To read and listen to this poem, go here. Hindi evokes the loss that is continually occuring even as we gather evidence of life: “Once, a rooftop wedding. Once, a certificate of death. My father collected / every report card of mine growing up.”
Her work also raises many questions archivists well know: problems of words in one language going to rest among other languages, the fixity of electronic documents (or not), and the vestiges and layering of materials of identity. As the author says on Poetry.org, the Academy of American Poets site:
“I wrote this poem after returning to Amman, Jordan, where I was born, for the first time in twelve years. Being there, I found myself thinking about Palestine, my family’s origin, and the role and futility of documents in shaping our lives. Without statehood, passports, records, and certificates attempt to fix identity while often mistranslating it. The poem’s fragmented, recursive form mirrors this instability of translation and belonging, where identity is shaped both by what is recorded and what cannot be documented.”
—Noor Hindi
Keeping (and Telling) the Past 