Questions and Their Retinue

About

Hatif Janabi’s poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States.

The speaker in many of Janabi’s poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.

Author/Translator

Hatif Janabi was born in Iraq and has lived in exile since 1976 in Poland, where he teaches Arabic literature and world drama at the University of Warsaw. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many Arab and English literary magazines, such as Kaleidoscope, Indiana Review, International Quarterly, Artful Dodge, and he has published five bilingual volumes of poetry.

Khaled Mattawa is the author of Isma’ilia Eclipse and poems that have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, and The Pushcart Prizes XIX (1994–95). An assistant professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Northridge, he has been awarded the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for 1995 and 1996.