Bibliography
Xiaojing, Zhou. “Intercultural Strategies in Asian
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———. “Kimiko Hahn (1955– ).” In Asian Ameri-
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Shawn Holliday
Ha Jin See JIN, HA.
Hammad, Suheir (1973– )
Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad was
born in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, in Oc-
tober 1973, the same year as the Ramadan War and
one year before Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir
delivered a speech in which she stated, “I cannot
sleep at night knowing how many Arab babies are
being born this same night.” For Hammad, these
events placed her birth in a context that gave her
a sense that Palestinian children were a nightmare
for Israel. The daughter of Palestinian refugees
from Lydd and Ramleh, Hammad moved with
her family to Beirut before settling in Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, in 1978 when she was five years old. The
eldest of five children, Hammad was raised in a
home infused with poetry from the Qur’an, from
Palestinian poets Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud
Darwish, and from the melodies of singers Abdel
Halim Hafiz, Om Kolthom, and Sam Cooke. In her
neighborhood, she grew up with poetic influences
from the burgeoning hip-hop music from groups
like Public Enemy.
A self-taught poet, Hammad attended Hunter
College, where she won the Audre Lorde Writing
Award for her poetry in 1995. At the age of 23,
she published two books: a memoir, Drops of This
Story (1996), and a book of poems, Born Palestin-
ian, Born Black (1996). Her style fuses Arab poetic
rhythms with hip-hop aesthetics and builds on the
politics and poetics of writers from the Black Arts
Movement such as June Jordan and Audre Lorde.
Poets like Jordan modeled for Hammad the im-
portance of drawing parallels across cultural and
political divides through poetry.
Hammad’s poetry and autobiographical writ-
ings narrate stories of Palestinian exile by drawing
parallels between the realities of the working-class,
immigrant, multicultural communities of Brook-
lyn and the experiences of Palestinians, Arabs,
and Muslims. For example, her poem “brooklyn”
describes Brooklyn not only as a place that has
provided her family with a sanctuary from Israeli
violence, but also as a community that failed to
protect Yusef Hawkins from racial violence.
Through images that show the intersections
between home and exile, Hammad plays with lan-
guage in her writing that reverses the dominant rep-
resentations in U.S. media of Arabs and Muslims.
She demands that her readers ask questions and
think critically about what the media tells them. In
her poems “palestinian ’98” and “mike check,” for
example, she portrays the reality of Palestinian and
Muslim experiences in the United States and the
occupied territories, as a way of responding to the
U.S. media’s frequent representation of Palestinians
as terrorists. Hammad challenges the stereotypes
also by portraying the compassion of her family
and her culture in poems like “daddy’s song.” She
explores and rescues the meaning of words like
“terrorist,” “liberation,” “freedom fighter,” and “oc-
cupation” to illustrate a realistic version of Pales-
tinians and their dispossession in 1948.
The performative and aural quality of her writ-
ing can be seen in the way she plays with language.
In “sawah,” her inspiration comes from the music
of singers like Abdel Halim Hafiz, whose Arabic
songs taught her about the power of language
as well as the deficiencies of English. One poem
that reveals her use of language to convey parallel
themes of liberation and oppression is “first writ-
ing since.” This landmark poem was performed
on television in HBO’s Russell Simmons Def Po-
etry Jam. She has performed her work in a variety
of venues, on college campuses, at spoken word
poetry readings, and at rap concerts. Her libretto
Re-Orientalism, commissioned by the Center for100 Ha Jin