To Shelter and Buoy

Review of Tariq Luthun’s How The Water Holds Me (USA: Bull City Press, 2020)
By Kendrick Loo

“All beautiful poetry,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “is an act of resistance.” Appearing to discuss the ability of poetry to reframe and revitalize the unremarkable, Darwish’s words are inseparable from the political context he wrote in. The writing of Palestinian poets has long been a site of resistance against territorial and cultural oblivion, a mode of expression of communal grief, affirmation, and healing. The debut collection of Palestinian-American poet Tariq Luthun, How The Water Holds Me, works in this vein of advocacy and healing.

Operating predominantly in free verse, Luthun’s twenty-two tightly crafted poems can be divided into two sections—the first exploring themes of childhood, family, and masculinity, the second examining more explicitly political issues. Concerns over Palestinian belonging and displacement recur throughout the whole collection. Such concerns are established in the opening poem “The Summer My Cousin Went Missing,” which begins with a regrettably unasked question (“I should have asked how our khalto was holding / up.”) The speaker ruminates on the erosion of Palestinian culture through the metaphor of planting:

Child upon child goes, and someone’s mother
is no longer a mother. My aunt — a mother herself — looks,

for a moment, away; nothing she plants has roots
long enough to hold.

Although the poem does not clarify whether the speaker’s cousin has died or vanished, the disappearance itself is a loss. Moreover, it cannot be properly mourned. The maternal figures of “The Summer My Cousin Went Missing” are buried under endless tasks, weighed down with exhaustion. The speaker thus uses his missed question to stage a deeper interrogation: “If we are too caught up […] how ever will we stay fed? How ever // will we live long enough to grieve?” For Luthun, a Palestinian, these are painful questions whose answers are already known: his questions guide readers to consider the realities of displaced Palestinian families. Born in Detroit and raised in America, Luthun opens up new ways of imagining diaspora while resisting the conventional immigrant narrative of American assimilation.

The arresting image of Palestinian children unable to “root” requires the collection to elaborate on the nature of belonging. Luthun develops this theme in “We Already Know This,” a poem written in response to the anniversary of Nakba—Israel’s day of independence. As the title implies, the conditions that underpin his speaker’s rootlessness are historical (“Palestine. There, / I’ve said it. I want to be sure / everyone knows”). However, this historical wound has been forgotten, a situation which needs to be called out and remedied. While the titular “we” of Luthun’s poem suggests that his speaker represents the Palestinian community, the speaker steps past the division of “us” and “them” as the poem progresses. Consider this excerpt that follows the naming of Palestine:

Genocide:
I would hope everyone knows
did not start, and did not end
at the Holocaust. I haven’t forgotten that
everyone needs a place on this planet.

While the speaker invokes the Holocaust and compares its relative longevity in historical memory against Nakba, thereby placing a measure of responsibility upon those who have forgotten the suffering of Palestinians, Luthun’s speaker follows this with a declarative statement: “everyone needs a place on this planet.” The speaker moves from a distinction between those who remember (the Palestinians) and those who do not (everyone else) to empathize with all humanity, a universalized desire for belonging. For Luthun, this emotional belonging is invoked in various ways, beginning with a traditional image such as the olive tree—whose hardy and long-lived nature has long been a symbol of Palestinian rootedness— and closing on the personal image of water. This is where the poem shines, as the speaker submerges himself in an ocean of familial memories:

I don’t know if there is
a child, anywhere on this earth, that wasn’t,
at least once, held by their mother. Water:
where my mother held me
until I was given to land. O firm land—
how my father holds me…

Water, as the collection’s title implies, is where Luthun is most at home: where he is surrounded by love. In “Portrait of My Father Drowning,” an elegantly crafted poem about parental bonds, Luthun’s speaker recalls being cradled in water. The poem resonates strongly with Barry Jenkin’s cinematic masterpiece Moonlight, in the scene where Mahersala Ali’s character, Juan, teaches Little how to swim. Luthun’s poem too explores the associations of water with weightlessness, changeability, and transformation. Crafted so that the title leads straight into the poem, the drowning in the title is quickly defused, now reading as a drowning “in the type of love he deserves.” Luthun demonstrates his deftness with language, playing on the image of metaphor on the literal and metaphorical level. Consider how opening line is developed:

in the type of love he deserves; nestled
in his lap, a young me is learning
how to swim.

By holding up the speaker, the father drowns in the love of his son; by teaching his son how to swim, he saves himself. Through its chronological arrangement, How the Water Holds Me constantly refines its answers to its own questions. Beginning with an image of rootless children, Luthun’s speaker searches through his poems for a place where the Palestinian bodies can belong. In “Portrait of My Father Drowning,” the body becomes an island, cradled by parents. The speaker watches as other parents do the same: “calloused hands buoying / their lineages, these islands // and their fluttering limbs.”

Although family can give a sense of belonging, a means of cultural inheritance, it can also be a site of violence. How The Water Holds Me does not shy away from fleshing out a fuller picture of masculinity in poems such as “Harb” and “Upon Leaving the Diamond to Catch 14 Stitches on My Body.” The father figures encountered in these poems are charged with violence, unlike the earlier figure of the gentle, omniscient giant. In “Harb,” whose Arabic title can mean warfare and combat, the speaker frames trauma and violence as a form of inheritance.

