Poems That Do Not Sleep

In Poems that do not sleep, Hassan Al Nawwab tells of his experiences as an Iraqi soldier and refugee whose life has been forever altered by war. Al Nawwab’s English translations, which appear alongside his Arabic originals, bear the imprint of the dual consciousness that so often shapes the experiences of refugees. “The migrant,” Al Nawwab reflects ironically, “remembers his homeland / More than the people who live in it.”

The speaker’s longing for a homeland is complicated by the realities of war, as we read in the poem “Difference”:

This exile
Resembles my homeland,
In goodness and feeling,
But the difference is
My homeland has become full of soldiers and bombs
And this exile has become full of angels and kisses

In a short poem called “Writing,” the speaker considers the predicament of the writer-soldier who is unable to capture what is immediate and close at hand, and who can only write about war from a distance:

In the trenches of war
I wrote about love only
And when I survived
I began to write about death
That I saw there.

These are powerful poems, but the particular nuances of the poet’s voice are not fully captured in the English translations. Still, this is an important collection that bears witness to the experience of a war that has all too often been told exclusively from the vantage point of the occupying forces.