What is the psyche of a drone? What does it do to the poet who must consider this question? Sahar Khraibani’s new collection of poetry, ANATOMY OF A REFUSAL, opens with a section titled “MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION,” where the poet begins with the story of a drone. It reads as a story about sight, drone vision. We gain altitude line by line, to see from above downward, the way “drone” does. Human sight is looking up, towards something we cannot see unless there is a screen. The poems make me compare versions of the sky—upwards as a place of hope in stories of the universe, then to drones and missiles, shifting the sky to a place of fear. “fear is orientated upwards,” writes Khraibani.
The screen becomes a message from the surveillant. It represents detachment, the politics of optimization, or quite literally, destruction. I sense what is unspeakable around the words that are written, it echoes in the numberless pages and in the looping voice. This violence is all too recognizable; has the poet been here before? In this hybrid terrain of footnotes and assembled fragments of language, there are no page numbers, no titles for each page, only coordinates of grief. Space on the page creates a sensation of dropping from one foothold to the next on the side of a ruin, stepping on fragments of a story of inquiry, feeling the ruination of what is left over from the research and of lived-in destruction. The disintegration is mirrored on the page.
Have you considered drone? What is your relationship to drone? Questions that arise within. The reader becomes emotionally implicated in the text, the poet’s voice weaves into an intimate space and then pairs it with academic citations, layering the feeling of “drone,”the feeling of surveillance and being targeted. Drone becomes both ghost and witness, holding both the powers of aid or violence. Its size varies, it could fit in the palm of your hand or be as large as an aircraft. It could be used to aid in natural disasters, to deliver packages, or in targeted violent attacks. The poet is left assessing, left with the data that drones are more harrowingly used for acts of war and terror instead. Khraibani writes, “drone will happily deliver your groceries.” Drone in the poetics of ANATOMY OF A REFUSAL is alive, sentient, and personified. It pulls the reader into an uneasy dialogue, becoming complicit in the act of looking, of seeking meaning through the very apparatus that dehumanizes. The poet makes drone personal, and isn’t it? Our own unpiloted selves, disintegrating, surveilled, seeking form, are reflected in the unpiloted aircraft of drone.
Isn’t violence from a distance the loneliest thing? The separation between what a drone does, and what a human does, rubs together in the text, and the friction from that rubbing reflects haunting recordings of destruction. Not only material destruction, but the layers and ripples beyond, landing in the psyche. The poet’s language is the reimagined image in the drone’s conscious targets and data: bodies interpreted through image, tracking and reimaging back onto a screen instantaneously. What would otherwise be unknowable with other technologies, drone has provided in-depth information / configuration / reconfiguration / perhaps even a sort of teleportation. Death transmitted and re-coded.
It is a remarkable move of the poet to turn the drone, in its loneliness, into an object of sympathy. It’s flipping the logic of the war machine, showing how the drone is a modality of thought. The work of the poem is layered, it shows how empathy can be molded and redirected; as readers, we might feel for drone, the thing that must carry out these lonely acts of one-sided terror. The discomfort in feeling for drone creates moral disorientation: “Why do I have sympathy for the machine?” Profound discomfort and tension builds. In personifying the drone, the witness in the book has multiple ways of seeing the inhumane structures and systems they operate in. This move also illuminates the asymmetry of power that Nathan K. Hensley describes in Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire, which Khraibani cites in a footnote, where, drawing on Grégoire Chamayou, he notes that drone warfare “eliminates reciprocity from the scene of killing and turns seeing, and with it the risk of death, into a one-sided operation…”
This book sparks awe in me for how it exposes logic. In depicting the drone with a capacity to feel or to even wonder about how drone feels, it shows how empathy can be designed, and depending on where attention is funneled, empathy can be a trick. Empathy can be its own tool in the media, and the poetic depiction channels human emotion in multiple directions. Khraibani: “can this pain be transferred.” Drone acts as a vessel, it holds representations of the poet’s reflections, like the drone receives representations of targets, images, the state’s desires. Boundaries dissolve. Like the images teleported through drone. Throughout the collection, there are offerings of OTHER WAYS OF SEEING. Vision can be fractured from different apparatuses, and in each perception, the poet displays connections of perception to forms of power. They link fugitivity, as Fred Moton describes it, to perception. Ways of seeing are political acts. One way of seeing, in the motion of fugitivity, Khraibani writes another line amidst a myriad of gut-stirring lines, “wanting not for the end of colonialism, but the inevitable end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense.”
“i want to know if drone ever thinks about desire”
Desire in this work appears in pockets. It appears in lines, alongside research and technology. It appears as wants. Amid the loss of people, land, animals, city, and environment, the poet stages an intimacy with violence itself, with the machines that mandate it: the drone, the cargo ship of ammonium nitrate, explosions. “i want to not know what losing land feels like,” Khraibani writes, then later, “i don’t want a job where i say ‘deliverables’ or ‘strategy.’ friendship as a method of encryption. don’t talk to me about desire. please. i am so bored. i want a poetics of refusal. i want the undomestication of desire. i want the lack of narrative to be the kink. i want to be sexy, regardless.” Desire becomes a constant grappling, an interlocutor that holds humanity and fugitivity in tension amid repeated injury. As I read, I connect the statements of want as forms of refusal. Wanting amidst injury, destruction, violence is precarious terrain, and each time a line about wanting or desiring appears in the book, it marks decisions toward aliveness. Khraibani demonstrates profound skill in shifting scale, moving between distance and intimacy, at one moment gaining altitude to reveal the systems of destruction shaping daily life, and in the next focusing closely on something as human and ordinary as a drain tangled with hair. These movements between the macro and micro build a layered understanding of how the macro view, the systems, are impossible to completely separate from the moments, for example, of laying on top of one another to feel real.
In the section called “BLAST,” the reader enters an explosion of fragments. Reports scattered across the page. The poem accumulates fragments of language, shrapnel-like debris, to follow where the poet writes about the explosion that occurred in Beirut on August 4th, 2020, when a ship with 2,750 tonnes of high-density ammonium nitrate exploded and was deemed one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. It pulverized the port and damaged half the city of Beirut. By scattering the data, mirroring the effects of a blast, the poem does not try to stabilize the event into narrative, but instead reproduces the disorientation of catastrophe itself. The poet allows the archive to remain fractured. “I would have liked not to have to write this text,” Khraibani later writes in the section called “DETERRENCE.” In ANATOMY OF A REFUSAL, documentary poetics becomes less a method of explanation than an acknowledgment of rupture by assembling reports, fragments, echoes, drawings. The poems refuse the comfort of a steady account, instead asking the reader to move through the wreckage of language, much as cities, countries, entire peoples might move through the wreckage of drones, explosions, loss of land, or of their own memories.