Hagar Poems

Mohja Kahf

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610755887
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

"Mohja Kahf 's Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There's lyricism, there's satire, there's comedy, there's theology of a high order in this book."

—Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book

"Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf's new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh's daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet's ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry."

—Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger's Mirror

"'Where have all the goddesses gone, ' writes Mohja Kahf, 'I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq....' In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf's hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read."

—Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America

"This brilliant collection captures all the 'patient threading of relationship' between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God.... At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes."

—From the foreword by Amina Wadud

The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts.

Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar's story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.

i.

The Water of Hajar

After the searing light

After abandonment

After the blow

that brings the head to the ground

and breaks the teeth

After the unrelenting vision

After the god who requires blood and obedience,

how do you find water?

It has no content

It is the cupping of the face

It is the wiping of the forehead

It cools the lips

and moves without words

It is almost not visible

between thorn and rocks

Where on this earth

is the water of Hajar

the water that came

up from the ground,

from the ground of Hajar

given

freely, freely

by the God of Hajar

The First Thing

I am Hagar the immigrant

There came to me the revelation

of the water

I left the world of Abraham,

jugs sealed with cork,

cooking-grease jars,

Sarah’s careful kitchen fires

I walked across a razor-sharp horizon,

slates of earth, sediment

of ancient seas

to stand alone at this frontier:

where the shape of the cup of morning is strange

and dome of sky, mat of earth have shifted,

where God does not have a house yet

and the times for prayer have not been appointed,

where the only water is buried deep

under hard ground and I must find it

or my child will die, my people

remain unborn

The first thing

the founder does

is look for water

I am Hajar, mother

of a people

I stand here

straddling the end and the beginning

Each rock cuts into the heel like God

Each step is blood, is risk:

is prayer

Hajar, First Woman on the Moon

Abraham is a just dot now,

distant planet

Sarah’s laughter floats by in globules

I grab, swallow one, laugh

I am alone in a space

no one else has ever inhabited

I’m not what I was before:

Not Sarah’s Hajar,

nor Abraham’s, not

a girl of Egypt anymore

Can’t go back now

& I don’t know

what else to be

What will anchor me?

I somersault like hiccups

There is too much noise on earth

to hear God there

In a life spent listening

to commandments, I never

had the luxury

of this lunar silence

Things whiz by. Djinns swing

from galactic chandeliers,

eavesdropping

Was that a ram?

Was that a lote tree?

I hear the beating of many wings

& someone being taken on a tour of heaven

Will these weightless shapes

be hewn into a cube

solid enough to anchor earth?

Did I touch that rock before?

Seven times?

Hajar in America

We came over together

I spoke no English

He had a mission:

grad school, then it’s back to save the masses

Here I am now with the baby on my hip,

alone in Newark,

on foot, looking for milk at the all-night Exxon

I hear he’s marrying her,

the teaching assistant with the frosted hair

I have to learn how to drive

Professor and Mrs. Abraham

You were always typing up his papers,

Tending to his hunger and his thirst

You scheduled his appointments, edited

The memoirs of his spiritual search,

Of how he shook the stars and broke the moon,

Questioning the planets and the sun

For years, a rebel on the mountainside,

Iconoclast, until he found the one,

the God he was certain would not set

But Sarah, did you never have a thirst?

Did you ever take off on a quest?

Do you have a desert in you and despair,

To make you rail against the sun and stars?

Have you found a god who will not fail?

Or do you still bow to the customary god,

God of your fathers, tethered in your heart?

Hajar Writes a Letter to Sarah as a Cathartic
Exercise Suggested by Her Therapist

Dear Sarah, life made us enemies

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

What if we both ditched the old man?

He could have visitation rights with ...