A Cartography of Voices
Review of Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres (USA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
By SEE Wern Hao
In his afterword to Shrapnel Maps, Lebanese American Philip Metres recalls a conversation he had with his friends about the Israel/Palestine conflict, wherein he thought “If I can’t sit inside the stories of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews and Arabs, and open the gates of my heart to their exiles and returns, how could I ever expect those cut by the knives of history to do so?” To sit “inside,” and not merely “with,” the stories of individuals who have been erased by violence and a barrage of political labels is no small undertaking. Metres’s latest collection, Shrapnel Maps, dedicates itself to picking at and apart the wounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict, before stitching together the narratives of overlooked voices. Each section in the book meditates upon the points-of-view of characters within a scene or situation, such as a wedding, a bombing, or the expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa. This heavy subject matter is explored by maintaining a focus on the dynamics of human relationships, placing individual stories and narratives at the center of the various poems.
In the opening prose poem “One Tree,” Metres uses the mundane setting of a neighborly dispute to show how easily conflict arises: “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” This motif of suspicion and scorn as being part of the human condition is further elaborated upon in the poem “Like the Serpent in Eden is the Trumpet Vine,” wherein the speaker instructs his neighbor to “Watch this vine. It will invade / the yard, crack the foundation.” Metres cautions us in turn that “the world doesn’t pay well for the spirit.” Such cynicism is found necessary in “Two Neighbors,” where Metres’s speaker describes the man’s physical appearances ( “wore a pen in his oxford, black hair parted clean”) and aspirations (“He hoped […] to study engineering in Cleveland”), thus emphasizing the Palestinian’s humility and so the cruelty of his detention at the border, where he is taken away, “surrounded by three soldiers.” However, it is noteworthy that, for the large part, the opening section of Shrapnel Maps does not expressly signpost the fact that the conflicts happen in Palestine. It is almost as if Metres is saying that the conflict over territory and the desire for dominance is universal, and exists insofar as human beings are made to co-exist with one another. Mutual suspicion and scorn are defensive mechanisms for the individual in a contested world that is “bloom-shadowed” and “light-deprived.”
In addition to drawing its imagery from the intimate revelation of the motivations and actions of neglected characters, Shrapnel Maps compellingly assesses historical understanding by mapping a topography of wounds. Metres’s collection traces how shrapnel in one’s environment—whether it takes the form of literal weapons or metaphorical language—etches onto the body and memory. He does so through his use of negative space on the page, as is evident in the eighth section Returning to Jaffa. This section is inspired by and dedicated to Professor Nahida Halaby Gordon, who was part of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, which serves as the context for the fourth sub-section “The Palestinian Refugee’s Powerpoint.” The voice of her persona is italicized and right aligned, and the speaker’s observations are left aligned:
I know: a pain behind my ribs when I cast back
the diminishing green of Palestine on map after digital map
into the river of remember. Tremor of explosion
The perspective is smoothly interspersed with the refugee’s words, spoken verbatim, but the speaker remains in the position of observer, neither co-opting the refugee’s experience as their own, nor judging her experiences. Instead, the speaker gives the refugee space, and describes her as “a forensic scientist examining her own body.” The poem therefore is witness to an act of self-mapping, the marking of the position of the individual relative to one’s vast environment, as well as the detritus strewn over it. There is an understanding that the identity of individuals cannot fully manifest independent of the conflict they were surrounded by, and that these experiences must be shaped by the individuals themselves, who drive the narration of violence and discrimination. At the poem’s end, the refugee is left “asking why, why” and the answer is in “the last Haganah leaflet […] fallen from the sky.” The final visual image of a leaflet distributed by an Israeli paramilitary organization that claimed to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks presents readers with an organic, painfully intimate understanding of the cruelty of state-sanctioned territorial conquest.
Although Shrapnel Maps maps the wounds of the Palestinian conflict, it does not merely open these wounds as rhetorical questions without answers. Instead, Metres evinces a sensitivity to language as he shows how human life—ranging from mundane travelling to celebratory milestones—flow in spite of the horrors witnessed and experienced. To this end, the section A Concordance of Leaves is breathtaking in how layers of meaning unravel in spite and because of the sparseness of language. The poetic sequence is about Metres’s visit to Toura in the Palestinian West Bank to attend his sister’s wedding. Each poem in the sequence contains a brief yet almost dreamy snapshot of that journey to the wedding written in the form of couplets:
& because we swam in traffic for hours
lost / lapping Haifa twice / my bladder
began to ache / before the highway
split he pulled off / I bouldered hillside
(from “& because we swam in traffic for hours”)
Cars and roads soften and dissolve into a liquid flow, much like the internal circulatory system of a body. And yet, if we read this stanza with the following stanza, we get the pulses of life and vibrancy of movement. Placed next to each other, verses flow effortlessly, with cause-and-effect, emotional impetus, and physical impulse merging into a single stream. This flow of words spills across pages (and poems) to map an entire journey—not just to the wedding, but also of the speaker’s life. For instance, notice how the word “darkened” functions as a bridge between the above poem and the next in the sequence:
all I could hear was wind / wind beneath the passing
rush hour, older than the rocks I darkened --
[…]
on drying racks tobacco leaves swim
Wind turns the pages of the book…
(from “on drying racks tobacco leaves swim”)
The speaker is blown from the highway in one stanza to the solemnization ceremony in the next. Metres demonstrates evident mastery of language in inviting the reader to bask in fleeting moments of joy in a world of danger (perhaps most cheekily done in a moment of dark humor: “a sniper’s bullet would chauffeur me / from this place—pants undone, penis in hand—.”)
