On Monday, Sep. 23, renowned poets Natalie Diaz and Fady Joudah captivated an audience at Swarthmore College’s Lang Performing Arts Center. The reading marked the commencement of Swarthmore’s Cooper Series “Global Justice: Historic Present, Imagined Futures” and explored themes of power, state violence, indigeneity, and colonialism through the lens of poetry.
Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, including “Postcolonial Love Poem,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Joudah is a Palestinian-American physician, poet, and translator. He is the author of “[…]” and several other acclaimed poetry collections, such as “The earth in the attic,” “Alight,” and more. Joudah has translated several Arabic poetry collections, including those of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan.
Prompted by ongoing global conflicts, including the violence in Israel-Palestine, the “Global Justice” series brings together activists, scholars, and artists like Diaz and Joudah to offer a deeper understanding of present realities and possible futures within a broader global and historical framework.
The evening began with an introduction by Associate Professor of English Sangina Patnaik, who situated the reading within the context of ongoing violence in Palestine. “We are now 351 days into the current iteration of genocide in Gaza,” Patanik said, setting a somber tone for the poems that followed.
Joudah began the reading with excerpts from “[…],” a powerful collection of poems that shed light on the enduring spirit of Palestinians. He began, “I am unfinished business. / the business that did not finish me / or my parents…I write for the future / because my present is demolished.” Joudah then shared a second poem that reflected on the resilience of Palestinians and concluded with two poems that underscored the significance of love and survival. He closed with the line from his poem “Dedication:” “To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.”
During Diaz’s reading, she shared her poem “From the Desire Field,” which she explained as an exploration of the power of language to redefine anxiety and its connection to energy. She recited, “Despite my trembling / let me call my anxiety desire, then let me call it a garden,” expressing her experience of anxiety as a field ready to bloom in her chest.
The next poem she read, “American Arithmetic,” grapples with the complexities of Native American identity and the struggle to find a place in a society that often marginalizes Indigenous voices. “Can the statistic be emotional? Can the statistic have a body?” Diaz asked, citing the disproportionate number of Native Americans killed by police — higher per capita than any other race. “We are Americans and we are less than 1% / of Americans. We do a better job of dying / by police than we do existing,” she read. “Sometimes race means run.”
Another piece, “Pandemic Furniture,” explored the interplay between language, identity, and the body. She concluded her reading with two love poems that reflected on the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit.
After the readings, Patniak initiated a discussion by inviting Diaz and Joudah to share their perspectives on positioning their work within the contexts of “occupation, the violence of erasure within the English language, and love.”
Joudah responded that just asking him the question in English violated his interiority as a Palestinian, “It lacks love to constantly address the Palestinian, even in a time of genocide, through these kinds of forms … in which that I am able to be here only because there is a genocide going on.”
Diaz continued the conversation, detailing the connection between erasure and language in her work, “For me and my work I kind of toy with excess. I take the English language and make it do what it says it’s going to do. I take the word back to everything it’s ever been, including the violences…for me, the excess is very important to my visibility.”
The event concluded with questions from the audience, reiterating themes from Patnaik’s questions, contemplating the role of love in the poets’ writing, the impact of language on identity, and the challenges of writing in English as a language that reduces marginalized identities.
One audience member asked if the poets saw any value in English beyond its instrumental purpose as a writing tool. Joudah responded that the question had asked him to redeem English and that “by doing so, I [Joudah] redeem myself to English as well.”
“There is much more to the Arabic tradition than just to always address itself in English in relationship to the brutality that English imposes on it,” he continued, “…I reject these kinds of questions … that are asking me to perform some kind of redemption, that I think is part of the violence when speaking to an Arab in America, a Palestinian in English.”
Diaz concluded the evening, adding to Joudah’s response from the perspective of a native Mojave speaker who often contemplates the relationship between the U.S. and English. “For me, what language is, is my beloveds who speak it, the stories I want them to be able to tell in it…language is the people who speak it, so we are always going to be open to a kind of critique.”
The following lecture in the Cooper “Global Justice” series will be by Ussama Makdisi on Monday, Sep. 30, at Haverford College. Subsequent events include a lecture by Nasser Abourahme and a conversation between Maya Wind, Davarian Baldwin, and Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn. The series will conclude with a conversation featuring renowned activist Angela Davis.
