Urban Poet Nathalie Handal on “Kaddish,” Allen Ginsberg, and “Volo”
By Stella Hayes
Nathalie Handal is a New Yorker of Mediterranean roots. Her recent award-winning poetry collections include Life in A Country Album, The Republics, Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses.
Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, The African Institute, among others. She writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.
Her chapbook, Volo, was released in October 2022 with Diode Editions.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: You once interviewed Allen Ginsberg for Mahmoud Darwish’s magazine Al Karmel. His long poem “Kaddish” is dedicated to Ginsberg’s mother Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956). The poem chronicles her struggle with mental illness, which would eventually result in a lobotomy.
When his mother died, Kaddish (a Jewish prayer for the dead) was not read because too few men were present at the service. According to traditional Jewish law, at least ten men (a minyan) must be present for the service to be performed.
Although Kaddish is typically read after someone dies and on each subsequent anniversary of the death, it is a prayer that celebrates and praises God; it is not a poem of mourning. What did Ginsberg say about it when you spoke to him?
NATHALIE HANDAL: He didn’t address this specifically. It was my very first assignment. I had no idea what I was doing. I was intimidated and exhilarated.
Ginsberg began writing “Kaddish” in Paris, and [the poem] takes readers through his emotional landscape as he mourns his mother’s passing. But it is also a poem about another loss, that of his estrangement from Judaism.
I think when we read the poem, we find the Allen who said: "Yes, I am a Jew, but at the same time you see I am not a Jew” (Jewish Post and Opinions). The Allen who went to Buddhism and eastern religions for a home.
The interview was published in [its] Arabic translation but never in English. One of the questions I asked him was,
“In ‘White Shroud,’ the epilogue to ‘Kaddish,’ written twenty-five years before, you wrote: ‘I am summoned from my bed / To the Great City of the Dead / Where I have no house or home / But in dreams may sometime roam / Looking for my ancient room.’ Have you found your ancient room?
He answered: “It just so happens I have. Well, those kinds of dreams in which you come home and find that the lock is lock, the house has moved, you can’t find your house, you are lost in the city, lost in another city without any money, usually are hints of the sense of displacement after death when you don’t quite realize that you are dead yet, and you are still trying to get in your door so to speak.
My father had a recurrent dream. He taught in Newark, New Jersey, which is about thirteen miles from Paterson. He would drive to work and drive back home. He had this recurrent dream that his car would stop and he would lose his way. There were dark streets. They were deserted, and there was a phone booth, and he didn’t have any money on him except a nickel. He put it in the phone and the phone was dead.
And he would wake up. A recurrent dream, almost like being dead but not being able to find your way physically back into things. So as far as that is concerned, my home is an open empty space. On the other hand, I sold my archives to Stanford University and received quite a bit of money. I kept everything from grammar school on. Anyhow, I had enough money after taxes, (two-thirds of the amount taken out) was enough to buy a loft in a building that I knew quite a long time. I just moved in about three months ago and it’s like living in heaven. A big long space.
I was always living in inexpensive walk-up apartments and I have heart trouble. My doctor said I had to get away from that, and so this has an elevator, and it is in my neighborhood. I lived in the same walk-up apartment for twenty years or so, which is right around the corner. This is a loft with lots of space. I live underneath the painter Larry Rivers from whom I brought the loft.
I go to Salvation Armies all over Manhattan buying a lot of beautiful furniture for hardly any money. I think I just about furnished the place except I am looking for a big long eight-foot table. I do a lot of writing on the kitchen table. I just got everything cleared away and just had my first dinner guest. So I have a new home.”
He [Allen Ginsberg] died a month or so after the interview. When Mahmoud Darwish died, I was living in Queens, commuting to New Jersey to teach. Allen was with me on the PATH train, on the bus in Jersey, and in my dreams.
It was as if I was circling back to my entrance to literary life—which began with the death of one of the most well-known American poets. And my journey with the question of home: Where is it? What is it?
My poem “After Kaddish” was written as I was mourning Mahmoud, and Allen unexpectedly accompanied me.
WSR: Ginsberg’s poem, ”Kaddish” reflects on Naomi’s life as well as her death. How do life & death figure in your own work, specifically in your two long poems “After Kaddish” and “Téssera,” which appear in your recently published chapbook, Volo?
NH: Death is alive. In “After Kaddish,” I am trying to connect to that. And in the poem “Téssera,” I write: “Death’s stubborn—it never rests. Maybe that’s how it stops suffering,” or “Maybe we will fall into the sea, forgetting that love is a longer voyage than life.”
WSR: Among the themes of war and injustice, exile, and dislocation that are apparent in your work, you also write about desire. What are the different faces of desire?
NH: What gives us pleasure, what motivates us, and what we wish for…
I am intrigued by who we are (and become) when we desire what’s erotic; intrigued by the displacements, defenselessness, and drive of desire.
WSR: Despite her severe mental illness, Ginsberg was close to and loved his mother—I’m Jewish and considering my experiences and my relationship with my son, I think this kind of closeness is typical of a relationship between a Jewish mother and son.
Political mistreatment of women, as well as the celebration of women—their minds/bodies—are important subjects in your own work. Could you tell us how they relate to both poems in the chapbook?
NH: No society can be its full self if women aren’t visible, valued, free.
Women are wonders. I am interested in what women write with their bodies.
WSR: In movement (1) of Aletheia (from the Greek “not being hidden”) section of the first long poem “Téssera,” you write: “We give birth … [w]e tell them our body isn’t a stage.”
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, these lines carry an oracular quality. As a fellow woman and poet, how does it feel to speak out against voices that are against our rights, our human rights?
NH: We need a world where we can be who we are. A world where being a woman ceases to be a radical act.
WSR: The poem is both a call for a revolution against oppression and a ceasefire on womankind. In “Voyages,” the final section: “The women quiet motion and ask sudden wind, explain to us histories, / wars.” Could you talk about this movement, from war to love? Is “love all love needs” in the time of aggression and war against “our kind,” as poet Anne Sexton put it, too optimistic?
NH: I keep returning to bell hooks: “I feel our nation’s [and the world] turning away from love … moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.”
Love is what allows us to find quietude, and courage.
WSR: Cities spanning four continents, from New York City to Bethlehem, figure as protagonists in your works, including VOLO. Could you talk about what these cities mean to you?
NH: Cities taught me how to listen and look at words; how to invent a language that includes all my tongues.
The more you get lost in a city, the more you start resembling it, and the more it starts resembling you, and the more the differences get lost.
The intersection of two city streets can be so insane and intoxicating, you would do anything to recross it, do anything for the desire it left in you.
You can purchase Nathalie Handal’s Volo here.