Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is a searing love song of longing, memory, and language. It is a heart-wrenching evocation of the poet’s mother, Nawal, and of the poet’s own identity, familial lineage, and their occupied homeland. Woven with epigraphs from Ahmad Shawqi and Emily Dickinson, the collection propels itself smoothly between English and Arabic with erasure poetry, Arabic khatt, shape-poems, and English prose that chart the poet’s topographies of Philadelphia, Beirut, Vermont, and Bethlehem, along with the reimagined terrain of his mother’s Amman and al-Khalil.
Border Wisdom pulsates with the poet’s estrangements: from his home, from his father, from the contours of his own memory. And echoing through as though an aftershock is a disclosure from the book’s last few pages: “Dear reader, I’ve been pretending all along to have a second language. Actually/in reality/basically/essentially/ I don’t know anything in Arabic.”
In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Almallah about Border Wisdom, mistranslations, and his labyrinthine poetics of negotiation between Arabic and English.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. How did the poems in this collection come together over time? And what has the experience of sharing this work with the world been like for you?
Ahmad Almallah (AA): The poems began to come together before and after my mother’s disappearance from this world. The world of borders did not allow me to be by her side in her final hours. It was in 2021; I was trying to be there for her but the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) launched a large operation to quell protests over kicking people out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza ended up being hit the hardest as Israel was flexing its military power on innocent Palestinians as has been for seventy-seven years now.
At that point, I chose to leave the West Bank to be with my family in the US. A week after that I got news that my mother was no longer of the living. I was advised not to go back. I found myself flipping through the poems of Emily Dickinson and I happened on the line “there is a finished feeling at the grave.” It was then that I decided to go back to Palestine. The first thing that came to my mind when I walked into the room where my mother spent the final days of her life was that she was not dead. She had just disappeared. And the same thought stayed with me when I visited her grave. I wasn’t there to witness her body put in the ground. This is when I began to hold onto the idea of disappearance as an alternative to death.
That idea recurs in the collection, from the first poem, which is about the disappearance of people from the world of tables and chairs, to the idea that even a dead tree has many after-forms in “Even When Broken, Wood Always Gives,” to the centerpiece in the book, my long elegy to my mother. I guess the final mediation on that disappearance was an essay I wrote in Arabic titled (in translation) “in search of the mother in language,” which I incorporated into the book. My attempts at translating that essay made me realize that I want to write toward a disappearing language (or languages), and to that end are the various mistranslations of the Arabic of text included in Border Wisdom.
The main challenge was that publishers were not interested in a complex, bilingual, and multilayered text. They were interested in visibly diversifying their operations, i.e. by choosing a collage of pictures that show this diversity, rather than in publishing texts that incorporate a complex discussion of what diversity means, and what it should mean in terms that seriously challenge the core of the Western and English literary canons. Winter Editions was brave in that regard and truly interested in the book and my vision of it without undermining or compromising its complexity and/or difficulty.
AMMD: At Palestine Writes Literature Festival in 2023, you spoke about Border Wisdom and remarked that to write in English is to probe a positionality that dismisses you. You also discussed the practice of mistranslation as a way to enrich the reader’s experience and inscribe Palestine on your own terms. Could you expand on these remarks?
AA: If you are a poet, then translation should not be a priority. The attention that the American literary scene gives to some literary figures is because they act primarily as translators in the narrowest of terms—sometimes even as informants. This culture does not give value to the intellectual and aesthetic complexities of a book of poems coming from Palestine but rather values poetry from our part of the world whether in English or in Arabic in as much as it offers “commentary” or information on our other/“alien” world. The genocide in Gaza is not only ignored by mainstream media but it is funded by the US. It’s not enough to give an award to someone from Gaza to right this wrong, someone who willingly censors themselves from the use of the word “genocide” when writing on Gaza and is capable of uttering a phrase like “America was good to me” in a time of an ongoing genocide in Gaza. NO! America was not good to Palestine and to any Palestinian! It’s a spit in every Palestinian’s face to actively promote an individual success of a Palestinian in order to continue ignoring the crimes committed firstly by the US, who sustained military aid to a system that is committing genocide. If someone is willing to ignore that in order to say what America wants them to say, then that person, from the Palestinian people’s perspective, is nothing but self-serving and in the service of the very forces that are set on the annihilation of Palestine.
