I think that the major difference in Hayan's poetry and his prose is the ability of prose to delve into more situational detail and anecdotes, while poetry maintains a more symbloic and mysterious element. I loved Hayan's "Becoming the Center of Mystery" mainly because of the anecdotes he included, my favorite one being the one about his reply to a girl in his class' questioning his non-halal eating. He humorously engaged in a sequence of arguements with her and concluded by "blessing his frankfurter" for her. I think the prose gives more leeway to describe the entire surroundings and background that led to a specific incident- for example the prose has many details regarding stories of neighbor's lives and historical background of feelings towards Saddam and other figures. Hayan's poetry is more symbolic and each word bears more heavily on the overall outcome. For example "Pregnancy" is a very personal poem, and given that it is a poem one does not get the background or other situational details regarding the incident that prose would have accounted for, but this is also what makes the poem so strong and direct. As Majaj alluded to, I believe that the real problem is not that poetry is not effective but that poetry is less circulated and widely read than prose, so Arab American writers like Hayan need to make sure and include prose in their overall collections in order to be heard.

What i really enjoyed about this poem was it's universality. I feel like a lot of the poems are really beautiful but they are not really accesable on a universal level. This poem had traces of Arab culture, for instance the setting itsself, but on the other hand it could be any experience recalled by anybody who has grown up American as well. I felt this to be true for a lot of Hayan's poetry. There was a really down-to-earth feel to it that I really appreciated.

I really liked this poems raw imagery and blunt nature. It reads almost as a movie script; and Charara effectively paints a in-your-face no frills image of the surroundings without being overly verbose. The easy flowing nature of the poem effectively represents a coming of age/young adult point of view. With such raw imagery as in the description of the boy who "drowned at the bottom of the dam...[with] his stomach bloated"; the reader is pulled into the sort of invincible mind of the author, the feelings of invincibility that come at the point right between ones coming of age. The last stanza reiterates this observation; the author discusses how a simple "keep-out..danger" sign would not suffice n keeping other kids from drowning; and this is said in a very apatheitic/almost cold sort of hopeless manner. Essentially the poem exudes a youthful rebelliousness with its uneasiness(sp?)-inducing diction.

First things first murderous and killing are not vocabulary that I find either asscioated or appropriate to abortion, that being said...this poem follow a longer history of such poems and writings, I was strongly reminded of Anne Sexton's "after the abortion". I certainly found this to be the most "american (?)" of anything we've yet read.

I found 8 Houses interesting because of the wierd irony with homeland and exodus that come up in the poem. Certinly we have seen alot of writing about the displaced immigrant and second generation's arab americans, but in "Henry Ford" there is as much a desire to escape as to find belonging. The end of the second section "Hubbard's orders, plain and simple/ Shoot any nigger that crosses!/ Any wonder we stayed in Detroit?" This shows Charara's indentification with America's other poor communities of color( he'll reference this again in the last passage) but also I sort of desperate imprisonment that characterised the industralized, poor, colored Midwest.I felt it even more in Camp Dearborn. I grew up in the midwest and it definatly has its own special geographical and physcological entrapment. In this way the these poems and prose pieces ARE more localised and more place specific which is interesting given the situation of the Lebanese diaspora. This poem put me right back in my youth in missouri and i found myself growing more and more uncomfortable the more i read, so i guess it did its job.

"Saddam" is interesting to me because it deals with "big" issues (war, poverty, violence), as well as more minor concerns (what do I name my dog) without losing any flexibility in what the author is trying to say. The speaker at first thinks its funny to tease his uncle by saying his hero, a cruel dictator, is no more than a dog. However, he concludes that the dog is better than the dictator. He isn't fit to share the name with an innocent dog. This is important, because it is a sign of the speaker’s new sense of responsibility and growth as a person. The reader knows that the speaker has learned something through his experience with the dog. .

I loved Charara’s “Saddam” under Becoming the Center of Mystery. With a title like Sadaam, it is hard to imagine it would be devoted to a young child in search of a name for a new puppy. While the story does focus on politics and a conflict between uncle and father, the child and puppy give the story a bit of innocence and soften a subject that is near impossible to soften. The child is very discerning and precocious; able to identify that even a dog “did not deserve the title of ‘killer.’” The child identifies that the Dino may make mistakes, but he would never “turn boys into dust, turn cities into graveyards.”

