Hasib Hourani’s rock flight (Prototype, 2024)
Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is at once universal and scrupulously specific: it charts an autobiography of writing retreats, email inboxes, airport lounges, and Palestinian kitchens, which, taken whole, sensitively allegorises the Lebanese-Palestinian diaspora. In the ‘afterword’, Hourani writes, ‘the nature of print, palestine, and linear time is that books are read in contexts different to which they were written in’. rock flight insists that this simple and sensible fact, however, must not sanction inaction: ‘the palestinian struggle long outlives today’s and tomorrow’s headlines’. Hourani’s poetry is as meditative as it is proactive: it finds in the poet’s prerogative to organise not only the means for individual understanding, but a method of resistance.
The book is organised into seven chapters, which emerge as faint, hand-drawn boundaries across one long poem. Accretive chapter titles underscore this fact: after ‘one’, there is the witty ‘one more’, which builds word by word to the book’s final title – ‘one more rock thrown onto the pile to tumble the mountain on my chest’. It is one instance of many in rock flight’s book-length fixation with how revisiting moments in time can yield more informed perspectives. The book’s epigraph comes from Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, ‘whose mountains’, Hourani diffidently confides in his acknowledgements, ‘ground me’. The options that the verb ‘ground’ presents are all variously taken up by Hourani in rock flight: it is (1) the stasis of the grounded airplane; (2) pop-spiritualism’s “spiritual groundedness”; and (3) the physical foundation for building something new: the groundwork. The movement between these senses is, in short, the movement which organises the book at large.
Definition is rock flight’s first mode of organisation. On the first page, Hourani provides ‘it’, ‘thing’, ‘israel’, ‘something’, ‘entity’, ‘_________’, and ‘the suffocating state’ the same plangent gloss, ‘the reason i am elsewhere’. It is in this total thesaurus of threat that Hourani first introduces us to the black censorial band that stripes the work throughout. These pock-marking occlusions render the oppressor’s embargo on knowledge in thick, black clarity. Hourani states the choice plainly: organise or be organised; and in this early glossary Hourani nails his organisational colours firmly to the mast. The book’s enduring motifs – ‘flight’, ‘window[s]’, ‘throat[s]’ – all appear in the poem’s economical opening six lines. They read like an abstract to an academic research document, something to which the book’s erudite footnotes and hierarchies of numbered bullet points throughout attest. Hourani’s rock flight is tightly structured so much so that organisation becomes the poet’s modus operandi.
Another effect of Hourani’s self-censorship in rock flight is to foreground the thinginess of printed poetry. Words are left to tussle for space on the page. It is, however, in Hourani’s corrupted origami instructions, ‘HOW TO MAKE A BOX’, that this interplay of poetry and page is most apparent. Poetic scraps accompany nets of cubes to share how to construct a box from paper. Hourani’s directions start at the top of one page and continue overleaf – to complete the origami box, the reader must peel over the page with the same paper-folding finger and hear the paper crinkle. It is a kind of anticipatory ekphrasis – the poet does not address an extant artwork, but co-opts the reader in the mysterious business of artistic production. In an interview for Australian literary magazine Liminal, Hourani explains how he almost devoted his life solely to printmaking and textiles – readers of rock flight will be grateful that he worked those same hands over poetry. It is small wonder that Prototype Press, who lead the way in work done at the boundary of verbal and visual arts, were so keen to add Hourani to their roster. Hourani holds out his origamist’s hand to the reader, guides them through the book.
In that same interview for Liminal, Hourani shares that ‘rage’ and ‘frustration’ are the emotions that rock flight ‘embodies’. Hourani gives these feelings body in the rich invective strain that beats through the book. And yet, through all this ‘rage’ and ‘frustration’, the poet of rock flight displays his staggering lyric achievement. Nestled among angular cuts of verse condemning technological surveillance, there shines this blazing image-cluster:
little onion hearts
pervasive
and they keep forever
and then you add fire
a second life covered in soot
and they are like molasses: sweet
and they are like butter: slipping in and out of things.
