— No, I am awake Mary,
have been listening
for this call

 

— Yes, you
will bring forth beauty

I, Zekariah, always knew

from “Mary Phones Her Old High School Teacher from the University Library at 4 a.m.”

In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf continues a venerable feminist practice: the reclamation of sacred texts. Focusing on the lives of women revered in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Kahf gives primary place to Hajar, the young Black woman whose trials on facing exile in the Hijazi desert would form a crucial junction between the Abrahamic faiths and the inspiration for a number of significant Hajj rituals. Celebrated as the mother of Ismail, progenitor of the miracle of Zamzam, and founder of Mecca, Hajar and her life before the point of exile have nevertheless remained obscure within conventional Islamic tradition.

It is her personal history, in particular, Hajar’s precarious status as the younger second wife of Abraham, and her relationship with Sarah the elder, which fascinates Kahf. With palpable immediacy, Kahf’s direct American vernacular evokes daily domestic routines and simmering resentments between two women forced to share husband and home for the sake of God and religion. The poems contemplate different facets of the lives of ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances, offering readers renewed insights on the value of a spiritual practice which consists of simply reflecting on one’s actions, and asking how things might have been different.

By turns bitter and humorous, rueful and compassionate, the Hajar sequence ultimately affirms the kinship between imperfect, remarkable women as symbolic of ties between Judaism and Islam. “Like matter, kinship can be changed but not destroyed. Cruelty tarnishes,/ but cannot dissolve it. We are kin/ from bread baked together, / salted, broken, eaten, sacred/ as a challah braid at sunset on the Night of Power…”

Kahf’s creative strategy in the majority of these poems constitutes a spirited feminist tafsir (exegesis). Poems epigraphed by different Quranic verses imagine the voices of Asiya, wife of Egypt’s tyrannical Pharoah; Bilquis, the Queen of Sheba; Mary, mother of Jesus, Fatima, daughter of Muhammad. Following in the discursive path of the Quran itself, and deserving of wide Muslim readership, her work insists on Islam’s closeness to its Abrahamic antecedents, even as it rejects the airless, authoritarian lens in which perceptions of all three religions tend to be flattened. The cumulative effect is a stinging rebuke against the one false idol Abraham the iconoclast left standing, the patriarchy successive generations of women must renew the struggle to destroy.

This is literature written in the spirit of belonging, of remembered and chosen connections which also deserve to be nourished, not as some self-conscious liberal exercise, but as ordinary and unexceptional, long into the future. The voices of women in Hagar Poems remind us even more appealingly that secular language itself originates from the human necessity of making sacred texts legible among mortals: that liberation begins with “the patient threading of relationship, the lifelong piecework of love.” They account for the spiritual authority and emotional depths of Hagar Poems, but more importantly, they are the source of its joy.

—Rahat Kurd

The First Thing

I am Hagar the Immigrant

There came to me the revelation
of the water

I left the world of Abraham,
jugs sealed with cork,
cooking grease jars,
Sarah’s careful kitchen fires

I walked across a razor-sharp horizon,
slates of earth, sediment
of ancient seas

to stand alone at this frontier:
where the shape of the cup of morning is strange
and dome of sky, mat of earth have shifted,
where God does not have a house yet
and the times for prayer have not been appointed,

where the only water is buried deep
under hard ground and I must find it
or my child will die, my people
remain unborn
the first thing
the founder does
is look for water

I am Hajar, mother
of a people
I stand here
straddling the end and the beginning
Each rock cuts into the heel like God
Each step is blood, is risk:

is prayer

Hajar in America

We came over together
I spoke no English
He had a mission:
Grad school, then it’s back to save the masses

Here I am now with the baby on my hip,
alone in Newark,
on foot, looking for milk at the all-night Exxon
I hear he’s marrying her,
the teaching assistant with the frosted hair

I have to learn how to drive

Hajar at the AIDS March

—O son of Adam! I fell ill but you visited me not.

—How could I visit you, when you are the Lord of the worlds?

—Did you not know that my servant was sick but you visited him not? Did you not know that if you had visited him, you would have found Me by him?

From a hadith qudsi of the Prophet Muhammad

The mosque board members
examine the dogma ID card
of every supplicant at the door,
run morality background checks
on the impoverished and the ill.

In the desert, with the boy dying,
Hajar ran to the heights.
Faith acts
in her hands and feet.

This matters: the firm flesh of now,
the head in the crook of the arm,
the downy notch of beauty,
this world of God.
Hajar is out
marching
in the AIDS rally today.

1996

Hagar’s Sandals

Behold, Safa and Marwa are among the symbols of God.

Quran: The Cow, 2:158

Hajer wedges her shoulder
Between ledge of sky
And slate of Earth
To save, from a crushing fate,
herself and her son.

We call the earth that mounds
around her sandals
Safa and Marwa.
Holy, these, God says:
Honour your mother’s feet.

Over the lava-rock land,
people settle, hardening
into tribes and loyalties —
walking in the grooves of Hajar’s sandals
and forgetting Hajar’s ordeal.

The Kaba’s Lap

A low brick ledge extends
the Kaba’s perimeter
in a half-circle called the Hijr,
The “Lap”. The Kaba used to be that big.
Entering the lap breaks the count

of seven circlings
because it is not the path around,
but the path inside.
It is part of no ritual.
It is Kaba, and it is not.
Lore says Hajar and her son

are buried in the Kaba’s lap,
And so is a basket of green gems.
No one knows if this is true.
It is, and it is not.
The Kaba’s lap is a ghost limb,

our forgotten grandmother’s arm,
reaching around to make haven
for the heartbroken, the tired,
the ones unable to keep circling with the crowd,
the orphans of the orphan’s faith.

Hajar Triumphant

Islam began as a stranger and will return as a stranger.

—Prophet Muhammad

Hajar hajarat Hajirah hujirat
We don’t even know your name
Our Prophet traces his line
to a Black woman
whom we know
only by her function:
to migrate, to be abandoned,

holding out after hope of help
and home wholly vanish,
ha huna, ha ana, Here I Am,
Eve out of Eden,
left with only the wahy of water
and the task of helping another
human being, Ismail:
He who, without Hajar, is history

Hence, “islam,” to surrender,
begins with hijrah, alienation,
homo sapiens at ground zero,
cast out in otherhood, motherhood,
I and Thou in the desert,
having no hard rod of law to lean on for holiness,
but only this flow between our fingers

Our Lady of the Sorrows

It is hard to find Fatima. Fatima’s face
is always averted from the crowd.
Fatima’s form, wrapped in its cloak,
is always receding to another place
Did she carry in her pelvic floor
the knowledge that her son Hussain
would die at Karbala, his body gored,
my Lady of the Sorrows, of the shroud?
Girl of ten, anxious for her hounded father,
her pinched face peering right and left,
picking through Mecca’s crooked streets
among the sweaty backs of men the day
had made unmindful, forlorn, bereft
little mother even as a little daughter,
she appears at Trayvon’s killer’s trial,
shadows the crowd at Ferguson,
Fatima, shuddering, shouldering the pain
of every mother’s son who will be slaughtered.

Hagar Poems is Mohja Kahf’s second collection of poems, published by University of Arkansas Press in 2016. These selections have been reprinted with permission.

Poet and scholar Mohja Kahf was born in Damascus, Syria. Her family moved to the United States in 1971, and Kahf grew up in the Midwest. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from Rutgers University and is the author of the poetry collections Hagar Poems (2016) and Emails from Scheherazad (2003) and the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006).

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