On Fragments and Silence

I’ve always debated what form of writing suited me most. Early on, I tried that quintessential Canadian form, the short story. Writing my first story and winning a university prize at twenty-two didn’t encourage me though. I published three stories thereafter, yet over the years I concluded that the short story was not my vibe: I remember telling writer friends that it felt as if someone was putting a gun to my head to get characters from A to B; that I had no room for the sort of meandering, crabwise style that has afforded me some readability as a poet. I need to move all over the place as a writer: all over the world, all over my readings, allusions, and notations in notebooks, picking up bits of text underscored and flagged in books on art, on travel. Philosophical rumination; lines transcribed from other poets, memories of lines from movies.

This patchwork characterizes my third collection of poems, Fata Morgana—still in manuscript. Beginning with centos (poems composed of lines from other poems and texts) I branched out to think of the idea of the collage, the fragment of writing, visual perception transposed text, and modes of thinking akin to ideation about paintings. In comparison, writing the short story felt like having to hang out in the same room for untold numbers of hours until an escape route was offered.

The new book of poems consists of lineated free verse, cento, and prose, reflecting my engagement with a kind of auto-mythology cobbled from disparate parts, assembled debris, shimmery mirages on the horizon like those which lured Italian sailors to their death in the Strait of Messina, where fata morgana “horizon” ripples are commonly seen.

Fata Morgana draws on themes of mixed identity. These aesthetic encounters are built from my previous poetry collections including the exotic, the hewn together, and the estranged, a poesis of reverberations toward the manifold, layers of past and present. It is also a kind of usurpation: the vibrational fata morgana illusion on the horizon is a metaphor for a chimera, a monster dismantled from a fictional whole, the fabulations of colonial states as much as identities issued from them. Perhaps the metaphor of the Frankensteinian monster of parts stands for revolution, a messy operation against a greater monstrosity. The fata morgana, an unusual weather event, had me meditating on the idea of strange things seen on the horizon. And what could be stranger and more monstrous, than what we have seen documented over two years on our smart phones and social media, and which has been happening to Palestinians since at least 1948, but genocide.

The Palestinian intellectual Edward Saïd reflected on literary form in relation to the ongoing destruction of Palestine. In his 1986 book of essays After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, writings that accompany Swiss photographer Jean Mohr’s documentation of Palestinians in their cities, villages, and refugee camps, he observes,

the striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present (Saïd 38).

Discussing Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Saïd makes a point about exile and dislocation in Palestinian narrative when he writes, “the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other. Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations.”

It’s tempting for me—and not mistaken—to interpolate this thesis of Palestinian literature (such as the body of work was at the time, just before the first intifada) into my own writing life as the descendant of a Palestinian in exile; my diasporic identity had to become known to me in the present mostly through my own research and writing activity borne of curiosity, obstacle-laden as that research had to be.

My current and past writing projects as a Palestinian daughter have been shored against a past of fragments through whose fires live the 19th century of my great-great grandparents in the Old City; the 1920s and 1930s of my grandparents’ family life and my father’s childhood, their disruption during the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa and my grandparents’ arrival on Turtle Island / Canada, the 1970s and my latent understanding of the need to be silent about “being Palestinian” and “Palestine,” my undergraduate years watching the end of South African apartheid and the start of the Palestinian intifadas, both reported in all the student papers, palpable on many college campuses; and, my own continued self-censorship as my writing career began, many years later.

There was an irony to setting my first short story at the funeral of a Palestinian elder in Toronto. I remember struggling through fragments and even living out Saïd’s “self-consciously staged testimonials”—the story was based on my first attendance at a funeral, and as I wrote about it, I had to remember it was conducted in Arabic, my father tongue, which I did not understand. That didn’t stop my interest in exploring a rooted identity that defied the Canadian one I was given at birth.

All this awareness culminated most recently, while watching in horror the two months of my father’s fatal illness. His symptoms came in mid-October 2023, ending his life on December 28 of that year.

About a week before, he asked me for an update on the Gaza situation from his palliative care bed. Since he’d left his seniors’ home, he had not been watching TV. He was hardly speaking, but he broke his silence one day to ask me this. I told him that, although it was bad, I thought surely, they would stop the aerial bombardment soon.

He answered, “No. They will not stop.”

