Contact Marian at: haddadmarian@aol.com Phone: 210.859.7750
Book Review: Words Reflect Spiritual Awareness
Publication: El Paso Times Date: 10/24/2004
Culture, Hope Drive Writer's Heartfelt Book
by Ramón Rentería
El Paso Times
Marian Haddad loves to immerse herself in a world without boundaries.
"I claim three cultures," Haddad said in a phone interview from her home in San Antonio. "I feel as much attached to the Mexican culture as the Arab and American cultures."
Haddad, 42, is returning to familiar turf in El Paso to promote her first major collection of poetry, "Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home."
The youngest of nine children born to Syrian immigrants, Haddad -- the only one in her family born in the United States -- never considered geography as a barrier when she grew up in El Paso.
"That river that divided two countries also somehow connected us," Haddad said.
The book touches on Haddad's tricultural experience on the U.S.-Mexico border and on other basic human experiences, such as life and death. She credits her parents, Salim and Namnoume Haddad, for instilling in her a love of literature and language.
Haddad is optimistic that the book's basic message -- that people focus on what they have in common rather than what makes them different -- will get across.
"We're very divided, very polarized," Haddad said. "I prefer to see the commonalities that bind us."
Haddad often lectures across the United States about how art and music can bring people together, regardless of their religious and political differences. She often uses El Paso as an example of where people of different ethnic roots get along.
"Art is healing and it offers hope," Haddad said. "And that hope drives me."
About Haddad
Age: 42.Present job: Teaches as a visiting writer . . . lectures on creative writing and editing and edits manuscripts.
Education: Bachelor of Arts in creative writing from UTEP; Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, San Diego State University.
Early influences: Leslie Ullman and Rick DeMarinis at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Writing credits: Published a chapbook, "Saturn Falling Down," in 2003. Poems and essays have been published in magazines, anthologies and journals, including the Texas Observer.
Works in progress: . . .children's books, a collection of essays and memoirs, and two collections of poetry.
Ramón Rentería may be reached at rrenteria@elpasotimes.com; 546-6153.
El Paso Poet Comes Home
By Christine Meyer Ponsford
Special to the El Paso Times
Marian Haddad's first full-length book of poems, "Somewhere Between Mexico and A River Called Home" (Pecan Grove Press, $15), is definitive proof of her calling as a true poet in both the historical and literary senses. Haddad is an active participant in her family's stories of love, grief, birth, death, identity, assimilation, unification and separation, yet, at the same time, she is an observer of the family, protector of their history, chronicler of their lives -- objective in details, thoughtful in self-examination.
Other reviewers of Marian Haddad's book refer to her as a "San Antonio poet," as if the title is a condition of where one lives when the book is published. But you cannot have our poet, San Antonio. Marian Haddad is a child of El Paso, and she belongs to us. Her work is a reflection of and is defined by this very place -- a city built at the crux of two countries in which the dividing lines are anyone's guess.
To exist and grow in this place, we must be miners -- not only physically incising the land to create the neighborhoods in which we live and die, but spending those lives mining through an immensely rich and diverse cultural environment, one inexorably joined at the hip to Juárez and the military installations that are the uteri of our city, to discover a vein of individual and collective identities.
The poems contained within Haddad's book are not merely lovely in their craftsmanship. Each individual word choice, the syntactical ordering and length of each line, the construction of each stanza block, the enjambment of one stanza into the next, the placement of each complete poem against another and then into thematic sections -- all these show not only the hand of a skillful, educated poet but, more importantly, an inner muse, some inexplicable voice that speaks to Haddad as loudly as the voices of her family.
They are poems that mine through the transcriptional topsoil of personal experience, down through the caliche of confessional poetry and into the inner core of the human condition at large. One cannot help but personally connect with Haddad's themes of the complexities of the child-parent relationship, from the adulation of one's mother, to the adult child's role reversal with an ailing father who suffers from night terrors.
The third section of the book, "Nawal," contains poems of such dark essential beauty that we cannot turn our heads away, even from the horrific images of a deceased sister's arms "stiff as boards" or the "two drops of blood (that) spurted" from her mouth as she struggled to speak before death. Whether the reader be a curious onlooker of that which is taboo, or a fellow traveler on the road of gripping loss, Haddad's "Nawal" poems are inescapable, standing not only as a monument to a beloved sibling's life and death, but as evidence of the triumph of the female spirit that recognizes the cyclical nature of the universe and inherently understands that what is lost is never truly gone.