AMMD: How does Border Wisdom differ from your other collections, such as Bitter English (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Wrong Winds (Fonograf Editions, 2025)? I’m curious if there were influences, aesthetic experiments, or personal unfoldings that shaped Border Wisdom in unique ways particularly since, unlike Bitter English which was written entirely in English, Border Wisdom restores Arabic into your poetry.
AA: Border Wisdom was a turning point. In it, I realized that I was writing toward a disappearing language, and I reconciled myself with that. Language is not the essential tool of poetry. If poetry gets stuck in language, it cannot be distinguishable from advertising or even propaganda. Language on its own is the death of poetry. We can cite many dead poems that cannot detach themselves from language and its meaning. Poetry transforms experience into a “thing.” That thing is not language as we understand it in our day-to-day experiences. A poem performs what I, in Border Wisdom, call “translaformation.” In that sense, the poem saves language from language and transforms it into experience on the page. For you to understand poetry, you must see the human action it reflects and the one that gave it form on the page.
Border Wisdom, like Bitter English before it and Wrong Winds after it, came from a place of extreme discomfort and even lack of faith in humanity. I wrote each one of them to regain a relationship with the world around me, in moments of shattering abandon on a personal and collective level. It was as though I’d lost the essential purpose of language under the heaps of meaning we pile up on it. It was as though I was going back to being a child again, learning the names of things: this tool is called a spoon, and this thing a table, and the one by its side is a chair. I wanted to return to a fascination with things and with language as a thing; perhaps, I thought, that would reset my relationship with a world that keeps turning against my people first and then me as one of them.
AMMD: In Multilingual Literature as World Literature (2021), Dima Ayoub’s essay “Multilingual Others: Transliteration as Resistant Translation” references you alongside Sinan Antoon of Iraq, Inem Yacoubi of Tunisia, and Ahdaf Soueif of Egypt, observing:
The multilingual Arab writer who uses more than one language in their text is often hounded by the question of which language to use when. Such writers can belong fully to all or neither language, yet they must justify their choices at the same time as they negotiate the fraught boundaries between Arabic and other languages.
How do you respond to this idea of writing in between linguistic borderlands?
AA: This is very accurate and to the point. The essential component is belonging and not belonging at the same time. This in-between-ness is both insistence on fully belonging and on not belonging at all—and in that contradiction or tension, poetry or the poetic happens.
Nowadays, however, we see wannabe poets taking shortcuts. I once asked a young Palestinian poet, who then “rose to fame” in the genocide industry, about his decision to write in English from the very beginning, when his relationship to English was clearly mediocre at best. I was thinking that it took me almost seventeen years to say to myself maybe I need to write in English, maybe I can say something there too, something that matters, that can speak back or claim a place for itself. That person didn’t understand the question. His intention was to be heard in English. . . and writing to be heard is not exactly a poetic project. Reinventing what is being said in order to save it from the redundancy of language is perhaps what great poetry charges itself with. But speaking simply to be heard or because one has a platform is a betrayal of poetry as a form of thinking, not just a reiteration of what can be said outside of it.
In Border Wisdom, the negotiations or the surrender to the in-between appears most clearly in the text that opens each section of the book. In these pieces, I embraced the tension and let go of the need to be similarly legible in both languages. Rather I took comfort in being misread or misunderstood as long as it was on my own terms and not violently imposed upon me by another.
AMMD: In the face of the silencing, erasure, and censorship of Palestinian voices in global literary spaces with Zionist sympathies, how can we confront and dismantle these dominant structures of exclusion? And how should this inform not only our creative practices but also the ways in which we publish and participate in these platforms and at the same time, ensure that our work aligns with broader movements for justice, equity, and Palestinian liberation?
AA: If you’re being silenced now, then you’re saying what matters and what the Western and American media machines are not willing to accept as they continue to turn a blind eye to the most horrific of crimes in the history of humanity. If complicit media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the likes are giving you space and seeking you out, it is only to pretend that they are objective, to relieve themselves of their moral responsibility in the moment of genocide. As they are being genocided, Palestinian voices are also being co-opted and turned into tools and tokens. Individuals who accept these roles are contributing to misinformation. The awards won by those who play this role are nothing short of a bribe.
