"Even though my poems don’t seem to be happy, I think I like to sing." Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah is a poet from my neck of the woods. The winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Joudah is not exactly a run-of-the-mill poet. His taxing day job makes his poetic pursuit a true labor of love. (I mean, when does he find the time?) An emergency room physician in Houston’s Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center, he has chalked up a couple of "firsts" with his poetry award. He is the first physician and first Arab American poet to be honored with the prestigious prize.
The son of displaced Palestinian Arab parents, Joudah is a native Texan born in Austin in 1971. His peripatetic life has taken him to many parts of the world. Schooled in the middle east and the US, he has cared for refugees in war torn Africa as a physician for Doctors Without Borders and has now returned to Texas to tend to the health care needs of the veterans of our armed forces. His poetry reflects the sharp caring eye of a physician who tends to individual pain and the mind of a poet who recognizes universal suffering. Joudah’s book of poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic is now available in bookstores and on Amazon.
The classroom can certainly be a site of pain, but poet Fady Joudah’s day job involves contact with suffering of a more elemental sort. He’s an emergency-room physician at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.
He’s also done two stints as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, in refugee camps in Africa. As a Palestinian-American, the son of refugees himself, there’s a certain irony in that, not lost on the author. Joudah, in his poetry, writes about those who are stateless and those who suffer, and tries desperately to do it without condescension or false simplification.
You can see an inevitability to how Joudah became a poetry-writing physician. Drawn early to literature and science, he was encouraged in both by his parents. Although he grew up mostly in the Middle East, he’s a Texas native, born in Austin in 1971, the second of five children. His father was 14 in 1948 when he fled Palestine following the creation of the state of Israel. Joudah’s mother, whose family hailed from the same village, was born in 1949 in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Joudah’s father eventually emigrated to the United States to finish a doctorate in history, returning to Gaza to marry Joudah’s mother. The family moved to Austin, where the elder Joudah taught at the University of Texas for a year before accepting teaching positions first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where Joudah attended junior high and high school.
His father introduced him early to classic Arabic poetry — reciting lines, talking about technique, linking those beloved poems with his own life as a boy. "I always had the feeling that poetry comes through us in a very mythical, legendary way because it forms our experiences," Joudah said.
His own first efforts to write came in middle school. But medicine attracted him as well. His father gave him a shrewd piece of advice, Joudah said. "He reminds me to this day that he kept telling me, ‘Son, you can always be a writer or a poet after you become a doctor, but if you become a poet, you can’t become a man of science.’ He reminds me that was one of the wisest things he ever told me."
Joudah never saw himself becoming a conventional private-practice physician or medical researcher. He felt drawn to public-service health care. "It’s the privatization of medicine that I had a weariness of," he said.
That led him to the VA hospital. "For me the VA is first and foremost a hospital system that provides medical care as a basic human right," he said. "I think most of the people who come to the VA would not have decent services otherwise."
This idealism prompted him in 2001 to join Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, French nonprofit that delivers emergency medical care to people victimized by war, epidemics and other natural and man-made disasters. In 2002 he spent six months in Zambia, working in the oldest refugee settlement on the continent. In 2004 he did six months in Darfur.
In a sense he was paying off a debt. When his parents received medical care in refugee camps, it was always a foreign doctor providing it.
But the most immediate effect of his first trip to Africa was to free him from his obsession with his own private tragedy as a Palestinian, a person without a homeland.
"What I felt was, OK, what I can do is universalize suffering and not just privatize it. It’s not just me, me, no one’s suffered more than I have or my parents have. It was great in that sense. I felt a great relief."
A sample poem (from the sequence Pulse)
In paradise, hospital beds
Sit under ageless
Mahogany and sycamore that bear
Every kind of fruit.
Hot meals are autumn leaves,
Branches are waitress arms
And also poles for drips.
And birds drop the pills
In your mouth from bills
Of surgical precision.
For Aspirin the swallow.
For Benadryl the nightingale.
No harm befalls you.
The roots will sense your ailment.
The flowers will scan your organs.
Geranium for the spleen,
Poppies for the brain,
And where there’s a latrine
A jasmine vine will blossom.
