Reviewed by Keith Taylor

The Romans, with all their imperial arrogance, called the Mediterranean "our sea." The Italian fascists of the first half of the twentieth century, with their imperial delusion, used the same phrase. In the latter half of the last century, the phrase took on a more benign meaning as all the countries that border on the Mediterranean began to honor and claim their part of those waters. Mare Nostrum. But in the last decade—as civil and post-colonial wars have ravaged the region, as economic and environmental collapse have eliminated jobs and threatened food supplies, as the deserts have grown hotter—the claims of "Mare Nostrum" have arisen again as a barrier against southern peoples trying to find some relief in Europe. The images of drowned bodies washing on to beaches haunt us.

Libyan-American poet, Khaled Mattawa, has witnessed these tragedies. A MacArthur Grant recipient, he is perhaps best known as the premier translator of contemporary Arabic poetry into English. His work and his family have taken him back to the Mediterranean basin even in this time of trouble. And now, in Mare Nostrum, his new chapbook, he has begun to write a different kind of unforgettable poetry, one that is directly engaged, even enraged, by this moment. 

The poems in this short collection work in a couple of ways. Mattawa writes narratives that are often told in the voices of various people, and he separates them with "Psalms" or other short poems that work as laments or prayers, evoking the inner life of the people on those impossible journeys across a difficult sea and through even harder landscapes. It is worth remembering that even though "psalm" inevitably brings to mind the Hebrew scriptures, this book of the Bible is also revered by Muslims the world over. When mythological creatures out of Arabic culture, like the Djinn, or Islamic stories arise in Mattawa's psalms, the blurring of cultural reference is not only intentional; it is natural.

The first poem, "Psalm of Departure," establishes the pattern. In the poem, "Djinn build cities of mirage, / the poor stand waiting by the shore." It is a striking image, one that seems almost cinematic: people standing and waiting quietly on the shore, staring out toward impossible cities built out of air by unnatural creatures. The signs that direct the people across the water are "made of stardust and spider / thread." The harsh lessons of reality will be learned only by the voyage: "Any way you measure it, / the difference will be the road." It is a tiny poem that in only twelve lines captures a moment that must have been reflected in millions of imaginations.

Because there are place names throughout this book that don't immediately resonate with many English speaking readers—for example, Agadez (in Niger, along a Saharan trade route); Arwad (a town on an island off the coast of Syria); Nimroz (a province in Afghanistan); Kufra (an oasis in southeastern Libya); Skala Sikamineas (the village on the Greek island of Lesbos whose citizens worked heroically to pull refugees from the sea)—it is worthwhile taking the time to look these up, at least on the first reading. The names then might lose a bit of their exotic or difficult ring and become the places they are for the poet, real places where real people have struggled.

Some of the poems that are particularly effective build from the expectation Mattawa has created for poem/songs yet still have a narrative embedded in them. "Into the Sea," for instance, has the repeated elements and the absolutely clear language of Mattawa's songs, but yet is framed by the story of refugees crowded on to a rubber boat. It begins:

Barely out of the jetty, the boat rises
with every wave, and in the back
2 or 3 fall into the sea. 

At sunset the boat starts to lose
air, fills with water, mothers
and babies fall into the sea.

The poem continues to follow the horrific nighttime journey of this one boat as it begins to sink into Mare Nostrum, yet each short stanza returns to those fatal four words as an ominous chime or a terrifying reminder. The poem ends:

They fling a small inflatable boat,
I am too weak to reach it.
Others try and fall into the sea. 

A cargo boat throws a rope,
get us on board. Alive at last,
and we still fall into the sea.

There would be easy ways to categorize this book and the poems in it. We could try "political poetry" or "the poetry of witness." Those are fine, of course, but it is more than enough to simply think of these poems as memorable reminders of the horrors that we allow to stay on the periphery of our experience. Mattawa does not let us forget.