Just as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha begins her introduction to Summer Farah’s The Hungering Years among the books of “our matron saint of Arab American poetry and Mediterranean landscapes,” Etel Adnan, I approach this collection having spent my summer with one of Farah’s other inspirations: Mary Oliver, mentioned in “READING MARY OLIVER IN LA VERNE,” the collection’s first poem. “Oh, Mary,” Farah writes. “You make me pretend I am seven again.” The poem begins with food and ends with repetition. “Do the birds know my guilt?” she asks in the same poem. “What have I given up?” One answer leads to another, leads to another. “Reconciliations, maybe. A life, sort of. There was something to start, sort of.” And then the ending: “There was, there was.”
Here, in this microcosm of the collection, in the soft shell of one poem, in the skin and the fabric of my own life, I find myself mirroring and maximized by the experience of Farah’s debut. Overflow. Longing. A richness in conversation. While Farah is more frequently in conversation with Etel Adnan than Mary Oliver, I gather still a serendipitous sense in this one moment that Farah gestures to throughout, and Tuffaha right at the beginning: here is what it is like to be surrounded by your questions. Piles and piles of books. Here is what it is like to be surrounded by your desire.
The Hungering Years tells the story of what it means to “have loved so many prophetic women.” Friends come and go from its pages—Helen, Leena, Jess, Cameron—as easily as places, video games, TV shows, and other writers do. Should you believe in a discrepancy between high art and low art, you can be sure that this collection eschews such distinctions in lieu of a total devotion to desire. Desire, obsession, a pursuit of power germane across genres and across mediums: to the speaker of Farah’s poems, it is simply about a sense of being moved. Be it the blue light of a screen or the silver of moonlight: it matters less where something comes from and more what it does to you. Is that the definition of appetite? Is hunger, then, the root of ekphrasis? And might ekphrasis be the foundation of this collection, both in the epistolary (towards Adnan) and also in the kaleidoscope of inspirations beyond her? I count a few of them: Mitski, Haikyuu!!, Gemini placements, Supernatural, memes.
It makes sense then, in the midst of such poetic voraciousness, to orient towards an ancestor. “Etel, I don’t always understand you,” Farah writes vulnerably. “But I have lived in a city where you lived and to it we both owe something.” Space, place, people, desire. Space, place, people, desire. Repetition does its own dance on every page of this collection and when I arrive at the end, I ask why.
It exists in titles of series (“THE BIRDS ARE CALLING”, “THE ANGELS ARE FALLING”)—it exists in the cadence of the language (see “sort of” above)—it exists, simply, on the page. “[S]aying Palestine, saying Palestine, saying Palestine,” one of “THE ANGELS ARE FALLING” poems ends. “WHAT’S IT CALLED WHEN ISRAEL DESTROYS A PALESTINIAN VILLAGE BECAUSE THERE’S ALLEGEDLY AN ANCIENT JEWISH CIVILIZATION UNDER IT” ends with “there was so much here / before & before & before & before & before & before.”
Repetition is an echo; a call and response; the questions and the answer; the answer in and of itself. Emotions repetition can justify: ecstasy, horror, derangement, lament. Structures repetition can hold: a loop, a cycle, a list, a ladder. In a collection so deeply entrenched in the question of language as a question of being, it makes sense that, like the waves, Farah’s words take their time to crash upon us over and over and over again.
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was," Toni Morrison writes in “The Site of Memory,” the essay wherein she argues that the floods of the Mississippi River represent the water remembering where it was. “Writers are like that,” Morrison continues, “remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”
This flooding is the ethic I observe in The Hungering Years and its repetitions and its desires; its repetitive desires. In Farah’s debut, I observe media as a form of mythmaking: a parallel form to make understandings of your own life through others’. Motifs of salt, ocean, moon and light appearing in sync. The past is encoded as a place of respite and longing, much like the parasocial; religion is as a portal as much as a video game is. “I understand the cling to ancestral,” Farah writes, her poems littered with references to her homeland of Nazareth, Palestine and to rituals of Christianity. The imagistic, the allegorical. The past provides a place of reprieve, a collective memory to parse through, maybe even a collective self. Sido, next to Dad, next to Mama, in one poem. Another flooding, another remembering.