Accidental Blogger 
11 responses to “A Poet Without Borders”
My father gave me exactly the same advice when I was twelve – if you study science now, you can write poetry later. I think it was great advice. I was reminded of it years later when in a meeting with one of my professors from India (who knew that I was an experimental physicist), he asked me – are you writing poetry or are you building bombs? Without any hesitation, I told him I was writing poetry. Physics can be poetry too.
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Well said, RR!
Unfortunately, the image of scientists as mindless, heartless robots is all too prevalent, even among those who should know better. More than two years ago, I had written a lighthearted post lamenting this public misconception.
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Not a “run-of-the-mill poet”? What would that be, Ruchira? I wonder if Joudah’s just a run-of-the-mill ER medic. I can’t tell from the sample lyric whether or not his writing is to my taste. It’s a bit precious, but maybe that’s the trend in versifying these days, and anyway I can enjoy sentimentality at least as much as the next guy. But I have to disagree forcefully with the “wisdom” of sidelining poetry for science, as if the former doesn’t require a lifetime of attention, focus, patience, rigorous reading, and carefully tended talent. Sure, it’s good advice, but if advice is what is needed, then poetry may not be one’s calling. I’ll also disagree–no surprise here–with RR’s aphorism, inasmuch as it’s a mere truism. Physics can be poetry, but so can tuna salad. And the reason physics can be poetry is that poetry allows it to be so.
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Okay, like Obama, I regret my choice of words – “run-of-the-mill poet” (believe me there are many, just like there are ER physicians and physicists for that matter). My point was that it is quite unusual that a man with a job that is demanding of both body and mind, has found it useful / enjoyable to pursue poetry. My very next sentence following the one you found objectionable, amply clarifies that I am referring to his motivation not the quality of his poetry.
The story caught my eye not because of the verses but the life choices of the author. Not all of us have the time, energy or the inclination to serve in refugee camps in Darfur and Zambia, come to terms with one’s own unlucky breaks (perpetual refugee status of Palestinians in the author’s case) and distill life’s bitterness and disappointments into healing – either amidst the stress of the ER or the solitude of poetry writing.
All life’s achievements on paper can be made to look less than lofty – the blood, sweat and tears are shed by only a few. There are very few inspirational tales one comes across these days given the breathless Oprah culture of emotional hyperbole about pain – our own as well as that of others. Genuine and idealistic dedication to serve and find peace starts to look no more remarkable than overcoming drug addictions or losing 50 pounds of unwanted weight.
Joudah looks like a good man to me even if you suspect him of self-conscious versifying. And which poet (for that matter, which writer or blogger) is free of the last virtue?
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Ruchira, now you can see why I am usually a quiet observer, rather than a person who writes comments on a blog. Poets and politicians, physicians and philosophers, all seem to be capable of the persistent desire to prove themselves right, and others to be wrong, or, at best, trivial! Physicists – well, they have to admit they know very little about anything – they don’t even pretend to know what 95% of the universe is made of, let alone human feelings and emotions.
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Chronic self-consciousness of course leads to writer’s block. One of the marvelous aspects of writing is its breaching of the objective/subjective divide, however illusory that might be. When I read this first stanza of “Violin” by Frederick Seidel, for instance:
…I wonder just who is doing the writing and about whom is he writing.
I wasn’t mistaking your reference to Joudah’s motivations. I was quarreling with the implication that poets who fail to attract prestigious academic awards, or who don’t manage to accumulate résumés replete with occupational and philanthropic achievements, are somehow ordinary. To illustrate, imagine this upending revision to your post:
Imagine it, but it’s unimaginable, really. Nor was I especially concerned with the quality of Joudah’s writing, although I wonder what else there is to admire about a poet’s work.
Seidel’s biography, by the way, is much less a model of sacrifice and self-discovery than Joudah’s. This line from his Wikipedia entry suffices: “Seidel is independently wealthy and is fascinated by Ducati motorcycles, of which he owns four.”
