Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow or Dear Poetry, How Are You So Powerful

I read “Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.” by Noor Hindi like one passes through a storm, intensely and hurried, and then I read it again with a close friend, N., slower, letting it simmer through us.

It is powerful, superbly formed, disruptive of anti-arab narratives, diagnosing the reporting, journalistic eye and critical  of America and its immigration policy, of what is requested of women, of migrants, of Arabs. It’s composed of four parts, dealing broadly with Palestinian identity, living in the US, and Muslim womanhood from a feminist perspective, with the last part being a long poem “Pledging Allegiance”, which blends many of the books’ themes. 

There are two poetic series in the book which carry its strength beyond words.

The first one is Breaking [News], which consists of multiple poems bearing the same title, all of them analyzing the meaning of reporting. “But who is the audience of my looking / and how far does a hurt stretch / before it yellows?” asks Hindi right before a Breaking [News] poem. Within them, the violence of journalism (of looking / of talking about people as if they are mere headlines) and its industry is criticized, while being acknowledged as a tool to make her people’s voices heard, to bring about or ask for empathy, recognition and much more (“I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible to consumers.”). In Breaking [News], Hindi breaks the expectation of what breaking news is – breaks emotions into pieces and looks back upon the looking just as she looks upon the looked at. Though not part of this series, the poem “Good Muslims Are All Around Us” is also an act of discursive disruption through the collection of headlines that, simply by being put in this book, in this order, shows how “Good Muslims” are portrayed in the media as “exceptions”. 

The second series follows the USCIS immigration trips with her grandmother, to achieve American citizenship. They are shattering documentations of the symbolic and epistemic violence of assimilation into America. Each of the four poems in the cycle is a stab at the heart, beginning with the first, in which the immigration officer crosses out Palestine as a country. “Try again” the officer asks, as if this is a sort of kindness – to be let into a country hostile to your people, a country that doesn’t recognize your homeland. Subsequent violences followed, one of the harshest being the taking of the grandmother’s headscarf, which was demanded when passing through security. “I want her to want more from America” Hindi writes, followed by the repetition of “they stripped me” in Arabic. 

In the last poem of the USCIS series, joy is smashed into anger as her grandmother passed the citizenship test for which she has been studying: when she gets out, her tears are brushed away as she asks for a picture with the statue of George Washington – so glad she can recognize him, glad she has passed. The rage at these multiple injustices, hiding within Hindi’s lines, is subdued, yet always there (“I want my rage to elicit love and more love. I want people to stop asking if I love this country. No. Ask if it loves me.”). 

Hindi’s words cut through language. In this collection titles repeat, we have images of the moon, of the mother taking or offering something, the color yellow again and again, ghosts ever-present and the impossibility of home. We have broad subjects seeping through the book – death, womanhood and being an immigrant in America, choosing a country that kills your people and a job that often calls them “terrorists”. Writing for survival and memory is not like writing for the sake of it, as the poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” clearly shows us (translated in Romanian here). Metaphor is no longer useful when genocide is so close. And yet the book is visually rich with dreams of home – a dream hardly fulfilled, neither in Palestine nor America (“How we yearn for its olive trees. How it haunts our dreams.”). It offers us the smell of pita bread in olive oil at the breakfast table, and a piercing humor when anger is tired (“I wish for everyone to leave / me alone and talk to me /  at once. Please, / forgive me. All I’ve ever wanted / is to be the poet laureate / of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos”). It’s one of my favorite poetry collections, endlessly filled with sorrow, haunted and true.