It is hard to describe the particular heartbreak I felt to hear my ninety-three-year-old Palestinian father say that, while all around us were statements from media, political figures, and opining influencers soaking in the now-renewed mendacity and racism doled out for a century, to excuse colonial destruction.

There has been a specificity to the hate which Palestinians have endured at this time, and my father knew genocidal violence long before seeing such violent displays of it in the last few months of his life. What’s stuck in my mind is that most writers of my age, living in similar socio-economic circumstances, might write about their final days with a dying parent without the need to make something so personal also political. It’s an observation I make as a function of living in a Western liberal democracy.

For me, and I believe many Arabs, the personal is political more times than not. I don’t think I have much choice but to write in that register. Does this distance or alienate my non-Arab reader? Probably. The questions then become about the relatedness of the narrative. Do we need to personally relate to others’ stories, poems, and novels? I have never looked for relational engagement per se, nor do I believe reading or writing literature to be about becoming a better person. And I do not subscribe to the increasingly bizarre idea that literature is for entertainment purposes only; that it is not written under social conditions, or with such conditions in mind.

We must leave it up to readers to decide that social and political conditions inside a story are neither attempts to make moral judgements on them nor appeals to personal relationality. They are extant realities that ought to explain speaker and protagonist attitudes, behaviour, or decisions. They show why people act as they do. At least, smart readers would draw such conclusions. Which are not conclusions as much as illuminations. Perhaps these illuminations are aesthetically pleasing. Or not. I often wonder if this dual ontology of Arab writing, the personal/political, will end, but for that to happen, many systems of oppression would have to be dismantled.

Other writers have engaged this idea through the literary lens of Saïd’s ‘form following function.’ They acknowledge that a declaration of Arab or Palestinian identity has been turned into a political question in a way many, if not most, other identities suffer far less at this time in the history of Western imperialism.

We were at that point still living in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious lies spread from Joe Biden, through CNN and other channels, to the no-longer hidden Israeli agents all over social media posing as liberals and proffering extraordinary racism. Those toxic narratives were put out there with unmatched energy to counter the Palestinian story, which had been conveniently invisible before the 7 October resistance operation against the colonial siege of Gaza and persecution of all Palestinians to lesser and greater degrees depending on their location.

I spent some of the time after those corrosive stories broke in mainstream Western media on a project of my own, for the recuperation of a whole: not Saïd’s broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, but a novel, one I think has a plot, a dénouement. It might not be Chekhovian, it may not adhere to standards so long enshrined in creative writing schools after the lauded methodologies of John Updike, Stephen King, or John Cheever. But it’s a novel anyway. As a poet I was able to embrace the form precisely because it allows for wandering, tangent, excursus.

We have the narratives and eye-witness accounts of Palestinian journalists, over three hundred of whom were murdered by the Zionist state. We have these fragments to shore against our ruins, and in turn our ruins have been revealed by these fragments: the ruin of free speech rights, the ruin of cultural engagement and curiosity, literary journals suppressing our poems after 7 October, the ruin of journalistic integrity as major Western outlets parroted government talking points, refusing to interview the resistance or take up Palestinian journalists’ reports on the ground.

I have only scratched the surface of our ruins, discursive ruins that can’t begin to tell us how remote we remain from understanding that while we go about living our lives without questioning Western political authorities, Palestinians and other Arabs—Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese—must identify real remains of real human beings, real fragments of real homes, churches, mosques, office buildings, universities, schools, hospitals, clinics, greenhouses, cemeteries, bakeries, shoe repair shops, jewelers, nail salons, shopping centres, gyms, mechanics shops, community centres, kindergartens, libraries, archives, historic sites.

There is the unidentifiable and the unrecoverable: nine hundred surnames no longer exist in the civil registry of Gaza, for example. And the civil registry itself was destroyed. We now live in Said’s “almost meta-physical impossibility of representing the present.” We live with the fragments of free speech ideals and fragments borne of physical destruction.

If the fragmentation of Palestine is not enough to convince us that state power has been enabled to enact such destruction anywhere, our forms of fragmented narratives and testimonials may not function for conviction to resist it either. Yet it is in the telling, rather than in the ruin of silence, where such illuminations will shine.

 

Reflections delivered for the inaugural talk at the Shakir-Ellenbogen Lecture Series, Center for Arab American Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn. 4 November 2025.

Image by the American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department from the Library of Congress.

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Nyla Matuk is the author of two poetry collections. Her first novel will appear with House of Anansi in August, 2026.