I was birthed with a beating

fist to go with those sleepless beasts,
my lungs.

The image of the beating heart is subverted by enjambment, the juxtaposition between the presumed collocation (beating heart) and Luthun’s actual choice (beating fist) animating the poem with tension. Similarly in “Upon Leaving the Diamond,” the speaker recounts how, after being hurt at a baseball game, he heard “the sound of men— / darker—from a different world.” Dramatizing the memory as a glimpse into the world of men, Luthun’s speaker describes the scene as an eruption of violent noise (“Our fathers—and the off-white / noise they let loose”). The description of “off-white” noise, with its color associations, suggests that masculine violence is a deeper societal problem, rather than an issue of race. Just as Jenkins’ script refuses to divorce Juan’s ability to protect Little from his status and wealth accrued from drug-dealing, Luthun’s collection refuses only to acknowledge the father’s gentleness without demonstrating the violent animus that lurks beneath his strength. His poems do not swing between interpretations of fatherhood so much as to work together to portray masculinity with complexity and nuance.

If the first section is concerned with familial inheritance and childhood memory, the second half is focused on adulthood and society. The speaker here appears to have tired of familial expectations. In “Finding Myself in the Direct Messages of Someone I do not Know in Kuwait,” the speaker begins with a restrained yet bitter line: “There is something to be said of / culture; how I end up here.” The poem first outlines how the cultural expectations of the speaker’s father, mother, and elders have informed the speaker’s desires, before arguing that his desires are still unique, animated by “a youth that keeps us from becoming our elders.” Revisiting the image of water and characterizing desire as thirst, Luthun’s speaker is poised for a journey of self-discovery:

to find

what might come of flinging
oneself into thirst; to drown

in every possibility, and
learn — if it’s possible —

to emerge unscathed
from its mouth.

Following this declaration, the poems we encounter are more varied. We see the speaker explore sex as a form of connection in “I Wonder About the Woman Who Now Lives in the Ballad Without Me,” and acknowledge the difficulties of negotiating American life in the poem “For Those We Left Behind.” There is also a poem that responds to the 2016 U.S. elections, “After Spending an Evening in November Trying to Convince My Mother that We’ll Be Fine,” which is especially engaging. Here, Luthun dispenses with the separation of poet from speaker to comment on partisan media news-making. As a political activist and data consultant, Tariq speaks with candor when he writes, “I reason that humans are just terrible / inventors — much better as / innovators.” Familiar with the dominance and manipulation of data, Tariq resists the flattening of nuance into political talking points. He does so by contextualizing the election in its broader impact on his family, of having to live in “a country that cannot have… does not want” his father.

One complication that arises with a looser grouping of poems is that Luthun struggles to sustain what makes the first half of How The Water Holds Me so compelling. Although the theme of racial discrimination connects the poem “Ode to Brown Child on an Airplane for the First Time” to later poems such as “Political Poem” and “I Felt Nothing,” it is hard to pinpoint what personal questions animate and sustain these poems of adulthood. Nevertheless, the speaker’s struggles and fears are palpable. At one point, Luthun’s speaker bitterly remarks that “I will always be / a skeleton marked by the flesh that holds it.” Perhaps the second half of How The Water Holds Me is about the wounding of the speaker by the world’s injustices. In “Al-Bahr,” whose title literally translates to “the sea,” Luthun’s speaker adopts a mythic register to describe death (“body thick as / a fist in waning crimson tides”). In a chilling vision, he sees the bodies of Palestinian boys wash up on the shore of the Red Sea, and acknowledges that he could have suffered the same fate.

At the end of the collection, a number of questions linger: where has the father, a vital figure of the first half, disappeared to? Does the speaker eventually forge his own version of strength, one that does not hold that damning “off-white” color? Does he learn to negotiate his resistance against history and society? No doubt, these questions imply that poetry collections must present a coherent narrative. Still, I find a kind of answer when Luthun ends his collection with a symbolic return to the beginning. In “I Go to the Backyard to Pick Mint Leaves for My Mother,” the speaker finds himself back among nature, now able to see the dead. The speaker does not make any declarations of strength; instead, he turns to a consideration of his community: “I pray that / when I am gone, my people speak / as sweetly of me as I do of them.”

Rather than focus on the individual, Luthun’s speaker points to his real source of strength, those who shelter and buoy him up. Although the second half of the collection meanders, without teasing out this thematic strand of communal strength, Luthun arrives at his answer to the question of where he belongs—in the search of home. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote in “I Belong There,” belonging is a process of having “learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.” Luthun’s collection takes that idea to heart, ending with a list of actions and objects:

a chase, a hunt, a honey, a home
for the tea to settle; a haven
for us to return to.

Evoking family and nation, Luthun’s collection suggests that belonging is not found in a specific place, but in the building of a community that uplifts and supports its members. That is where Luthun’s home is found.


Kendrick Loo is an English & Management undergraduate from the University of St Andrews. His poetry and reviews have been published in Tayo Literary, The West Review and EcoTheo, among others. He can be found tweeting at @stagpoetics.