The Fraught Nature of Belonging: Nathalie Handal’s Life in a Country Album
In After the Last Sky, Edward Said writes the following about the Palestinian consciousness forged by exile and occupation:
A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to be better than all of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation.
Though award-winning poet Nathalie Handal is of many cultures, in her latest collection, Life in a Country Album, she brings this particular Palestinian sensibility to her poems and to her encounters with her many countries and languages of the text.
Handal’s upbringing spans continents, and she is at home in English, French, and Arabic, just as she is in many countries, from her birthplace of Haiti to her familial homes in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and in the cities of Europe and the United States where she is in constant motion. Life in a Country Album, her sixth collection of poems, chronicles her life between two nations in particular: the United States and France. In multilingual poems, Handal explores speech and its fractures through the lens of belonging and diaspo
Nathalie Handal
Professor of Literature and Creative WritingAffiliation:NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MPHIL University of London; MFA Bennington College
nh53@
Research Areas: Global literature, poetry, flash, literary travel writing, translation, diasporic literatures, Mediterranean crossroads
Nathalie Handalis described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of 10 award-winning books, translated in over 15 languages, including Life in a Country Album and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. She is the editor of two bestselling anthologies, has worked over 20 theatrical productions, and her writings have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica, The Guardian, TheNew York Times, The Nation, and The Irish Times. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Africa Institute, and featured at the United Nations for Outstanding Contributors in literature She writes the liter
Rachel Barenblat: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your
background.
Nathalie Handal: I grew up in Europe, the United States and
the Caribbean. My grandfather was born in Bethlehem and emigrated to
the West in the early twentieth century, and my parents mainly grew up
with a French education, and of course, with strong Christian
Bethlehemite traditions, this was transmitted to me. When my parents
left Europe and went to Boston I was about one or two. I spent many
years in Boston before we left again for the French islands, and then
eventually, I went back to study and live in Boston, France and much
later on England. So I basically grew up with a strong
French-American-Bethlehemite culture if I could put it that
way&#;. I often go to Bethlehem and its narrow streets, stone
houses, the olive trees, lemon trees, orange trees, the smell of rose
wood in the prayer beads, the nativity church, constantly roams inside
of me&#; even if it is a fragmented experience&#;
RB: How did The Poetry of Arab Women come into being?
NH: When I left the United States for Paris in , I started
to work more with the Arab world, and I soon realized that Arab women
w
The Lives of Rain
Shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry
Recipient of the Menada Award
In The Lives of Rain, Nathalie Handal has brought forth a work of radical displacement and uncertainty, moving continent to continent, giving voice to Palestinians of the diaspora in the utterance of one fiercely awake and compassionate, who, against warfare, occupation and brutality offers her native language, olives, wind, a herd of sheep or a burning mountain, radio music, a butterfly’s gaze. It is a poetry of never arriving, of villages erased from the maps, of tattoed waistlines and kalishnikovs, a goat and a corpse cut open side by side, where every house is a prison. In a spare, chiseled language without ornament, she writes an exilic lyric, fusing Arabic, English, Spanish and French into a polyglot testament of horror and survival. Habibti, que tal? she asks of those who wander country to country, while those left behind in Jenin, Gaza City, and Bethlehem inhabit a continued past of blood/ of jailed cities. Her subject is memory and forgetting, the precariousness of identity and the
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