A Theory of Birds

Poems

Zaina Alsous

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781610756747
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest
a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside
the woman a lake of funerals

This layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds—particularly extinct species—become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.

Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems—their subjects and their logics—refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.

bird naming

Classification Is a Country

DOMAIN: 1492, la illah ila allah

KINGDOM: daughters, without bodies

PHYLUM: archive, settler

CLASS: plot, below

ORDER: winged, flightless

FAMILY: dialect continua

SPECIES: interstice interbreeding with history

GENUS: invented for convenience, hidden error

Ibis

1. In France or London, the sibilant machine of SCIENCE invents a bird based on the relics of Egyptian monuments, which is not an exact copy of Nature.

2. Fragments of amber rewoven into the composite Image, is also an invitation to form Sound, the whistle of species placed in a jar.

3. The jar is the Art of categories, the essential basis of our condition—to not look away but to look in wreaths, full blown, to sow our reflection as an exact copy of Nature.

4. According to Herodotus there are two kinds of ibis: black and white, the black is the enemy of serpents, the white is a domestic bird. The afterlife is a house, not all birds are allowed in.

5. The best-preserved birds are found in the mummies of Saqqara, wrapped in dyed linen, then sawed open. Tools dressed in membrane correct myth: there were shellfish in the cavities, not snakes.

6. In order to preserve SCIENCE, the language of speculums rusting by the window, we must shake the graves of birds. Shaking graves is not a species complex—which is actually an argument of resemblance, a market for more skin.

7. Precise methods of dissection are also useful when carving the womb out of a woman’s corpse. We draw this jar to reproduce ourselves, in order to keep producing the SCIENCE of birds. Bodies are families, bred of facts and secrets waiting to become facts.

8. She who scrivens—do you contain a monster nostalgia?

keep keep keep keep keep keep keep keep

9. Years from now, when sliced open to be redrawn from memory, the naturalists discover an engraving in the urn of my skull: play dead (and a laugh track).

The Roman legions whom you have sometimes imitated, but not as yet equaled, fought Carthage successively upon this sea and upon the plains of Zama. Victory never forsook them, because they were constantly brave, patient of fatigue, well disciplined, resolute. But, soldiers, Europe has her eyes upon you! You have great destinies to fulfill, battles to fight, fatigues to surmount!

Frenchmen, you are about to undertake a conquest of which the effects upon the civilization and commerce of the world are incalculable. The first city you are to meet was founded by Alexander.

Cadis, Sheiks, Imams, Chorbadgys, you will be told that I came to destroy your religion; do not believe it. Let your answer be that I come to reestablish your rights. . . .

—Napoleon Bonaparte,
Speech on the Egyptian Campaign, 1798

I have this nightmare about fucking Napoleon

in which the bareness of me is already annotated:

each clavicle hued, irises diagrammed, a petri of my saliva

in the morning. There is no time to whisper cerulean

into my lover’s mouth. The urgency of discovery announces

BLUE, crisply ironed. It is easier to divide the world this way

he explains, when there is only always more to divide.

I never take it personally, because I do not really exist.

A palette mirage, I pluck the harp for his sergeant the zoologist,

who is studying the curious eccentricities of Muslim gender

relations, An imbalance of power, he says.

the subject of much debate

Here a case study on limits: Bruised

strawberries, High on hash,

abroad and bolstering the Local

economy. I read about a man

who stabbed two dutch Tourists

in casablanca. I often can’t dictate

if I am a Dead Tourist

or the killer but I know I am Embarrassed,

in the midst of the arab

spring as an american arab Student

fixated on a pale Boy

in class. an avid climber,

he teaches me how to say crevice

in french, fente; in the streets of rabat,

an uprising, a thawra:

I mostly speak in english

and avoid the irony of my invasion.

except when the cab driver tries

to rip me off where are you From?

Out comes the broken lantern

I inherited and poorly

maintained. I could have

been more honest,

said, I locate myself

in the city of eve

but There,

I just wanted him to believe me.

Public Botany

The cab driver hung himself tomorrow. The cab’s stillness

cocooned by snow. Yellow has degraded in value, periled over

time. Some species of plants trap and kill their prey, to eat.

Some of us are proxies for rendering weather. Living demands

I tell you something about ...