20 Sept 2021 Guest Poet: Threa Almontaser

Threa Almonster – A Voice from the Middle East

By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut (The Wild Fox of Yemen) asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the American imagination, and instead invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilizing any means necessary to form a semblance of home. In doing so, The Wild Fox of Yemen – from which the poems below are taken - fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.

And That Fast, You’re Thinking About Their Bodies

At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge. 

Someone drops a ring in glass, in your head 

the clink of a used bullet, still hot, and that fast 

the rooftop is covered with wires, riflemen, 

and you’re thinking about mutiny, MK-47s, 

two cities clawing at each other’s bruised 

throats while boys try to hold your hips, 

keep dancing. The war is on your hips. 

Your hands. You wear it all over. You wrap 

your hair in it. Pluck it from your eyebrows. 

The rooftop is wide and caring, too rained 

or sometimes incensed, and you never once 

think to be afraid of what could arrow a cloud 

and kill it. You eat volcano rolls, pink pepper 

goat cheese, and the war enters you. You stare 

at Still Life with Flowers and Fruit 

and the glade of roses scream 

war. Here with a doctor and your pregnant 

aunt who hasn’t yet learned English, only speaks 

in war. Friends in Greensboro get picked up 

by bored police, get beat up for no reason, 

and those fists carry war. At a job interview, 

you carve yourself into a white-known shape

and that renaming is a kind of war. 

You take a passport photo, told to smile 

without teeth, the flash a bright war. 

You’re on the other side of mercy

with your meadows and fluffed spillage,

where nights are creamed with saviors. 

Here everyone rests on roofs graduated 

and sung, gazing at a sky that won’t 

bleed them. At the beach, you’re buried 

to the neck, practicing dead, snug in your 

chosen tomb, gulls flittering on all sides, 

waves fleshing closer, and that fast you’re thinking 

of a grubby desert girl who placed small stones 

in her scarf, shook it back and forth,

said, This is what the sea must sound like. 

Heritage Emissary

As designated translator, I taste saffron, gold coins, 

a slight burning. Since I’ve returned, there has been less 

of me in English. Though return always meant measuring

the earth’s door, tongue ozoned and still learning 

to stretch between here and home. Sah, my native 

speech is like a window sash pulled up wa down. 

Sah, I shift phrases without thought. Classmates tilt

at my returned self like I grew horns, can shoot bombs 

out my ass. Like they want to dump me in ma’a, 

watch me float like a witch. When I Arabic my way

towards them, they pat my back in case I hack mucus 

wa dem. What do you call a word the mouth has forgotten 

to push out, stuck by the tonsil’s entrance, squirming 

to be sound? Speech becomes a slagged pot I bang crude 

beats on. I long to play a song that doesn’t terrorize, 

a song that’s understood. The mushkila is I am a surging 

current of feared language. Words have stopped arriving

easily. Was it Rumi who said silence is the language 

of God and all else is poor translation? I am not

mathaluhum. I can’t properly translate myself, 

                  part I hush tongue my floats lake settled a so

       need I steam senseless of shrouds spout and lips my

           

   don’t I proof need I with accent my sink to dictionary a 

   .sense make still can I that, cooing blurred a like sound                             

I lie about my D in Algebra. Turn, She daydreams 

during lessons into, Qaluu I pay attention to detail. 

Turn, She’s suspended for fighting into, I’m such a good

student, they gave me a day off. Each rephrasing 

Pinocchio’s my nose. I am out of breath from so much

code-switching, crunching the sand it leaves my teeth. 

When threatened with a call home, I shrug, Taib. 

Go ahead. They’ll say, yes yes, but won’t yafhumun, 

will ask me about it later so I can twist it. At dinner, 

Baba tells a story of his childhood in Yemen. 

About catching a wild fox with his cousin–—Arabic 

the medium through which his body can return home. 

I drown him out. Ana asif, I don’t mean to. It’s only that 

my languages get mukhtalit, and when he talks it sounds

mathal poetry. So when I hear a line about a lost, 

sly animal, I am struck mute. Think he means me.

Living in English

I want fine hair, a rich dad, a pair of pantyhose.

To hold my tongue from rolling r’s,

stop my throat from turning juice into goose.

I want people to believe I didn’t come

from somewhere else. I repeat new sounds slowly,

coordinate facial expressions with words:

scorn, relief, dismay — feelings still unknown to me

in English. Will sabr work the same as patience

with its Norman linguistic? Will mercy look as fervent

as rahma? How will I convey in Saxon semantics

when someone harak galbi — hurt me from within,

a literal scald to my heart? Can I display these

honestly in another’s language? I practice

in the mirror for hours, block any Arab influence

that might sneak in, longing to live fully in English.

But my face never yields — like a kite

with no wind, it always drops back into old ways.

After my accent adapted, my face still told another story:

that I am from somewhere else, a land

blanketed in sand, spice, sun. A Middle Eastern map

cut out and placed deftly into my dark pupil

for those who look close enough.

Background

Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni American writer, translator, and multimedia artist from New York City. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University.

Her first full-length poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen, was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets, and was published by Graywolf Press on April 6, 2021.

Almontaser teaches English to immigrants and refugees in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

About The Wild Fox of Yemen, Mullen writes,

“The spirit of Whitman lives in these poems that sing and celebrate a vibrant, rebellious body with all its physical and spiritual entanglements. Formally and linguistically diverse, these bold, defiant declarations of ‘reckless’ embodiment acknowledge the self's nesting identities, proclaiming the individual's intricate relations to others, the one in the many and the many in the one. Ultimately, they ask how to belong to others without losing oneself, how to be faithful to oneself without forsaking others. Exuberant dialogues incorporate communities of known and unknown interlocutors along with translations of the Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni.”

Exploration 1: Speculate on how Almontaser can create poems that incorporate both a Western and a Middle East perspective – if you think her work does this.

Exploration 2: Imagine Almontaser’s life in New York after 9/11.

Exploration 3: Are Almontaser’s poems a “A love letter to the country and people of Yemen?”