Echoes, Sequence, & Form

The way Khaled Mattawa uses language is a kind of poetry unto itself. It is breathtaking. Sensuous.  Images, ideas, sound, and places fall off lines, fall together, and break into and out of stanzas. There is no single form. Instead there seems to be an exploration or challenge to form. The poems seek to find a container for multiple identities, countries, and languages, but in doing so they also defy containment.  I’m in awe how the prose poem “Cricket Mountain” breaks apart in the last two lines. I don’t want to say too much more about the form before Tuesday, but “Cricket Mountain” is a good example to look at and think about how Mattawa is spacing his collection and exploring content through form. 

“Cricket Mountain”

The bridge under our wheels moaned, some said, because it was built in

time of war. Others were more specific—it moaned because of the two

men buried in the concrete. Rommel built it, the British maintained the

asphalt after he left. My father would drives across it with the car

lights off. The haze from the city is enough to show the way, he explains.

We stop by a channel that carried sea water to the salt fields. There are

no birds, not even the sudden flop of a fish, or the rumble of the city's

thousand pariahs that roamed the streets and howled through the night.

The sound of the crickets crawls like a creature that wants to be noticed,

yet is quick to withdraw. My father rests his hand on my shoulder to

quiet. Soon there is nothing in the world but the sound of the crickets’ hum,

an ordered machinery, a vibrating zone. You feel the air shiver around

you, the sound wrapping you like a shroud. If you close your eyes, you

can almost see the mass of their history, the design of their invention,

and the idea of their purpose. This heap of intangibles rises like a

mountain of silver, glittering, luminous, doing away with the dark.

            And who was I then, and who was my father?

And what was that city that tangled us in its muddy streets?

I am also interested how sequences and the idea of echoes are used together, consistently, throughout the book. The repetition of numbers and echoes appears to engage language, numbers and sound—anything to clarify an intangible idea or question, which cannot be fully understood. For example, the contradictions of ideas and language in “Echo & Elixir 2:

City without words. Night without night.    
Somewhere I remember
these clothes are not my clothes.
These bones are not my bones.

I forget and remember again.
Ships in the harbor which is the sea
which is the journey
that awakens a light inside my chest. (5-12)

The poem and the book offer resonance rather than clarity. I am wondering, as I write this, how sound lies: how echoes can sound closer than the cause of sound, while distorting origins—challenging location, direction, and source.