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I regret, rr, that you perceive a strain of the ad hominem in my comments. I’m really not interested in proving anything, let alone proving anybody wrong in some absolute sense. I was prompted to respond because, as Ruchira knows, I tire of the routine marginalization of the arts in the service of the sciences. Ruchira’s post and her comment make clear that she intended to focus on Joudah’s achievements as a medical professional and human rights activist. That he is also an acclaimed poet intensifies those achievements. I wanted to complain that poetry shouldn’t be characterized as little more than his icing on the cake, his respite from his day job.
My gripe is about the conflict of disciplines, which is distinct from denigration of artists or scientists, not to mention of others posting to AB. I’m sorry if I put you off by seeming to attack your point as trivial, and I admit that referring to your comment as a “truism” comes across that way. But it is in fact the gist of the comment that irks me, because it suggests that physics–by which I am not referring to physicists–transcends all, to the point that it may choose to appear as poetry. Physics, but not physicists, can’t pretend to exhaustive knowledge of the universe. Likewise, poetry knows its limits, but not poets. The latter–the individual people and personalities who pursue their ambitions–are, as your second comment notes, often capable of hubris. I was defending poetry against that hubris.
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Dear Dean,
I suppose I run the risk or irking you even further and being accused of more hubris with this excerpt, but it’s worth it:
“Who was the 20th century’s greatest English-speaking poet? TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Sylvia Plath? Not for me; my nomination is the theoretician Paul Dirac, honorary poet laureate of modern physics.”……..
……..On hearing that the Manhattan project supremo Robert Oppenheimer was writing poems, a puzzled Dirac remarked in a rare outburst of cross-cultural criticism: “I do not see how a man can work at the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/693452/posts
With much hope of healing our hifferences (hostile irreconcilable differences)
rr
On a more serious note: A “medicine-poetry” connection that seems interesting (Association of American Physician Poets):
http://metatorial.com/ezaapp/
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Dean:
Your own gripe about the conflict of disciplines colors your vision of what others may be saying.
No one here was making a value judgement on whether poetry, physics or emergency medicine is superior, more desirable or more transcendent in spirit than other disciplines. And even if one did, that opinion would be equally valid as yours since we can only bring our subjective take to this debate of comparative worth. Society and individuals do weigh the value of different vocational pursuits and have done so for ages. It is a utilitarian judgement, not a moral or even an aesthetic one.
The statement made by Joudah which rr concurred with is the following:
you can always be a writer or a poet after you become a doctor, but if you become a poet, you can’t become a man of science.
A factual statement – reflects on the practical nature of the two disciplines and not on their intrinsic worth. How can you refute its validity? Dr. Joudah says he always loved poetry. We do not know whether he became a physician to comfortably support his poetry habit. He also doesn’t tell us which job he loves more or whether being a doctor makes him a better poet or vice versa. But there is no doubt that he could not have made the easy transition from poet to physician (or physicist) on a fanciful whim. But he can definitely continue to “versify” while tending to the sick without necessarily going to school for it. One job required him to go through rigorous academic and practical training and the other may have come to him quite naturally and was perfected with sheer personal dedication as happens with a lucky few. What is so objectionable or insulting in this statement?
I also don’t see with what authority anyone else can argue why and how a physician may see art in the fat layers or the skeletal structure of a cadaver or a physicist finds the cadence of poetry in the laws and nature of the physical world. It is not art or poetry which “allows” them to do it; the scope of human imagination defines the nature of art and poetry.
By no objective standard of labor intensive work, is a literary vocation as physically taxing as the job of an emergency room physician (or for that matter a construction worker, a commercial fisherman or a meat packer). No one is arguing about the attention, focus, patience, carefully tended talent, passion, joy and dedication involved or even the number of hours that one or the other may devote to a life pursuit. I am arguing for just the number of calories expended, muscle fatigue endured and exhaustion experienced at the end of a work day. Which is why I asked when Joudah finds the time and the mental energy to compose poems.
So the converse of my statement regarding “taxing jobs” as you put it, does not stand up to scrutiny. Even if the good doctor were to himself tell us which of the two, poetry or medicine, he counts as his first job, I definitely know which one is more “taxing.”