At its best, Shrapnel Maps reminds me of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, in that the act of translation simultaneously functions as an act of world-building within the book. Meanwhile, the notion of a single voice—the “speaker” or “self”—in Dictee is incredibly fragile as identities morph and shift. In the poem “زيتون”, which bridges the poems in A Concordance of Leaves into one long sequence, Metres imagines the olive tree, the “zaytun,” as a being that “gnarls as it grows / into itself / a veritable thicket,” which “throws […] up obstacles to the light.” The groves are subsequently torn out with “roots like limbs / claim[ing] horizon.” The addition of stylistic flourishes such as the open and close parentheses between couplets, as well as the slashes within the line, unfortunately comes across as superfluous, distracting the reader from the otherwise resonant lines. The play with words and space, in itself, proves more than capable of regulating breath. In an episode for the podcast Between the Covers, Metres attempts to explain the parenthesis markings within the poem as “a punctuation of prioritization,” or “an attempt to pry open the sense of what is deprioritized […] what is included and what is excluded.” However, given that Metres already builds a world of language of his own, it seems unnecessary to emphasize these ideas with such explicit symbols, which do not quite add to the reader’s appreciation of the poem.
Metres does not merely rely on poetic language to explore the relationship between the individual and the state, he also turns to artefacts such as postcards as a way of examining and indicting the systematic erasure or relabeling of entire communities. These artefacts are placed at the beginning of sections to frame our reading of the poems that follow. Several references are made to grainy postcards of the Jewish Agency for Palestine Jerusalem that depicts the state as an “Ancient Beauty Revived,” whose claim to beauty and natural right of existence is complicated and challenged by Metres’s presentation of other competing claims. For example, the same postcard at the beginning of section VI is juxtaposed against the biblical verse of Genesis 12:1: “Now the LORD has said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land I will shew thee.” The biblical verse, which presents a divine mandate to occupy the land of another, raises the incompatibility between Israel and Palestinian claims to the land, and questions the ideal of the One Land, Two States solution. Yet, pointing out that religious systems are mutually incompatible merely opens up further questions about how the individual may live in a land over which big historical claims have been repeatedly made. Metres attempts to frame these larger problems of coexistence via a couple’s intimacy:
in bed my body your body inviting
[toward the shore of the Holy
[familiar curve of the land spooning the sea
nursing the child between us
(from “Palestinae sive totius Terrae Promissionis nova descriptio”)
Elsewhere, Metres dramatizes the nature of map-making and its political implications through the visual poem “Fill in the Blanks: Adele’s Sunday School Homework,” which asks a child, or the reader, to “fill in the Blank Map of Israel” using the “Bible and the clues on the ‘Places in the Holy Land’” worksheet.
As Metres remarks in the next poem, in “a map, as with narrative, / Any chosen detail necessarily blots out / Proximate details.” Human obsession over territory-marking is portrayed as being contrary to communal harmony because “in the Bible there’s no West Bank no Green Line […] just where forefathers // lived & we want to live & pray.” The continued insistence on staking a claim to territory undermines attempts to achieve cohabitation, and subverts the hope of reconciliation between the two cultures.
In the face of such overwhelming hostility and politicking, Shrapnel Maps appears to suggest that the capacity for resolution reverts to the individual. The book pays homage to individuals like Huwaida Arraf who blocked a soldier from shooting demonstrators: “she’s the rifle / unfired / shield of flesh // her arms overhead / before the muzzle / as if she could cradle a bullet” (from “The Dance of the Activist and the Typist”). In the closing poem “The Bullet Dream,” soldiers “playing their part in this daily opera, unleashed a pack of bullets” into the speaker, but the “old singing arose, the in him not him, pressing the other side” until “the leaden heaviness no longer troubled his hip.”
Ultimately, Shrapnel Maps invites the reader to stay with, and serves as a documentation of, characters like the dark-haired girl: “amid rubble she rises in a green hoodie” before she “disappears inside the pages.” There is no easy conclusion of hope or reconciliation, but Metres invites us to look where it may be disquieting or uncomfortable to do so, and to recognize the individuals dotting a fractured map.
SEE Wern Hao is a final year undergraduate, pursuing a Double Degree Program in Law and Liberal Arts at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College. His work has been featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Softblow.