Chaos, Crossing

“[H]ow long must those in Gaza wait for the Devastation to be named?” asks Olivia Elias in Chaos, Crossing, her English-language debut. Born into an Arabic-speaking family in Haifa, Palestine, in 1944, Elias was exiled as a child to Beirut—where she attended French schools—before moving to Montreal as a teen and finally to Paris, where she now lives. Translated from the French by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, this bilingual volume includes many newer poems that did not appear in the book on which it is based, Chaos, Traversée. Elias’s poem “Flame of Fire” opens:

I was born
in this 
eruptive time
when my country’s
name was changed

Where names cannot be relied upon, Elias attends to the noises produced by settler-colonialism: “the sound of an olive tree being uprooted” and “the prisons blooming / in the desert / the barbed wire scraping / your shores.” In a world where “the grown-ups had gagged the words,” a speaker must escape to “the sea to drink / before she could reach / the other shore.” To be violently displaced and made stateless means to remember in multiple languages, “vocabulary dwindling dwindling.” Exile is “the other name / of time combusting / and continents / colliding,” synonymous with chaos—meaning both disorder, and also, recalling its Greek roots, an abyss of nothingness. 

The poems are most precise when localized to a specific set of anxieties and observations, as when recounting how the “village elders,” who, “surrounded by beauty […] offered / their faces like old cats in the sun.” In another poem, those who “were away a few days,” are “suddenly / declared aliens / on their own land.”

“In this country the stars were not fixed // they could easily fly off in a single go migrate to / regions where happiness is less precarious,” writes Elias in the book’s opening poem. And in one of the last poems, “The Dream Wouldn’t Leave Me,” the speaker declares: “Suspended from a star / I escaped the chaos.” For those “who know exile,” writes Elias, “it’s only in our village / that we’re finally at home.”