Nathalie Handal [Palestine / France / USA]

 

The City

                                —after C.P.Cavafy
 
You tell me: I’m going to another country,
another city, another body.
Perhaps my heart will stay uncertain,
and I will destroy my history but I am leaving.
Even if on every street, I find the ruins of our bodies,
I’ll roam like a restless soul anyway.
 
I tell you: You won’t find a new country,
new city, new body. You’ll return to roam
the same ruins, same streets, same quartiere,
return to complain in the same room
of the same house, return to the memory of our intertwined bodies.
You will always end up in Roma: I will always remain in you.
And maybe late, you’ll see, what you destroyed
is worth more than all the worlds you wasted your time in.
 
 
 
Intermezzo
 
You can’t trespass
an open wound
 
the smell of September
on the breast of a lover
 
you desired
but can’t remember,
 
the lines by Pasolini
that couldn’t
 
carry the pleasures
of a perfect nation,
 
so stay in between.
After all,
 
faithfulness
is a long hesitation.
 
 
 
Salacia
 
I pull you out of the sea,
drag you across the risky waters,
where the distances are longer,
where pain has laws.
On your face a wave as long as a tomb,
behind you, the cities you left,
all moved, like winded and un-winded
hearts. I look for your bruises,
knowing some damages are irreparable.
            I listen: No one dies alone in the sea.
I wonder how it’s possible,
            decades later, across continents,
not to find all the parts of you I need.
I take you back to the waters,
take you back to the waves,
to the blue we break and unbreak.
We enter. We get lost. And salt, salt, salt
holds the sea in us.

(from the forthcoming book “Roma Roam”)

 
 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Nathalie Handal is described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of over ten award-winning books, translated into over fifteen languages, including “Life in a Country Album”, winner of the Palestine Book Award;  “The Republics”, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; and the forthcoming, “Roma Roma” (2026). Handal is the recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, the Africa Institute, among others. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at New York University-AD, and writes the literary travel column, “The City and the Writer” for ‘Words without Borders” magazine.