These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara Reviewed by Issam Zineh

These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara 

Published: 04/12/2022

Milkweed Editions

ISBN:  9781571315410

Reviewer: Issam Zineh

Toward a Poetics of Tenderness: On Hayan Charara’s These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit

Hayan Charara’s These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is a collection of poems that contends with what it means to be in deep relationship. Charara’s speaker, through self-exploration, meditations on what Beston called “the violences of men,” and elegiac contemplation, moves towards reconciling the imperfect self within our fraught human interconnective context. These poems are also strikingly tender. Gentleness, affection, and kindness are expressed, often in unexpected ways, within and across the personal relationships of these poems. The poems ask us to consider tenderness as a precondition for a community-minded, just, and joyful world. 

In poems that appear early, like “Older” and “Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms,” Charara’s speaker establishes a foundation of tenderness through familiar, though nonetheless powerful, evocations of the love between child and mother. In “Older,” for example, the speaker describes his own children: “they love candy, but less than they love / their mother.” We then learn he is addressing his dead mother, lamenting her absence, “young as the new moon, barely a crescent tonight, / twenty-two years after you died. O, / mother, I am older now than you ever would be.” “Elegy with Apples…” ends with: “My neighbor looks like my mother / who left a long time ago / and did not hear any of this. / Just for a minute, give her back to me, / before she died, kneeling / in the dirt under the sun, calling me darling / in Arabic, which no one has since.”

Charara creates a sense of deep longing for a relationship that was loving, nurturing, and fulfilling, grounding us in a recognizable, emotionally satisfying parent-child relationship. Once he creates this foundation, he begins to extend that tenderness outside of the familial context—first subtly (e.g., “My neighbor looks like my mother”), then more overtly in a poem like “Neighbors,” which immediately follows “Elegy for Apples…”

“Neighbors” is an exercise in compassion. Through four short sections, Charara’s speaker counterbalances implied or overt offenses by his neighbors with empathy or sympathy. “George killed men in the war” but the speaker doesn’t ask him “[w]hich men, which war”—only comments on the superlative beauty of George’s garden. The next-door neighbors “celebrate with shots / …the soaring tips of their bullets.” In both of these sections, a kind of jingoistic violence is noticed but not indicted. To be clear, it is not ignored; it is simply not judged. This is an act of great restraint (arguably generosity) considering what we come to know of the speaker who, as an Arab-American, struggles with being a citizen of a country that perpetrates crimes of war and a child of the diaspora of those countries against which these crimes are perpetrated.

In the third section, the speaker notes his other neighbor’s “dog shits on my grass, she never picks up after.” Then “[t]he one time I said something… / she told me her son, tall and handsome, had turned on himself. / She touched her temple. ‘Went this way, straight through.’” The original slight is immediately recast in light of the son’s suicide and is therefore nullified. We see the same in the final section in which another neighbor who cannot control his weeds (an implied nuisance to the speaker) dies by suicide after his divorce. Charara’s rapid series of juxtapositions in “Neighbors” also enacts human reactivity as the speaker (and the reader along with the speaker) changes emotional temperature from agitation and ill-will toward a sympathetic acceptance as tragic details are revealed about the neighbors’ lives. The very next poem in the collection is “Empathy,” punctuating the subtext of the previous poem.

One approach Charara uses to further the reach of tenderness is to create intimacies where they are not expected or typically accepted. In “All These Questions You Ask,” the speaker (responding to a presumably curious, possibly well-meaning, naïve, and/or obliviously racist acquaintance (a stand in for a larger societal gaze)) says “Once, / I paid for a prostitute. It was Amsterdam, / I was young, she taught me / not to be ashamed. I bought her / a sandwich, she read me / Hemingway.” Charara creates an intimate, positive, symbiotic picture of an encounter with a prostitute, extending tenderness to encounters not typically endorsed by western (at least American) societal norms. The speaker’s profoundly tender relationship with his mother also returns in this poem: “My mother saw Nina Simone / in Antibes. She sang her to me / the day she died,” putting both intimacies in close proximity, if not on equal footing—bold in light of the speaker’s profound admiration and affection for his mother.

Tenderness toward strangers appears elsewhere as well. In “Self-Portrait with Woman on the Subway,” the speaker regrets not having extended compassion to a stranger “crying badly” across from him, “everyone / around her looking…Twenty years on, / I could’ve said something, / anything— / ‘The red of your scarf / is beautiful.’” 

The tonal consistency throughout this collection credibly establishes the speaker as the same compassionate person who “peeled / oranges for the kids” in “Self-Portrait After a Funeral,” is the anti-misogynist of “Self-Portrait as Scientific Observation,” and is exceedingly understanding and tolerant toward a complicated father in “The Day Phil Levine Died,” “Sibling Rivalry,” “Michigan,” “1979,” and “Ode on an Abandoned House.” It is the same citizen that resists intolerance in the face of ignorant others and hopeless rage in the face of oppressive systems of power in “Fugue,” “The Prize,” “Mean,” “Nothing Happened in 1999,” and “Apokaluptein.” 

Charara reveals the premium his speaker puts on compassion in a “meta” moment in the long poem “Fugue.” In the poem which, through intertextual weaving of several source documents, is part dissertation on the American myth and the savagery of the imperial mindset and part metaphysical exploration within a construct of civil society, the speaker says:

But if I pick up one of those books, read it, and say, “My heavens, this guy is doing things I never thought of doing, he’s talking about the stars, flowers, his neighbor,” then I might suddenly be shocked into my deadness to my neighbors, flowers, and the stars. I might learn something. I might become a different kind of poet. 

In the same poem, we understand further the speaker’s view that “[t]he more resolutely you plumb the question ‘Who or what am I?’—the more unavoidable the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.” We see that the speaker considers an empathetic consciousness, one that must include tenderness toward oneself and, by extension, to others, is a prerequisite to “joy, freedom, happiness, even delirium and ecstasy…” That one must “[t]o paraphrase the Gospel: love your competitors, and pray for those who undercut your prices.” That it is “a monstrous combination of uncompromising idealism and unscrupulous gangsterism…devoid of…humor and humaneness” which prevents harmony with each other and with the ecosystems we inhabit. For the poems in Charara’s These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit tenderness is a protection against that oblivion. 

Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His poetry books are These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed Editions 2022), Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2016), The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose Press 2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include the Arab American Book Award, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and the John Clare Prize. 

Issam Zineh is a Palestinian-American writer and scientist living on Paskestikweya ancestral land. He is author of the poetry collection Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel, 2021). His work appears in AGNI, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Tahoma Literary Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Find him at www.issamzineh.com or on Twitter @izineh.

28 December 2022