Hajer Mirwali, Revolutions

 

January 22

In 1994 Mama gave birth to me in Amman on
her way from Baghdad to Richmond Hill and
Mona with wood sand metal electric motor
transported us to the first home we were
exiled from. Two daughters of a revolutionary
split. Two mothers of a contracting uterus
waiting to be Palestinian again. 

Past noon. Shadows cast by a swinging
mobile are longer, higher. 

Repetitive sounds mimic Mona’s repletion:
whirring projector light, needle hitting
copper thread. Mama held my slippery body
to her chest. Mama’s slippery body on my
chest. She asks if I have ever listened to
+ and –. Grains of sand flowing through one
another. Every daughter grain resorbs her
mother grain as first foreign body. Lives her
whole life with that inside her. 

I later fix “Mona’s repletion” to repetition to
repletion. Mona so near bursting every line she
erases reconfigures its genes to another line. 

Every time Mama asks what I am writing
I only say + and –.

The full-length poetry debut by Hajer Mirwali, “a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto,” is Revolutions (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that the back cover writes “sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities.” Composed as a book-length suite, this collections weaves and interleaves such wonderful structural variety, offering a myriad of threads that swirl around a collision of cultures, and a poetics that draws from artists and writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Naseer Shamma and Nicole Brossard, writing tales of mothers and daughters; and how one self-edits, keeps hidden, and also provides comfort, solidarity. “Yes,” Mirwali writes, as part of the poem “January 23,” “a very good daughter who loves / her motherlands and her God. // A daughter more or less. // A daughter + and –. // Never the same twice.”

Structured as a book-length sequence of eleven poem-sections, each of which are set as individual poem-clusters—“3AIB,” “CYCLE GENERATOR,” “MEETING + AND –,” “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” “OPEN GUIDE OF PALESTINE,” “BORDER TONGUE,””OUD INTERRUPTED,” “RAMADAN RECORD,” “GROOVES OF ONE OR MANY XXXXXXX’S,” “REVOLUTIONS” and “SIFT”—weaving through conversations with her mother, swirls of text, erasures, ekphrasis, visual poems and first person description and reportage: “Waiting for the long Baghdad night to fall // down the mountain fold / fragments of rock for riverbed // between our homes he shields / his body over mine // storms of earth not rooted enough / eyes of sand and red sky // after it settles we sweep / a new day or the same long night // rub against other nights making / grains more and more circular [.]”

In the “NOTES” at the back of the collection, Mirwali clarifies how the collection, as well, exists in conversation with and response to a specific work by British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum: “Much of Revolutions is a response to Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, which I first encountered online in March 2016 and in person January 2019 at the exhibition Open Works. Art in Movement, 1955-1975 at Le Pedrera in Barcelona.” As the Museum of Modern Art website writes, this particular piece (1994-2004) by Hatoum “is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.” Through Hatoum’s piece, the cycle of creation and erasure exists on an endless loop, without anything new created or gained, set in a single moment of yin and yang. And yet, whatever else might be swirling through these poems, this is a collection that is also centred around that core of mothers and daughters, and how one navigates such a relationship to emerge as an individual self separate yet connected and interconnected; with all else, one might offer, as a means through which that articulation might best be explored, from meditation to conversation, citation and direct quotation. “Heaven lies beneath a mother’s feet.” she writes. “What is at her centre?”

What becomes fascinating is in how all of these moments that Mirwali articulates connect across distances, moving from collage into coherence, writing the interconnectedness between each of these disparate narrative threads. As she writes as part of the section “BORDER TONGUE”: “Sand in an hourglass falls in concentric circles until the space is filled then reaches back to where it fell from. I take photos of the camera’s small screen send them to Baba in Iraq.” She writes of multiple points of departure and relationships to people, to individuals, to geographies and geopolitical crises; she writes of home, of hearth. She writes of the contradictions of where the heart may go and how one connects to the world, seeking solace and urgency, a connection to where part of her might always remain, as the sequence “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” a poem subtitled “(twenty-minute poems to be read in two directions),” offers:

Have I stopped caring about Palestine?

I want to go skating

Want to eat hand-pulled noodles

To live alone

I want to be a mother

Again I want to listen to the oud

Naseer Shamma would not have written “Layl Baghdad” if it weren’t for the mirage