“The beauty of this experiment is that I will connect even the furthest of dots,” Farah writes in “(DEAR ETEL ADNAN) I DON’T THINK OF CARLY RAE JEPSEN.” “Sometimes, I am in love with the almost knowing of poetry,” Farah continues and I think of the poem as the site where the body cannot be placed in time, which is what I think makes this overflow of memory and meaning possible.
But it’s not always so serious. That’s our luck, as readers, to meet the heaviness alongside the humor and levity Farah’s work contains. After reading “INTERLUDE: PARALLEL PLAYING W/ U” I wonder: is desire a faithfulness to play, then? How could it be when “desire, of course, / begins with shame”? The furthest of dots again. “I understand,” the speaker tells Adnan in regards to the mountain Adnan paints over and over. “the desire to not only return but to be consumed. I have had obsessions, I have been made small by those obsessions.”
This smallness is another ethic of the collection. It takes strength to be small, I think to myself. To make yourself small before a giant, like an ancestor, like a writer you love, or even just another person. The magic of the epistolary, its particular opening to the self. It is this smallness that opens the way between the speaker and Adnan; and, likewise, between Farah and the reader.
The hunger of the body lives in this collection in parallel to the longing of self; the cycles of feeding like the spacing of the rhythm, its airiness, its gaps, its ruptures across the page. An excess and an abundance: “THE FIGS ARE MOLDING,” the years rotting. Friendship, as always, provides some answers. This is where the title comes from.
The political clarity of Farah’s work is self-evident. Is this another function of repetition? To let it be said clearly. Let it be said twice, thrice, as many times as needed to armor against misinterpretation. “I WAS THERE! I WAS THERE!” the poem, “"PORTRAIT OF ME AS BREAD BAKING IN JERUSALEM” begins. “I WAS ALWAYS / THERE!” The refrain continues. “GRAINS OLDER / THAN SETTLER THAN STATE THAN TANKS / THAN BORDERS THAN BOMBS THAN/ BRITISH THAN EMPIRE.” Let our solidarity be as steadfast as these capital letters, as this chorus. Let our solidarity be “not sympathy” but “work,” Farah instructs.
This ethos refracts through the collection’s stories of Palestine; through the distinct embodiments of life with chronic illness and its tangible consequences—the longing to go to the grocery store and choose your own apples (“THE CHILDREN ARE SCREAMING”). It manifests especially through the paired poems, “POEM FOR AKKA BEFORE SETTLERS TORCH PALESTINIAN HOMES, MAY 2021” and “POEM FOR AKKA AFTER SETTLERS TORCH PALESTINIAN HOMES, MAY 2021.” In her essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” Solmaz Sharif writes that erasure can do one of six things: highlight, collapse, expose, care, or “render a text incomplete to invite a collaboration between the reader and the text.” For the last option, she references If Not Winter, Sappho’s fragments translated by Anne Carson, which “point to the nearly infinite possibilities and infinite centers of a single text.”
It is this infinity that appears in Farah’s erasure of her own poem, and it is this infinity that uncannily replicates its titular fire on the page, that devastates and immobilizes the reader in the shards of what remains. Like Sappho’s fragments, Farah’s work offers us a gap to look through: a detritus not of time, but of the genocidal power of the Israeli settler state and its American ally, working across the page the way that “bones tear at sea,” the poem’s body grief-stricken—the poem’s body grieving.
“I’m sorry for what I’ve brought you into, Etel,” Farah writes near the end. But I’m not. I’m thinking back to a novel I read recently—Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante. In the novel, one friend mourns another and, in her grief, revisits a fictional TV show that her late beloved was obsessed with. Soon enough, she becomes obsessed with it as well. It makes sense to me that I turn to other media, as Farah does, to make sense of her collection. Little Blue Encyclopedia reminds me of a sixth love language, which The Hungering Years is entrenched in: how we share what we love with each other, and how, in doing so, we also share parts of ourselves.
Farah’s narrator tells Adnan her fear, her grief, her love. It is through the kaleidoscope of devotion that the speaker chooses to be seen. It is in the vessel of those prose poems—linked, and holding the rest of the collection like a net—that I am not sorry for what Farah has brought us into: the seen and unseen, the cinematic and cacophonic. The static of life, seeping through the page.