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This correspondence is getting more and more interesting, to me at least. I recognize that I view the matter in terms so distinct from those informing your views, Ruchira and rr, that there is no hope for a reconciliation on the merits. I appreciate your neologism, rr, but I really hope to avoid the impression of personal hostility. I wasn’t accusing you of hubris! Rather, in my view the hubris is institutionalized: there is a sect among the enterprises of science and other proponents of absolute rationality that resents the attitude demonstrated by your own proclamation of scientific humility–the notion that a physicist knows that he or she is ignorant of 95% of what matters. This faction, represented by the Dirac article you note, for example, views science as transcendent and the arts as ancillary, even if luxuriously so. Such a view demands resistance if we are ever to secure a legacy for art. So, yes, my observation of imperialist science at work does inform how I process the discussion. Why should matters be otherwise?
Besides, what’s good for the goose… My own remarks, it appears, are being mistakenly regarded as absolute, as if I find it impossible that a doctor or physicist could also compose poetry. I would sooner believe in a doctor’s aptitude for poetry than that of a lawyer who ran an insurance company, and yet Wallace Stevens… I think that by “see[ing] art in the fat layers or the skeletal structure of a cadaver,” Ruchira, you mean recognizing the patterns or randomness or color or tensions or associations ascribable to such objects, which recognition serves to fuel or inspire or motivate the work of poetry. I completely agree, and I further appreciate that an individual doctor’s view of these layers will entail insights mostly unavailable to, say, a librarian. What I resist is the ease of elision from this observation to one proclaiming that layers of fat are art. This is what takes place when we proclaim physics poetry or mathematics beautiful. These are grossly figurative statements, effective solely by virtue of poetic operations. We are in the embrace of poetry when we see [_____] as art. It is poetry–the legacy of work before us, the possibility of its future–that allows such an oblique angular view.
I continue to find the statement about the strategic pursuit of science before poetry completely untenable. I see no reason whatsoever that one couldn’t spend decades of one’s life working at writing before deciding to enter medical school. I concurred that the strategic approach might amount to good advice, but there is an immeasurable cost in assuming that one has optimized one’s opportunities in abiding by practical advice, that one will achieve in poetry what one could have had one not subordinated it to the medical profession. (Or, for that matter, that years spent trying to craft poetry would not have better prepared one to be a doctor.)
Ruchira, you as usual approach all of this with eminent sensibility, perhaps to a fault. Some doctors work as hard as Joudah, are as fatigued at the end of the day, and are alcoholic. Despite their exhaustion, they find the energy and the appetite to lift the bottle and drink. I’m not concerned with full-time professionals who manage their lives so well that they can pursue second jobs. I’m concerned with regarding the station of poet as a second job.
The Farmelo piece may be an example of imperialist science–purveyed here by a journalist dispensing negligible clichés about beautiful science–but Dirac seems to have been an interesting critter. So he pooh-pooh’d poetry. That’s his prerogative, and there is something charming about his perhaps unorthodox “aesthetic strategy.” Think of it this way: Were I to announce that I want to pursue work in physics, but that I don’t want to be bothered with solving problems, I’d be shouted out of the Academy. Dirac wasn’t, and I bet it’s because for all of his swagger over pretty math, he in fact dwelt on problems. Imagining one is on an aimless stroll can be a salutary heuristic for getting from A to B.
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I’m concerned with regarding the station of poet as a second job.
I pointed out that I don’t know which one of Joudah’s two occupations is the “second job.” Only he can tell us. We can only guess which one is physically more demanding and pays better.
As for an aimless stroll getting us from A to B just as surely as a carefully charted march, who exactly is not doing that? The poet, the religious teacher or the artist? Even the mad man among us believes he provides us with answers.
I was actually not arguing for an absolute rationalistic approach to life – hence the evocation of art and poetry in science which you are determined to deny the scientist in his own field of learning. You are the one who is laying down the high voltage fence of purity against trespassing – imperialism on behalf of the arts, don’t you think?
Joe sent me a link to this article as a possible topic for a post. I said to him that I may have already addressed this on several other occasions. I also added the following in my email reply to him.
There can be no appreciation of reality without imagination. Also, let’s ask for the sake of mere “material” interest: Who will make the machines?
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