Umbilical Discord

Umbilical Discord - Etel Adnan Poetry Series

Paperback (15 Sep 2024)

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Publisher's Synopsis

Winner, 2024 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

At its core, Rawand Mustafa's Umbilical Discord is an impossible attempt. Ambitious in scope, it strives to trace the billion-branched reach of the Palestinian context within a fixed yet flowing form-columnar, helical, intertwining, tense, intense. Incorporating testimonies by elder Palestinian women who survived the Nakba, or Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948, Mustafa re-presents the ongoing shockwaves from this historical upheaval by interlacing witnesses' stories with related recollections from her own family history. The overlapping accounts from Palestinian women that Mustafa has painstakingly translated or gathered from family members recall moments of supreme perseverance in the face of unimaginable violence, separation, and loss, while weaving together past and present, collective and individual, Arabic and English, memory and imagination, homeland and host country. As Trish Salah observes in the foreword for Umbilical Discord, "these are poems of yearning and of being, both in spite of and fractured by an impossible history. [. . .] Mustafa offers resistant traces of the geographies and names dis/re-membered in [. . .] efforts to erase the material architecture and cultural memory of Arab life in Palestine. What must be traversed in order to come to tell a history? As Mustafa writes in 'dis cord,' her opening poem, [. . .] 'I attempt / my story / on a lost / foundation.' "

Book information

ISBN: 9781682262634
Publisher: The University of Arkansas Press
Imprint: University of Arkansas Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 813.6
DEWEY edition: 23/eng/20240515
Language: English
Number of pages: 100
Weight: 453g
Height: 216mm
Width: 140mm
Spine width: 9mm