{"id":11452,"date":"2011-02-02T16:25:46","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T21:25:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=11452"},"modified":"2017-03-30T22:09:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T02:09:23","slug":"the-lives-of-rain-by-nathalie-handal-foreword-by-carolyn-forche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-lives-of-rain-by-nathalie-handal-foreword-by-carolyn-forche\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lives of Rain by Nathalie Handal, foreword by Carolyn Forch\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2011\/02\/Lives-of-Rain.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-28390 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2011\/02\/Lives-of-Rain.jpg\" alt=\"Lives of Rain\" width=\"326\" height=\"500\" \/><\/a>I am the first to admit I missed having the poetry function installed when my limited brain got assembled. So when I DO actually GET poetry, I feel a true sense of gratitude to the writer, not to mention a few outbursts of gleeful accomplishment.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nathaliehandal.com\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Nathalie Handal<\/a>\u2019s three-part collection is a peripatetic wonder. She opens with &#8220;The Doors of Exile&#8221;\u00a0\u2013 &#8221; &#8230; stuck between two doors \/ waiting to leave to enter &#8230;&#8221; and takes the reader on a diasporic journey through language (Arabic, French, Spanish, in addition to English) by creating both an intimacy of the wanderer&#8217;s instant recognition of another traveler, and the displacement of a being other in an unfamiliar landscape both literal and imagined.<\/p>\n<p>In Part I, Handal traverses the Middle East, giving voice to uprooted\u00a0soul still searching in a lost and missing homeland. In Part II, she touches what seems to be a little piece of everywhere, from Marrakech to Paris to the Dalmatian Coast to Nueva York and briefly settles in Latin America where she visits relatives in &#8220;a little ciudad in M\u00e9xico,&#8221; where the polylingual multicultural ask, &#8220;<em>Habibti, que tal<\/em>?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Part III is a single, long piece which announces Handal&#8217;s journey&#8217;s end in the eight-part odyssey of &#8220;Amrika.&#8221; To mar Handal&#8217;s words with paraphrasing would be a literary crime &#8230; her finale clearly cannot, should not, will not to be distorted. Here, for now &#8230; Handal&#8217;s worldly peregrinations coalesce and settle:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px\">&#8221; &#8230;I wear my jeans, tennis shoes,<br \/>\nwalk Broadway, pass Columbia,<br \/>\nread Said and Twain,<br \/>\nwonder why we are obsessed with difference,<br \/>\nour need to change the other?<br \/>\nI wait for the noise to stop<br \/>\nbut it never does<br \/>\nso I go to the tip of the Hudson River<br \/>\nrecide a verse by Ibn Arabi<br \/>\nand between subway rides,<br \/>\nto that place I now call home,<br \/>\nlisten to Abdel Halim and Nina Simone<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px\">hunt for the small things<br \/>\nI have lost inside of myself \u2013<br \/>\nand at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer<br \/>\nthrough a window of faded Arabic letters<br \/>\nsee a New York <em>debke <\/em>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px\">It is later than it was while ago<br \/>\nand I haven&#8217;t moved a bit,<br \/>\nmy voice still breaking into tiny pieces<br \/>\nwhen I introduce myself to someone new<br \/>\nand imagine I have found my way home.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n<p><strong>Published<\/strong>: 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am the first to admit I missed having the poetry function installed when my limited brain got assembled. So when I DO actually GET poetry, I feel a true sense of gratitude to the writer, not to mention a few outbursts of gleeful accomplishment&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1893,94],"tags":[84,6608,22,341,10,51,25,1891,1892,28,55,45],"class_list":["post-11452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-palestinian-american","category-poetry","tag-betrayal","tag-bookdragon","tag-civil-rights","tag-colonialism","tag-family","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-lives-of-rain","tag-nathalie-handal","tag-politics","tag-religious-differences","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.14 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Lives of Rain by Nathalie Handal, foreword by Carolyn Forch\u00e9 - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-lives-of-rain-by-nathalie-handal-foreword-by-carolyn-forche\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Lives of Rain by Nathalie Handal, foreword by Carolyn Forch\u00e9 - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I am the first to admit I missed having the poetry function installed when my limited brain got assembled. 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