Tahrir Suite
Poems
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Arab American National Museum’s 2015 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award
Tahrir Suite is a book-length poem that contemplates immigration, homeland, and diaspora in the twenty-first century. The poem, inspired by recent events in Egypt, cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes, and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.
Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of “home” and “place” constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this book-length sequence from Shenoda (Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone), "A dictator swallows the clouds for shade/ And the people are left beneath the sun/ As fire rages in their spines." Shenoda merges moments and terms from Egypt's stalled 21st-Century revolution (which began in Cairo's Tahrir Square), archetypes from ancient Egyptian mythology, and even grander visions of cosmic destiny. Three- to five-line stanzas, arranged three per page, follow the quest of a modern-day hero called Tekla (also the name of a Coptic Christian saint), who "could not make himself at home/ Would never understand the distances of heart." Tekla's quest echoes the story of Isis and Osiris, as well as the progress or regress of Egypt's revolution. Many stanzas offer stirring but vague political rhetoric: "Justice is the one staff for freedom's flag/ How can we share with the enemy our voice?" Most pages also incorporate pronouncements that could almost have come from papyri: "What becomes of a journey is read in the dust." Some readers will find urgent inspiration. Others may wonder whether Shenoda's disparate materials at once populist and mystical, topical and eternal, aphoristic and narrative have, like his traveling heroes and dismayed citizens, not yet found that for which they were looking.
