as in-between. In the end, the speaker decides to
move forward and live life even though it is often
complicated and difficult. Chin sees America as a
place where she has the freedom to write poetry
and choose which culture she will embrace in
different parts of her life, but it is also the place
where she is stereotyped and where her father
degenerated to gambling and thuggery. In the
end, the opportunity of living in America is not
so simple a blessing, creating its own complex-
ities. Still, Chin has the freedom in adulthood to
stay in America, go to China, or go somewhere
else entirely, and she chooses to stay in America.
Youssef’s portrayal of the United States in
‘‘America, America’’ is critical and harsh. Yet
that is the reflection of his personal experience
and the history of his people, just as Whitman,
Ginsberg, Sandburg, and Chin depict America
according to their own personal experiences.
Comparing and contrasting these poems, then,
is an exercise in context. When reading a poem it
is important to keep in mind that each poem has
its own context, and that the poem itself also
exists in a larger context of poetry as a whole.
Some poems praise the wonders of love, for
example, while others reject it and want no part
of it. Similarly, Youssef and Ginsberg write
about America in derogatory terms, while Whit-
man and Sandburg write about it in positive
terms and Chin seems to write about it in neutral
tones. Thus, the truth of human experience is
that everyone experiences and perceives things
differently, based on history, location, upbring-
ing, culture, and personality. Just as it is enlight-
ening to see the differences among poems, it is
equally enlightening to see the similarities. There
are stylistic and structural similarities that tran-
scend time and location, as exemplified in the use
of free verse and imagery in the poems discussed
here. There are also similarities in how the poets
grapple with identity (Youssef and Chin) and
how they love their cultures (Youssef, Whitman,
Sandburg, and Chin). It is also intriguing to
realize that poets are often influenced by poets
with whom they have little in common. Youssef
claims Whitman as an influence in terms of style
and form, which means that he is able to set aside
his philosophical differences with Whitman
about America. All of these factors are impor-
tant both in writing poetry and in studying and
learning from it.
Source:Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘America,
America,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learn-
ing, 2009.
Ferial J. Ghazoul
In the following excerpt from a review ofWithout
an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems,
Ghazoul writes that the book is ‘‘a work for all
seasons and for all readers.’’
For a poetic chronicle of modern Iraqi life,
one could not find better than the works of
renowned Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef. Not only
does he capture the tragedies within tragedies
in the unfolding of contemporary Iraqi history,
but also the hope against hope in Iraqi experi-
ence. Born in 1934 near Basra, and reared in
rural Abul-Khasib by his grandfather, he con-
tinues to retain a fascination with the rustic
nature of southern Iraq—its palm trees and sun-
sets, its marshes and migratory birds. His poetry,
written regularly since his teenage years, is a
record of a collective experience, albeit one
expressed in highly personal lyrics. Educated in
Basra and Baghdad, and a long-time resident of
several Arab and European capitals, the vora-
cious reader Saadi Youssef has assimilated
world literature as well as lived the struggles
and plights of cities like Aden and Beirut. He
has translated major Western poets—Walt
Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Yannis Ritsos,
Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Frederico Garcia
Lorca—and several African novelists. He is
thoroughly acquainted with the great historians,
Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun, as well as radical
thinkers from Marx to Angela Davies [sic]. His
encyclopaedic knowledge does not appear on the
surface of his poetry, but functions as a solid
foundation for his deceptively simple lyrics.
Though Saadi Youssef has been translated
into English before and published in antholo-
gies, journals, and literary supplements,Without
an Alphabet, Without a Face, is the first book-
length collection of his poetry. The translator,
Khaled Mattawa, has selected poems from the
various collections of Saadi Youssef and
arranged them in chronological order, covering
more than four decades, from 1955 to 1997. As
an experimental poet, Saadi Youssef covers sev-
eral themes and partakes in varied styles: shorter
imagist poems and longer epic poems, political
poems and nature poems. Regretfully, the trans-
lator did not include samples of Saadi Youssef’s
erotic poetry, published in a collection illus-
trated by an Iraqi artist Jabr ’Alwan, entitled,
Erotica. Not only is this collection significant
because it shows another aspect of Saadi’sAmerica, America