In his 2001 lecture, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” Edward Said expressed what he saw as a central dilemma for any artist or intellectual trying to talk back to empire: you are constrained by having to use the same words and phrases that the empire manipulates to oppress you. And yet you have to find a way to use those words to speak truth to the oppressive power. How to deal with this conundrum? Either you write, in Said’s words, so “opaquely” that no one but a few specialists can understand what you are saying, or so “transparently” that what you’ve written is “indistinguishable from CNN or USA Today prose.”

Anyone who has followed the writing and activism of poet Philip Metres knows that he shares Said’s commitment to speaking truth to American imperial power, and, what’s more, to finding ways to embody and imagine peace in a world that is so often hell-bent on war. I recommend Metres’s prose in addition to his poetry–especially Behind the Lines, a study of war-resistance poetry from 1941 to the 9/11 era, as well as The Sound of Listening, a collection of essays and interviews about what I would term a poetics of peace. The prose in both of those books leans toward the “transparent” end of Said’s spectrum, which is not to say that these works don't profoundly challenge the reader. But Metres’s poetry has often leaned in the other direction, away from the straightforward, direct, and unmistakable, toward the experimental.

Two previous collections, Sand Opera (2015), which addresses the horrors of Abu Ghraib, and Shrapnel Maps (2020), which considers the Israel-Palestine conflict, include much that the casual reader of poetry might not even classify as poems. These books send the reader down rabbit holes of erased and redacted government and military documents, for instance. And in both books, language and wordplay abound, as do persona poems written from points of view far different from the poet’s own: soldiers, torturers and survivors of torture, terrorists and victims of terror. The multiplicity of forms and voices in these collections pushes the reader to make friends with the unfamiliar and expands the definition of what a poem can be and do.

At the same time, my own desire in reading both of these books was to hear more of Metres’s own voice—the poet speaking from his experience as an Arab American citizen after 9/11, or a father confronting the challenge of raising children in a war-torn world. While elements of Metres’s own voice are present, experimental poems and personas dominate, so much that sometimes I could forget who the writer is. 

Fugitive/Refuge, Metres’s newest collection of poetry, speaks as eloquently as ever against empire and for peace, but he grounds the writing in this book in his own family’s story and history. The cover, a photo of an art installation, sets the stage: the underbelly of a boat rises before us, surrounded by a shower of keys suspended in a spray of red yarn. This remarkable work, The Key in the Hand, was created by Chiharu Shiota and presented in the Japan Pavilion at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale in 2015. Shiota’s note from the installation is worth quoting from, because it’s clear Metres took its message to heart as he was composing his own collection. Shiota writes:

I would like to use keys provided by the general public that are imbued with various recollections and memories that have accumulated over a long period of daily use…. These overlapping memories will in turn combine with those of the people from all over the world who come to see the biennale, giving them a chance to communicate in a new way and better understand each other’s feelings.

This idea of “overlapping memories” is the heartbeat of Fugitive/Refuge. The central memory the poet shares—through many different angles and in photographic as well as written form—is the migration of his family from Lebanon to Mexico and the United States. Metres employs a three-part Arabic poetic form, the qasida, to structure the sharing of these memories: fate and longing, exile, and return. He then overlaps these personal familial memories with the voices of so many other refugees who have also walked this journey.

The ambitious scope of the book’s structure is matched by skillful craft in poem after poem. After a prose introduction that sketches out the historical background and form of the qasida, Metres presents us with an Arabic translation of an English-language poem he published fifteen years ago, “The Ballad of Skandar.” This poem told the story of Metres’s great-grandfather Iskandar Ibn Mitri Abourjaili, who was exiled from Lebanon for disobeying the Ottoman army. But interestingly, it is the 2014 Arabic text, a translation by Samuel Shimon, that Metres chooses to foreground in the book. It is underneath the Arabic text that he offers English-language footnotes that give the necessary background for English-language readers to understand both the poem and his family’s history. 

This poem, “The Ballad of Skandar II,” and the poem/commentary combination that accompanies it set the tone for an unapologetic use of Arabic words and phrases throughout the collection. Sometimes the Arabic is translated, sometimes not. For a predominantly English-language reader like me who does not speak or read Arabic, and who hails from the Midwestern heart of American empire, I had to take a number of steps to understand the way the language functioned in those poems: taking pictures of pages, using Google Translate (with the image function), puzzling over the context, and when all that failed, reaching out to friends with fluency in the language. The extra work was well worth the trouble.