AMMD: I’m curious about the Global Majority, Arab, and Palestinian scholars, poets, writers, and thinkers who have shaped your philosophy, writing, and ethos. How have their works guided and shaped you?
AA: My first encounter with poetry as a thing was in Arabic. I was fascinated by it because it presented itself to me as a thing, precisely because Arabic poetry, the one my parents were reading to me alongside the Quran, was semantically closed off to me. I didn’t understand it but what resonated most was sound. This is how a relationship between me and poetry began, not between me and “a” language.
One of my first fascinations is with Imru al-Qays. Since I was a child, I was taken by his biography and his poetry. I am in awe of his commitment to life and to experiencing it to the fullest, something that makes his poems truly “something.” Other influences, of course, include al-Mutanabbi, with whom every Arabic poet has a relationship. Later I encountered Bashshār ibn Burd and Abu Tammam.
Most of the influences on me from outside the Arabic poetic tradition come later and are perhaps secondary. I want to single out Emily Dickinson. But even then, I find myself seeking to connect these non-Arabic influences to Arabic. For example, I am drawn to Emily Dickinson’s mastery of the moment or the phrase or line that surprises or overturns the poems; bayt al-qasid as we call it in Arabic. A leap or a shattering shift that the poem builds out of nothing: a moment truly free of all the familiar.
AMMD: Speaking of Bashshār ibn Burd, you’ve written about the muḥdath ghazals of this Umayyad-Abbasid-era Persian poet in your critical essays. Has his work also influenced your own writing?
AA: Bashshār ibn Burd is a master of dialogue or the orchestration of voices in the classical Arabic composition, especially the ghazal. Bahshsar also had another language (Persian) but he chose to write in the language of his oppressors, Arabic. I like to think of myself as doing the same with English, and here I think of someone like Paul Celan as well.
Bashshar was committed to an aesthetic and intellectual project even if it cost him his life. He did not subscribe to identity in his poetry. Although, believe it or not, there was room for that at his time just as now. His most convincing commitment, despite the fact of his identity and the politics of his time, remains to the Arabic language and its poetic heritage which he owned so well and claimed so fully. The profile of Bashshar as the “anti-Arab” is a modern construction which has its origins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or more accurately in the colonial and post-colonial structures of al-Nahda or Arabic Neo-Classicism.
AMMD: Are there Palestinian and Arabic-language writers and translators whose work you feel the Anglosphere should not miss out on?
AA: The Anglosphere is already missing out—and it doesn’t care. It was never really invested in a real knowledge of writing or poetry in Arabic or from Arabic. And now in the genocide, it only uses Palestinian voices to alleviate a superficial guilt.
AMMD: Having taught courses such as “Writing and Borders” at UPenn, where you explored Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and contemporary reimaginings of The Iliad (as well as Salim Barakat’s work in your Intro to Creative Writing course and Darwish in your Poetry-as-Translation/Translation-as-Poetry class), could you share other writers, texts, or books you might consider including in your teaching?
AA: Ghassan Kanafani is a writer and thinker I would like to engage with more. He mastered complex simplicity so well: a clear direct language that doesn’t waver. He was interested in speaking to Palestinians first and foremost. He didn’t care to cater to an outsider. That is a real writer with a cause. I think we need a rereading and a retranslation of his works. I would love to teach Kanafani but I don’t think that’s possible at this moment in the American institutions where Palestinian thought and literature have been vilified. How absurd it is that reading Kanafani and teaching him now comes with security concerns. It goes to show how bankrupt and hypocritical these institutions are and have always been.
Ahmad Almallah, PhD is the author of Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023), Bitter English (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Wrong Winds (Fonograf Editions, 2025). Born in Bethlehem, Palestine, he currently lives in Philadelphia, where he is an artist-in-residence in the University of Pennsylvania. There, he teaches courses in poetry and translation, and previously served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. He holds a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry from Indiana University Bloomington and previously taught as an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Arabic Literature at Middlebury College. He has received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing (2018) and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship (2017). His works in English have appeared in Jacket2, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and others. Some of his Arabic writings have been published in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and his poetry has been translated into Russian and Telugu.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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