anyway, our sexuality,
when we do choose to put it into play,
is our own business. Narrow-minded Arab bastards,
I'll say it even though they are my brothers,
a hundred years since we entered those paintings
and they're still stuck in a Neanderthal cave
on that whole man-woman thing.

Neither western feminism nor Arab nationalism -- nor, indeed, ideologies of any stripe -- can subdue Kahf's self-liberated odalisques. They, like Kahf herself, have their own feminist agendas, and will not shape them to please the assumptions of others. One of the first things the odalisques do is to "[sue] the pants off the Matisse estate and the museums: Cruel/ and unusual contortions, unhealthy and unfair/ working conditions at nonexistant wages." But they also reclaim female identity on their own terms. Discovering that "With Magnolias had been painted pregnant," they all get together for the birth of the baby -- a girl, who waves her tiny fists "in protest to the world." The poem concludes with their ululation-- that traditional Arab women's articulation used at moments of great sadness and great joy -- in "post odalisquesque/ jube-jube-jube-jube-jubilation."

Clearly, Kahf's feminism cannot be pigeonholed. Nor can it be defined in opposition to a particular culture. The point, after all, is not which men, Arab or non-Arab, are more chauvinistic. Rather, what matters for Kahf is a feminist stance that recognizes women's value and women's freedom. In the poem "My Body is Not Your Battleground" she rejects all attempts, western and eastern, to appropriate the female body for male agendas. "My hair will not bring progress and clean water/ if it flies unbraided in the breeze," she points out. Nor will it "save us from our attackers/ if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun." Wearing or not wearing hijab is not the issue: what is important is female choice and autonomy. "Untangle your hands from my hair," she commands, "so I can comb and delight in it…so I can spill it over the chest of my sweet love."

In other poems, Kahf focuses on the themes of cultural interaction and cultural loss brought about by the processes of migration. In the brilliantly executed sestina "The Skaff Mother Tells the Story," Kahf describes a Syrian mother's agony at having to send her sons away in the middle of the night to escape conscription by the Turkish army. The sestina's strict form offers an effective counterpoint to the poignant subject matter, the repeated words building to a litany of grief that concludes with the mother's heartbroken declaration:

The wool of my heart is threadbare after the years and wars
And I keep in a bundle the names of my lost boys
Survive, we told them, and sent them unthinkably away

Other poems make reference to the emotional costs of her own family's immigration from Syria. In a poem called "Voyager Dust," Kahf describes the sense of loss that immigrants carry with them throughout their lives, a loss passed on to their children as a willed or unwilled legacy. Playing under her immigrant mother's scarves, Kahf describes the "soft spray on our faces like the ash/ of debris after the destruction of a city,/ its citizens driven out across the earth." For Kahf, Syria was "in her [mother's] scarves." Now, like voyager dust passed on from one generation to another, "it is on our shoulders too."

In another poem about her family's immigration, Kahf provides a series of snapshots of the family's adjustment to the New World, emphasizing not just the immensity of loss but also the immigrants' need to establish themselves in the new world. "Here's my mom and dad leaving/ Damascus, the streets they knew," she writes. "Here they are crossing the world,/ hoisting up all they know like a sail/… Here's my father staking his life's/savings on one semester in grad school/…The pilgrims were so happy at surviving/ that first semester in the new world,/ they had a feast. That's mom/ laughing at the strange loaf of the bread/…that's us,/ small, weightless, wobbly with the vertigo/ of the newly landed / voyager." The poem ends with a phone call to Syria, in which the vast space separating the immigrants in the U.S. from the world left behind becomes a counterweight to their desperate attempts to find a foothold in the new place:

…The line pulsates
with the beating of enormous wings.
They shout and shout into the receiver
as if the other end was a thousand and one
ages away. Spiny talon
digs into rock.

Despite the poignancy of these portrayals, however, Kahf makes clear that the experience of adult immigrants is never quite the same as that of the American-born generation. Her voice takes on particular power in poems that explore the cultural schism experienced by the children of immigrants. In a poem called "The Passing There," which refers to the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken," Kahf probes the pain and possibility of divided identity. The poem describes Kahf and her brother, age nine and ten, crossing through an Indiana field. Like many generations of children before them, they are in search of rasberry bushes, "Getting a kajillion scratches…forgetting everything but gold and green,/ scrabbling for another sweet hit of summer berry." The only difference is that instead of being named Matthew and Deborah, or Tom and Betsy, they are named Yaman and Mohja. But the farmer who owns the field is "no Robert Frost/ although he spoke colloquial." He curses the children, his epithets "express[ing] his concerns/ about our religion and ethnic origin." He "had a rifle. We went on home."