Hourani finds in these ‘little onion hearts’ the very example of endurance – ‘they keep forever’. The recurrent ‘and they’ constructions, those delicately stacked similes, conduct themselves with remarkable plainness. It sticks out as a reprieve from the fury of what surrounds it. Hourani permits those ‘onions’ room to breathe right into our twitching tearducts. No sooner has Hourani ‘slipp[ed] in’ to this sibilance soaked image has he branched ‘out’ into the carriage of a train, hurtling towards a ‘different colony’. The ‘onions’, however, linger. Hourani’s aesthetic organisation encourages connection not simply among places and people, but among synapses.
These moments of lyric observation – at times recalling Jack Underwood’s easy-osy way of rhyming the everyday and the absurd – are, nonetheless, fleeting. One of the book’s prevailing features is how Hourani’s Parnassian glimpses fail to fend off drop-down menus, instruction manuals, emails and hyperlinks: the things that organise the individual. Hourani’s poetic power lies in his knack for shifting language as though between states of matter:
it works
among other things
like fire.
rock flight melts things down and forges things together – its narrative method is metallurgical. Clarity comes in fits and starts, through which are driven the dreariest of rivets: reading lists on the corporations bankrolling the Israeli state, the suspicion of the customs officer, the reluctance of an academic at Tel Aviv University to cooperate on an artistic project. The latter episode recurs later in the book where Hourani reprints an unsolicited phishing email:
subject: annette!
email contents: Annette
algenoncurrie
The curious among you will click it. ‘Web Page Blocked’, it will read, ‘Category: malware’. In repurposing this email, Hourani sets the poem up as a training ground: not for morals, like a George Eliot novel, but for a very practical kind of vigilance against the efforts of others to make people weak.
Seen whole, rock flight’s stylistic restlessness scatters thoughts about like the dusty remnants of a fallen world. Hourani funnels his frustration through the murkily ironic axiom from rock flight’s first chapter:
rubble makes a thing holy because
you go to a place and say
this was worth fighting for
The line break at ‘because’ is a cunning early indicator that the rebel’s heartfelt conviction – which makes a cause ‘worth fighting for’ – is too often self-legitimising. Hourani suspends the reason and leaves us to mull over ‘because’, as though listening to the circular explanations of an inarticulate child. rock flight holds that anger can prove an enemy to organisation. His poetry’s offensive comes in section two’s twisted guided meditation, ‘HOW TO HOLD YOUR BREATH’. Steps ‘ONE’ and ‘TWO’ direct the left and right hands to seal off the mouth and nose, to achieve step ‘THREE’ – ‘make your lungs stop moving’. It draws the poet and the reader into somatic synchronicity – they struggle to breathe, together. Hourani’s organ failure is, ultimately, an act of organisation.
Hourani’s nimble pen often finds its way to suffocation: ‘give me back my oxygen’ is among the book’s most memorable refrains. Hourani’s asphyxial fixation began ‘during 2021’s unity intifada’: his ‘afterword’ narrates his drive to ‘the zionist federation in naarm/melbourne’, where he and his sister raised a cardboard sign that read, ‘you choke palestine, we choke you back’. The allure of choking is evidently twofold: it serves documentarily to portray a world in protest, but it hovers, too, as a stark artistic metaphor. Breath is poetry’s most fundamental ingredient – when Hourani’s ‘lungs’ cease, an important means of cultural expression is stifled with them. The metaphor’s especial force owes to its radical artistic application of the abject horror we see unfolding in Palestine on news screens the world over: the tenor is too excruciatingly close to the vehicle.
Hourani’s poetry – the attention it required in writing, the attention it demands in reading – is, in its meticulousness, an act of counterterrorism. Through its sustained engagement with how those in power can organise our existence, rock flight fosters in its reader the necessary instincts to organise vigilantly. Hourani constructs his language – as language must always be constructed – as a crucial bulwark against the potential for violence in “knowledge-as-possession”. rock flight is timely proof that language is action: it is the means by which the world is enacted upon people, and through which people act on the world. Hourani’s refusal to be organised, and his insistence instead to organise, becomes in rock flight the purest possible form of this enactment: ‘a rock is not a rock’, let’s not forget, ‘until it is thrown’.
AUSTIN SPENDLOWE packets crisps.
Art by Olivia Boyle.
Comments