Book record
Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation
Amal Jubūrī
Translated from Arabic by Alicia Ostriker
Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation, by Amal Jubūrī and translated by Husam Qaisi, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Alicia Ostriker from Arabic, brings Arabic-language poetry from Iraq into English through Iraqi occupation, biblical naming, and Amal Juburi's doubled Hagar as witness before and after historical violence. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for occupation, mother, desert, and the figure who carries displacement inside the body, not as a fixed lesson about Iraq. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as a fierce Iraqi feminist and political lyric of fracture and survival.
- Published
- 2011
- Publisher
- Alice James Books
- Language
- Arabic
- Country
- Iraq
- ISBN
- 9781882295890