This childhood incident becomes, for Kahf, an emblem of her life in the new world -- her positioning in, but not quite of, the American landscape. In the Syrian life she might have had, "other purples waited, a plum tree had our name on it"; the vineyard watchman "chased away /children whose names he knew…our parallel-universe Syrian selves among them." But in Indiana, "My brother and I crossed through a field./ Its golden music wasn't ours." Caught between the competing requirements of memory and amnesia, the conflicting pull of old and new lands, the children navigate mutually exclusive worlds. Trying to "feel like Hoosiers" while singing the "anthems / of their [parents'] remembered landscapes on request," they pledge allegiance to the flag at school while "trying not to feel like traitors."

Yet what Kahf takes from this duality is not just the wrenching apart, but also the necessary, if difficult, coexistence of worlds. The Indiana field is superimposed on the Syrian field; cornfield choirs and Arabic anthems come together in unlikely but vibrant counterpoint. At the poem's conclusion, the echoes of Frost make clear that the new world's claims are ineluctably present, imbuing the structures of language as well as of identity:

My brother knows this song:
How we have been running
to leap the gulch between two worlds, each
with its claim. Impossible for us
to choose one over the other,
and the passing there
makes all the difference.

Yet Kahf does not just absorb and reflect the Frost dictum: she transforms it. For her, as for other Arab-Americans, it is not a matter of choosing one world over the other, Arab or American. Rather, Arab-American identity exists at the point of crossing: the hyphen linking cultures, the gulch between worlds. Hers is not the dream of univocal identity, feet firmly rooted on one side of the divide, but rather the messy reality of hands stained with American berries, shoulders limned with Syrian dust. Kahf knows that it is not the choosing of one path, as Frost would have it, but the passing between both that makes all the difference. And her words make clear the difficult, rich cultural ground from which her poetry springs, lush and vibrant and resistant as wild berry bushes in a field.

This is not to say, of course, that the dilemma of identity is easily resolved. In the poem "The Fork in the Road" Kahf depicts identity as a stark confrontation with impossible choices, a " wound you carry/ without knowing its name." For Kahf, the wound's pain comes not only from the old world lost when her family took her away from Syria, but also from what was lost in the new place: a brother who died and was buried in the U.S., his body linking her irrevocably to American soil. To find the salve for this wound, the poem's first section insists, "you must return to the house/where you were born/ in the old country…Enter the crumbling houses./ Say: I was born here." Yet the poem's second section asserts that "to find the grave of your lost brother/ whose blood you carry,/ you must stay in the new world/no matter what happens./ You must go into the vein/ and heart of America." How to choose? If identity is built, at least in part, on the foundation of our losses, do we seek this foundation in the losses of the old world or the losses of the new? There must be a choice, the concluding section of this poem insists: "You only get one journey."

Yet within the U.S. context, Kahf suggests, the possibilities of cultural fusion and integration exist as an alternative to the stark imperatives of choice. In the poem "Lateefa," she celebrates the America of the new millenium, where "An Afro-Caribbean Muslim woman/ eat[s] paprika-tossed Hungarian potato/ salad at the wedding of a Pakistani-American to a West Indian man"; where "George Washington meet[s]/ Harun al Rahid"; where Allahu Akba' alternates / with doo-wop, she -boom, she-boom. For those "BORN! / INNA YOU-ESS-AY," return to an old world is not possible and perhaps not even desirable: rather, Arab-American/Muslim-American identity must be forged here, in the U.S., where "the Nile and the Euphrates/ [pour] into Passaic Valley." And, Kahf insists, it can done: "there's room here for all of us."

