Lisan Al'asfour

by natalie hanna

Beginning, and ending, with moving invocations for acceptance, Natalie Hanna's lisan'alsfour (bird's tongue), introduces a personal concept of creation around loss, confirming identity, and matrilineal questions of the child of a single mother forced to immigrate to Canada from Egypt in the 1970s. Narrativistically tracing challenges to wholeness, including medicalization, childlessness, racism, loss of culture, and labouring within the law, the book then brings the reader through poems of deep mourning for the victims of Tahrir Square, Syrian bombings, the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the Beirut explosion, and gun/police violence to Black and Indigenous communities. Finally, a series of poems that describe the schism between defining and maintaining identity and the orientalised perceptions of what others have expected invites intimate and vulnerable engagement. These are poems that speak to feeling out of place, longing for gentleness, abusing alcohol to relieve grief, reassessing the body, and coming back into softness and strength despite the sorrow and pressure of trauma. Poems that reflect on sometimes graphic encounters, do so in a respectful manner that confronts atrocity, refusing impulses to avert. They therefore also have a unique multivalence, embracing an impassioned approach to literary practice as antioppression practice, through the perspective of a politically critical legal professional who is also a self-subject in a narrative of trauma and acceptance.Book's main news/pitch hooks: Arab Canadian Feminist Poetry, Daughters of Arab disapora, Intersectional identies and the law. Book "tweet" "A poetic instersectional examination of diaspora, racism, law, violence, culture, and healing." Why natalie wrote this book: We form our identities in the context of our personal relations and daily experiences as actors, subjects, and witnesses of events. A natural extension of these experiences is the desire to make sense of the world we construct around us, from the very intimate, to the global. This collection, which gathers previously printed and new work, is concerned, in an immediate way, with how we speak or do not speak, who is entitled to speak, and how we misunderstand one another. I wanted to contribute a challenging collection of poetry from the lens of a feminist, Canadian, lawyer of Middle-Eastern background, that I would have appreciated seeing as a writer coming up in my twenties.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 192788666X
• ISBN13: 9781927886663
• Release Date: November 2022
• Publisher: Arp (Arbeiter Ring Publishing) Books
• Length: 117 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.4"