“Becoming the Center of Mystery” resonated with me. I identified with Chrara’s American experiences – instead of baseball, I watched basketball, instead of Saddam Hussein’s threat, I battled Osama bin Laden references. I especially loved her imagery. As I read, scenes unfolded before me, punctuated by my own reminiscing. Charara’s inclusion of details, such as exact store names in “Halal” or the precise details of a phone call back to the old country in “Long Distance.” These carefully described snapshots of Arab-American life read like a movie. I also enjoyed Charara’s style – humor mixed with poignancy, a touching, occasionally sarcastic, mélange of emotions.

Camp Dearborn struck me most as a scar against nature and youth and simply a place to accept as familiar, comfortable, a home. The first stanza establishes a wretched setting, unattended to by both man and nature. Moreover, the Camp severely opposes growth, as apparent in Charara's diction of the lake, water, the essence of life, "sprouting/ mufflers, broken bottles/ and eight-track tapes." All that figuratively grows or subsists is trash. "The camp [is] not even/ in Dearborn."
This is clearly no cultivating playground for children... And yet the next stanzas describe activities performed/associated with adolescence; pot, cigarettes, jumping fences, voyeurism, etc. Additionally, it seems arguable that God has figuratively abdandoned this place as the children jump off the dam "levitating [their] hands in praise/ of gravity."
Also, the anticlimactic ending of the poem adds to the theme of stagnation in youth present in the Camp: The impetus of being called a chicken-shit is the hesitant boys' deciding factor for taking the potentially fatal leap.
I depressively enjoyed the poem, especially in considering it in relation to the Camp Dearborn essay.
-sami saati

I guess I like the way the seriousness in "Becoming the Center of Mystery" is woven so closely with humor that the images really are memorable. Like when he walks into the Halal meats and you think "oh, this is going to be funny somehow" and then you're expecting to hear about gross meat, but the way you usually hear about gross meat is from blood stains on an apron or some crazy moustached guy sharpening a knife. The way the meat is described is actually really sickening. This pattern keeps up with the description of the dead boy over the dam, and especially the cousin whose face was ripped apart from a rifle bullet. There's really a sense of conditioning, like trauma is just another day in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Hayan Charara's poem "The pregnancy", as stated, is a deeply personal poem which describes the birth of his child (?). Another poet who invokes a sense of personal emotion in his writings is Joseph Awad. His can be compared to Chararas' on much similar terms because both poets lost their mothers early in their adolescence. In "The Widower", Joseph Awad describes the silence he and his father share after the loss of their mother/wife on the way to school. Although "The pregnancy" is not a poem explicitly alloted to his mother, he does remember "his mother always and forever" when his wife is in labour. There is something about seeing a child being brought into the world especially after one looses a loved-one, that almost feels like life starts all over again.

Charara’s “8 Houses from the Birthplace of Henry Ford” deals with the feeling of being misplaced. In a town with a French background, and the looming idol of America’s largest industry, an Arab child feels awkward. The oppression of Detroit’s car factories was heavy on all involved, but Charara does not even fit into the black minority and cannot escape it. “My name is Hayan Charara,/ from Motor City, and I couldn’t/ utter the simplest word in French” (327). 8 houses away from the birthplace of Henry Ford, and Charara was not anywhere near his fame, fortune, or American ideal.

“Hamza Aweiwi, A Shoe Salesman in Hebron,” deals poignantly with the social ramifications of political injustice. Simple, yet powerful accusations lie in the lines “He knows he doesn’t need to fix them to walk far enough where people live differently. There, boys are washing cars, housewives water lawns.” This necessitates the reader’s acknowledgement that the substandard infrastructure of Palestinians living juxtaposed to Jewish settlers cannot be reduced to the underlying political causes of such iniquities but must be exposed as the vulgarity of denying human beings basic rights and necessities. Similar to his work set in Detroit, Charara manages to confront social imbalances and at the same time, allows the reader to formulate the information presented through subtle demonstration of oppression and inequality. I would be interested to read anything Charara has written, prose or otherwise, during the second Intifada or in light of the recent disengagement.

-Sarah Beckham