This skillful integration of Arab and American identity occurs in part through language. Kahf's poetry draws on American colloquialisms and Quranic suras; it is informed not only by American free verse, with its tendency toward tonal subtleties and understated imagery, but also by a lush energy that draws on the heart of the Arabic oral tradition and Arabic poetry. At times Kahf is very explicit about her intention to use Arabic overtones and influences to revitalize the English language. In a poem titled "Copulation" she writes:

We are going to dip English backward
by its Shakespearean tresses
arcing its spine like a crescent
We are going to rewrite English in Arabic
[…]
English has never tasted anything this purple,
seen mangos this bursting, trickling down its poems
[…]
English will come to us hoarse with the passion
we will have taught English to have
and English will never be the same and will never regret us

As this poem suggests, Kahf draws on Arabic not just for specific images and words, but also for the sheer exuberance of the Arabic language: its richly fertile images and metaphors, its lusty passions.

Indeed, if one were forced to pick a single adjective to describe Kahf's work, "exuberant" would probably be the most accurate. Her poetry demonstrates exuberance of language, of tone, of imagery, of emotion, even, at times, of syntax and line length. This is true not only of poems that vibrate with sheer celebration of the world, but also of her more poignant, reflective work. In a poem depicting her longing for a sense of belonging in Syria, for instance, Kahf insists,

Syria is saving some cherries
in a bowl for me
at the back of the refrigerator
[…]
I am sure that if I went back to Syria,
there would be music,
and all the melodrama of a Hindi movie:
The ground would love me
The trees would lean toward me like aunts
The mountains would protect me like cousins
The ancient churches would kiss my forehead
The mosques would hold and rock me in their arches
The old synagogues would lay blessings on my shoulders like a shawl

At one point Kahf acknowledges, "Look, I told you this was melodrama." But this melodrama is far from trite: it draws on the deepest wells of emotion. Even the fact that the poem ends on a note of loss does not change this sense of outpouring energy. Rather, the sense of loss stands directly in proportion to -- and hence serves to heighten -- the celebration of what Syria is and could, in the imagination, be. (As Kahf parenthetically insists -- justifying her utopian invocation of a Syria without class or sectarian hatred or political prisoners -- "This is my poem and I can do what I want/ with the world in it.")

In a very real sense everything Kahf writes is love poetry. Her words spill over with love of the world, of language, of family, of culture, of the difficult struggle with identity. And while many of her poems celebrate the world more broadly, some poems portray actual love relationships. For instance, the poem "You Are My Yemen" celebrates the beloved through details both lyrical and erotic:

You are my caravan loaded with lentils and cracked wheat […]
Your arms are Umayad minarets
Your thighs are Tigris and Euphrates […]
Your body moves like the sand dunes of Rub'al-Khali and I am lost it in
You know the flavor of the clumps of rice
that cling to the soft seedy insides of fried eggplant […]
I burst through the gates toward you […]
Here you are. Here am I.

Yet perhaps Kahf's most impressive accomplishment is her ability to bring together beauty and pain in the same breath, to write poems that encompass history and human endurance as well as joy, that testify to the fragility and power of the human heart. In the poem "Disbeliever" she cries out,

By the limping of the people of Iraq
By the sound of frantic running in Qana, in Kosovo,
By the men and boys of Hama massacred
By the swollen bodies in a river in Rwanda
and Afghani women and the writers of Algiers
I am a disbeliever
in everything that refuses to kiss
full on the lips the ones still living
and receive them in the bosom of the self
no matter the religion or the nation or the race.

This is Kahf's ultimate message: that religion and ethnicity and color and nationality are as nothing in the face of simple humanity: that spirituality and life are beyond all of these, and that no creed or ideology may be taken as justification for harm. In the haunting poem “We Will Continue Like Twin Towers,” referring to the destruction of the twin towers on September 11, 2001, Kahf speaks of the need to "continue to walk the earth/ carrying our small supplies of grace." What we must always remember, she writes, is

what we will never forget again:
That our lives have always been as fragile,
as dependent on each other, and as beautiful
as the flight of the woman and the man,
twin towers in my sight,
who jumped into the last air hand in hand

1. See Western Representations of the Muslim Woman (University of Texas Press, 1999), Emails from Scheherazad (University Press of Florida, 2003), The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (Carroll and Graf, 2006).

Lisa Suhair Majaj is a writer and poet. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. Majaj’s critical articles on Arab-American literature have appeared in Post-Gibran, Arabs in America, Postcolonial Theory and the United States, Al-Jadid, Forkroads, Memory and Cultural Politics, Aramco World Magazine and elsewhere. She has recently relocated from the U.S. to Cyprus.