Interview with Suheir Hammad

Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad was born in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan in 1973. The daughter of 1948 Palestinians, her family moved to Beirut before settling in Brooklyn in 1978, when she was five. Hammad grew up in a home infused with poetry from the Qur'an and from Palestinian poets Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish; her family home was also rich with the melodies of singers Abdel Halim Hafiz, Om Kolthom, and Sam Cooke. The sounds of her neighborhood, which included the emerging hip-hop music scene from groups like Public Enemy, also influenced her aesthetic. She attended Hunter College, where she won the Audre Lorde Writing Award for her poetry. She is also the recipient of the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award, a New York Mills Artist Residency, a Van Lier Fellowship, and an Emerging Artist Award from the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at New York University. At the age of twenty-three she published two books, a memoir called Drops of This Story (1996) and a book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996). She has performed her work on college campuses, at spoken word poetry venues, at rap concerts, on Broadway in the Tony-award-winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam, as well as with several musical groups. Her poetry can be found in numerous collections of poetry, including In Defense of Mumia, Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab-American Writing, Bum Rush the Page, The Poetry of Arab Women, Listen Up!: Spoken Word Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, as well as in the HBO series Def Poetry Jam. Her most recent volume of poetry, Zaatardiva, was published in 2005. Hammad lives in New York where she continues to write and where she performs her poems on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam. Hammad auditioned for the program, but was initially turned away. But after 9/11, Hammad's poem "first writing since, "which responded to the terrorist attack in the US, circulated widely on the Internet and she subsequently appeared on the first episode of the show. Her poetry works against the grain of American media, which represents Palestinians only as terrorists. Her style fuses Arabic poetic rhythms with hip-hop aesthetics and builds on the politics and poetics of the Black Arts Movement. Her play with language and images reverses the dominant discourse in the US media about representations of Arabs and Muslims and asks her audience to think critically about what the media tells them. This interview was conducted in New York City on February 26, 2005. Marcy Knopf-Newman: I was wondering if you could begin by talking about your birth in October 1973. What did you think about being born the same month as the Ramadan War? Suheir Hammad: Well, actually, often the thing that stands out to me, as a Palestinian, about my birthday is that the year before on October 25, 1972, Golda Meir had delivered a speech where she says--and I am not paraphrasing--"I cannot sleep at night knowing how many Arab babies are being born this same night." This was a speech delivered to her countrymen and women as a nationalistic call to ethnic and national pride. It gave the sense that Palestinians' children's birth was the nightmare for the Israeli enterprise. This idea that we had so seeped into the subconscious and the fabric of creation of this state ... would keep people up at night. That's what I think about most when I think about my birthday in the context of a Palestinian exile community and the children that have been born to the refugees. Every child has a story like that. I just happen to have that year, very specifically bookended, but I think any Palestinian child born since that statement was made was a reflection of humanity that Golda Meir and her comments tried to diminish. I was raised in Brooklyn, New York City, I'm the eldest of five kids, and my parents are both from 1948 towns in Palestine. My father's from a town called Lydd and my mother is from Ramleh and both of those are [in] the Tel Aviv area. …