[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much Marcelo.
I feel like you've already sanctified the space,
seriously, in poetry, which is all I ever want.
My name is Farid Matuk, and it's my great honor
to introduce Marwa Helal tonight.
I have been watching videos of talks
by abolitionist scholar Joy James
and she's got me thinking about agape.
It's a word that helps us mark a different kind of love, where
"eros" is romantic, where "filial" is sisterly, "agape"
is supposed to be transcendent.
Agape, we are told, is realizing God's sacrifice
of a child for the world.
And agape is realized in that child's faithful answer
to the sacrificial call.
It's a confounding story, Christianity,
which is maybe why it engenders so many misreadings.
Its mistaken premise is a singular God,
and its pathos is misplaced in the preciousness of a singular
son.
The preciousness of a singular son
is a given to a patriarchy or the power
to engender and hoard property through generations
is situated in a collaboration between the penis
and the family name between the phallus and the signature
and where the state reveals its purpose not
in facilitating liberty but in co-signing
patriarchal accumulation with its violence.
Sometimes the theme is too buried
under the armature of the plot.
Sometimes the culture clings too heavy
on the transcending spirit.
Refusing to atomize the field of existence into self and other,
agape transcends the mortal, singular self.
And agape doesn't convey the lover to a heavenly elsewhere.
Alive or dead, agape returns the lover.
Agape brings the lover back.
As Marwa Helal quotes from Oum Kalthoum song,
"To the one I saw before I saw and to the body before the body
worries."
Joy James finds agape realized in the actions
of anti-imperial rebels disciplining their lives
to a strategy of confrontation with the violence of the state.
These rebels have already transcended singularity
and returned to a love so vast and so raw
that only the ante body can bear it.
That's the title of Marwa's new book,
the portal we've come here to approach, the crochet hook
onto which we can hope to be wound.
Ante, A-N-T-E, as in before.
The body before it was promoted only
after much professional development
to the rank of a singular self.
The body before it was awarded only
after sifting through unprecedented numbers
of worthy candidates with the honor
of everyday American loneliness.
If the rebel refuses these honors,
the state can try to absent the rebel,
can try to pluck them out of the vast ante-body of the people
and isolate them in a clandestine prison.
But Joy James says, "It's already too late.
The sacrifice has been made.
The example has been set.
The fact of transcendent love for the collective
is already understood."
So this isn't a sermon or a lecture.
It's an introduction.
But am I to read you a list of accolades,
are we that committed to the ritual of distinction?
Analogous to the state, the foundations and award
granting bodies, the poetry academies and the poetry
societies can try to honor the poet into a prison
house of singular achievement.
But the poet, especially this poet,
who has reversed the very waters of English
and made them run from right to left, this poet who
knows enough to say give Caesar back what belongs to Caesar,
this poet did not come to play at being distinguished.
Marwa did not come to be plucked from the collective field
where poetry is a technology to braid body and word, self
and other, music and meaning, present and past
at the double edge of body and breath.
We do not introduce the poet, we make way for poetry
so that we can join in its braiding.
When Marwa writes, "who real?
Who free?' they are not distinguishing.
They are not threshing the wheat from the chaff,
the chosen from the unchosen.
That's trifling religious shit.
That's trifling empire shit.
Return to Caesar what is Caesar's,
but return the poet to poetry.
When Marwa writes "Who real?
Who free?"
it's the voice of agape that speaks its loving invitation
and call.
How are we going to answer?
Please welcome Marwa Helal.