Every Empire Sings Itself a Lullaby: On Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something about Living

“I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation,” the poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha said as she accepted the 2024 National Book Award in poetry for Something About Living. “I don’t want to console.”

She doesn’t. Something About Living, which also won the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Akron Press in 2024, is a coruscating collection that plumbs the history and present of Palestinian dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide under the Israeli state; the hypocrisies and imperial violence underpinning contemporary US-American life; and the enduring losses, injustices, and longings of Palestinian people living outside Palestine. These poems condemn, demand, invoke, embrace, and love, but they don’t ever console. 

Poet George Abraham has written that Something About Living “embodies” a line from Tuffaha’s previous book, Kaan and Her Sisters: “Repetition is a Nakba.” This latest collection powerfully employs repetition in both its focus and its forms. Poems like “Tantoura Redux” (which references a Palestinian village massacred by Israeli forces in 1948) and “Dukka” (which references the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military in 2022) name atrocities of the past that remain in the landscape of the present. “Repetition is a feature of the Palestinian experience,” Tuffaha said in an interview with Anna Rajagopal, published in the “Palestine Square” blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies; “we’re locked in a series of repetitions not of our own making.” 

In evoking historical episodes of slaughter, expulsion, and attempted erasure, Tuffaha neither isolates nor simply commemorates them. Instead, she exposes their perpetuation in the air and soil of the present day, as the state of Israel sustains and escalates a genocide against the Palestinian people. Writing from within Palestinian experience, Tuffaha remarked in the same interview, is “trying to express how there is an unfathomable level of violence that is normalized in every aspect of life.” There is no then to this violence. The Nakba never stopped.

In Something About Living, the decimating power of repetition also plays out on the level of craft. Reading and rereading the book, I found myself especially harrowed by Tuffaha’s use of anaphora, a repetitive device that both bears down on something and bores deeper into it. Here’s the beginning of “Golden” (a poem with an epigraph that’s actually a quote from an American tourist: “Alweibdeh is definitely the cutest neighborhood we visited. So much culture!”):

Say this girl in earlier editions drowned
in this particular light. Say it’s possible
to walk again the roads and uneven pavements
where I and my mother were children.
Say this hillside, its summer
adornments. Say we pass
beneath jasmine, catch its petals 
in our hair. Say even the plastic bags caught
in the linden branches.

Tuffahah’s anaphoric phrases offer fleeting snapshots of inhabitation and loss, landscape and memory; they flicker, fragment, and vanish before our eyes. Suggestively, too, the repeated “Say” can be read either as the introduction of a hypothetical scenario (let’s say) or as an imperative (repeat after me). Thrown into the light of the poem, then whisked away as quickly as it appeared, each image is made and undone, or else commanded into a materiality it has been denied. 

Another example is the brilliantly excoriating “To Be Self-Evident,” structured around the repeated phrase “Every empire”: “Every empire tells its subjects a story / of revelation,” “Every empire eulogizes / its value system,” “Every empire promises / a revolution against itself” (a line so perfectly lacerating I grimaced), “Every empire denies the iceberg / it crashes into,” and “Every empire sings itself a lullaby”… Here, too, the anaphora’s cool relentlessness tracks the less blatant, more manicured, guises of imperial destruction: not the bravado of military forays, but the quietly insidious gestures of “cradling the embassy’s crystal” and “rebranding old protest songs.” The kind of imperialism that infiltrates activism, education, literature, and the liberal self-image; that “hires a chorus, funds the arts” as it does its work. 

Repetition is a Nakba. But in Tuffaha’s poems, it is also the site of endless change. The anaphoras I’ve mentioned above – as well as her use of forms like the ghazal, which repeats the last word of every couplet, and the crown of sonnets, in which the last line of the preceding poem becomes the first line of the next – all serve to “change the phrase each time you repeat it” (as Tuffaha said in an interview with George Abraham for TriQuarterly about a fixed form in her previous book). Every repetition is an expansion, even a reinvention, of what an image or idea can mean or do. This shouldn’t be misunderstood as mere consolation, either. 

When I consider Tuffaha’s rich and varied use of repetition, I’m reminded of remarks by Fady Joudah, whose book […] was a finalist for the National Book Award alongside Tuffaha’s, in conversation with Boris Dralyuk for The New Inquiry. “There is no life without repetition, beginning at the molecular, even particle level,” Joudah says. “There is no art without life. To remain viable, art, inseparable from the circularity of the human condition, also repeats. What is a life without memory? And what is memory if not repetition.” I find myself thinking of  “Variations on a Last Chance,” the devastating second poem in Something About Living. In a sequence of end-stopped lines with the same format, Tuffaha sets forth a series of hypothetical scenarios in which Israeli snipers don’t ultimately kill the Palestinians they train their guns on: 

The fence does not hold.
The wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread.
The snipers run out of bullets.
The desert, as it always has, of its volition, blooms.
The snipers are distracted, sexting their girlfriends.
The snipers’ eyes are blinded by smoke from our burning tires.
The snipers wonder if they will ever see the end of us.
The fence does not hold. 

And what is memory if not repetition? To conjure these speculative scenes, where lives are spared, the poet must remember many other scenes in which they were not. In this way, the poem’s litany of possibilities is also a devastating invocation of real-life loss, sustained again and again and again by an “us” both specific and expansive. And yet it also dares, if only for a moment each time, to change the story: to tell a story that breaks through the fence, runs toward life, and lives it. In Joudah’s words, “…repetition in art is our unconscious memory at work: art mimics the repetition of the life force within us.” 

Tuffaha has described this book as “trying to think of how language disappears and erases us – not just shapes us…  [This undertaking] is about the work that language can do to obfuscate, eliminate, and diminish, and the different ways in which we try to circumvent that or contend with that.” It’s essential, then, to acknowledge that Tuffaha writes in English, “the language of the colonizer”; that she lives and publishes in the US, contemporary empire par excellence and the nation-state funding Israel’s genocide; and that she includes and applies pressure on hegemonic forms of the English-language poetic tradition, such as the sonnet. Something About Living also incorporates and converses with Arabic-language poets (Mahmoud Darwish, Zakaria Mohammed, Fadwa Tuqan, Ghassan Kanafani, and many others); with translation (“To translate is to believe there is a reader”); and with, sometimes, the refusal to translate and be translated. She looks to other sites of struggle and solidarity around the world, including in the US (Ferguson, Atlanta, Minneapolis), and to June Jordan, whose advocacy for Palestine remained unpalatable to the literary establishment – and who remains a beacon for Tuffaha.

In all of these ways, the communal scope and polyphonic rigor of Something About Living is another manifestation of the “life force” that both circumvents and contends (through language and beyond it) with destruction (through language and beyond it). It expands, encompasses, and grows. It refuses diminishment. 

The poet urges us to do the same. “Good evening, everyone, and good morning to beloved Gaza, where it is the 411th day of the genocide”: this is how Tuffaha began her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards. “I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and make it stop.” 

This love is the life force that crackles furiously through Tuffaha’s poems. I’ll never forget how it wells up at the end of “Dukka,” the final lines in the book:

Let the stars fall. I have no idea 
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love.

There is no consolation in Something About Living, which hums with all of love’s lucidity, commitment, and courage.