Consider “Remorse for Temperate Speech.” Metres’s note on the poem (he includes a generous Notes section at the back of the book) sets the context: “After W. B. Yeats. For two Palestinians, Raghad Salah and Mosab Abu Toha, who on separate occasions bore my intemperate temperance gracefully.” Yeats’s poem, “Remorse for Intemperate Speech” considers Ireland’s fraught relationship with its one-time colonial overlord, England. Interestingly, though, where Yeats (who published his poem in 1931 after his turn toward fascism) laments the hatred for the English that his fellow Irish nurse in their “fanatic hearts,” Metres changes and inverts the title of his poem, and expands the scope of its work. The poem begins:

For I spoke as if I knew
            to you who know

        how a house looks
        clothed in flames

      from the inside, you
      sitting in the smoke

          as if watching my prose
          only stoke the flames

      in that stagnant room
      among stagnant rooms

    where the powerful
    talk for your people

bound in the margins
of empire’s book,

  who speak and speak and speak and

Here at this dramatic moment in the poem two-thirds of the way down the page, Metres inserts a rectangular block of boxed-in text which reads from bottom to top: “pretend to listen.” Walled off and impenetrable, this three-word phrase and its position in the poem represents a willful American deafness to the suffering of others—here, Palestinians. Written and published in 2021, well before October 7 and the current violence that has followed, the poem is prophetic.

But where a lesser poet might have ended the poem with the click of his rectangular, walled-off box, Metres shifts the energy. He continues:

May you find the يداو
where water flows

    into future, and greet
      what has come before,

        where you did not know
          you knew before,

            the unmapped, hidden
                    يداو
             where past
                       and
                       future
                          meet 

The translations that I could find of that word يداو  didn’t seem to make sense in context. I emailed Fr. Marc Boulos—a Palestinian American, Eastern Orthodox priest and near-neighbor to me here in Saint Paul—about the word. (Fr. Boulos is also a scripture scholar; earlier this month I read his excellent Dark Sayings: Diary of an American Priest.)

The word يداو or yadaw, Fr. Boulos replied, “is associated with healing, teaching, or curing. It can also be used as a noun, for example, ‘in God’s hands all is well’.... Hands and healing are linked. Do hands heal? Do they harm? Is all well in God’s ‘hands’ or his ‘healing’ care?”

This note from Fr. Boulos and the questions he raised opened the poem up for me. Keeping this understanding of yadaw in mind, I read the second half of the poem as a turn to prayer, with the Palestinian addressees of the poem among those for whom the speaker is asking intercession. As the poem draws to a close, the speaker calls this yadaw “unmapped,” a powerful word choice, especially when considered in relationship to land, which, in the scriptural context, is no one’s but God’s. The conclusion of this poem, Fr. Boulos also noted, includes people in other times (“past and future meet”), broadening the personal and genealogical work the poet does to include the generations of all fugitives seeking refuge.

These themes of inclusivity and overlap run throughout the collection. Metres weaves canonical writers and texts—the prophet Jonah, the Psalms, Dante, the Qu’ran, Frost, Yeats—and puts them in fruitful conversation with the lived experience of those on the margins of society throughout the world: refugees seeking new homes in Europe and the United States, unhoused Americans seeking shelter, citizens victimized by police brutality and violence.

Metres offers a “contrapuntal” mode of composition (to adapt another phrase from Said), which he embodies in a number of poems he calls “simultaneities.” These poems are meant to be read in two voices, and we find the word order matching the Arabic manner of reading right to left rather than left to right. So, for instance, in the second-to-last poem of this book, “You Have Come Upon People Who Are like Family and This Open Space,” the poet directs us in his notes to read double-voiced and “overlapping at the middle” of the poem, This poem concludes:

people upon come have you
family like are who
space open this

space this open
you welcome I that
away turn to

stay to wish you unless
shoes your remove and rest
speak your into lean we

slake to drink tender
eat to fullness and
end the are you

beginning my of
of beginning the
end my

You are the end of my beginning / the beginning of my end. The last stanza closes by calling us back to the beginning, to the first page of this deeply generous and inclusive book, which reads: Welcome. You’re among family. The way is easy. Open.

I recommend any reader to experience and respond to that invitation. I know I was grateful to receive it.

Fugitive/Refuge
Philip Metres
Copper Canyon Press
$22 | 144 pp.

For a conversation with Philip Metres, first published in Commonweal’s May 2024 issue, click here.

For a poem from Fugitive/Refuge, “The New Colossus,” which appeared alongside the interview, click here.