Make plans (Dates have passed)
What: Marian Haddad will read and sign copies of her poetry collection "Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home."
First appearance: 6:30 to 9 p.m. Friday , Hal Marcus Gallery, 800 N. Mesa;533-9090. (2004 Reading Date)
Second appearance: 2 p.m. Saturday at the West Side Barnes & Noble, 705 Sunland Park; 581-5353. (2004 Reading Date)
Christine Meyer Ponsford is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program and the Department of Theatre Arts and Film at UTEP. She was poetry consultant for the West Texas Writing Project for four years, is a published poet, and teaches theater arts at Sun Ridge Middle School in El Paso.
Publication: What’s
Up - Entertainment Weekly for El Paso * Las Cruces * Juarez
Date: October 28- November 3, 2004
Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home:
El Paso Poet Marian Haddad Returns Home
by LaRae Malooly
Remember shopping at the old White House Downtown? Back when Kress was
considered more exclusive? Or what about quainter images of pink and
turquoise homes lining dirt roads trod upon by men in wife beaters and
blue bandanas?
Through the eyes of poet Marian Haddad, the imagery of her native El Paso in her collection of poetry, “Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home,” celebrates the essence of our town, her multicultural upbringing, and life with her immigrant family.
Correction. Our immigrant family.
“This collection deals much more with the immigrant experience. It is your story, your grandfather’s story, every Arabic family’s story, every Jewish and Irish immigrant’s story,” Haddad explained. “We’ve heard it before, however I hope to make it different by fusing three cultures: American, Mexican and Arabic.”
We are all immigrants that can relate to her tales of childbirth, war, death, and toil. She will be reading and signing “Somewhere . . .” on Friday night at the Hal Marcus Gallery and again on Saturday afternoon at the Sunland Park Barnes & Noble.
Those of us who love El Paso beyond words, who have many siblings, or who lost a sister to cancer can feel the raw sensuality her stanzas create, and her ebullient and quirky personality grabs audiences during her dramatic readings.
The youngest of nine children, she is the product of passionate, demonstrative Syrian parents who took her into Juarez as a child to pray to the Virgen de Guadalupe before a stop at the Mercado, where “I was always astonished at the juxtaposition of the Elvis velour pictures next to the sacred heart of Jesus pictures next to the naked women velour.”
Her father learned Spanish before he even learned English, peddling goods to “brown men / whose skin shined in the sun like bronze gods from Inca.” Writing became forever paramount in her life at age six, when her mother expressed grief over one son fighting in Vietnam.
“’The walls of the house are weeping for you,’ my mother told me in Arabic to write to him in English,” Haddad recalled. “I knew the nuance, the verbal intensity, and I knew how difficult it would be for her words to be translated into another language.”
As a result, her words as an adult transcend culture and emotion.
There is much reverence in these poems, in awe of the immigrant struggle and unafraid to detail suffering and childhood joy. The celebration of the divine feminine, of conception and birth, weaves throughout, the book rising in tone at the end like a Phoenix and concluding with Transmountain Drive, a love poem to El Paso, written from atop the majestic view of “your colored clutter / of stucco and brick, crows swooping deep into your core / and out of you. I will come back to you, bulwark / from which I sprang.”
“The city itself raised me. I feel like the geographical area is really a part of me. I didn’t realize how much a part of me it was when I left it,” she said.
Today, Haddad, 42, teaches creative writing in San Antonio, always adorned in the bright colors of the Southwest. She studied creative writing at UTEP, taught at Bowie High School (one of her students shot the photograph on her book’s front cover) and pursued graduate work at Notre Dame, Emerson College and San Diego State.
Her mission revolves around multiculturalism, and she spoke on The Hallmark Channel about how it affected her writing. Medical groups seek her laymen insight about how families suffer after a cancer diagnosis. Her poetry and essays have been featured in many ethnic-collections and anthologies.
Even the spread at the reception will include tabouleh and hummus, right next to the queso and salsa. Local guitarist and saxophonist Adam Schydlower and David Romo will perform Flamenco and Arabic music.
Before she goes, Haddad may make another pilgrimage to the top of Transmountain, where, “I see the stars as spirits [of Aztecs and Onate’s dead] twinkling. It is different than any other place. It inhabits me. It is a call to people to look at that, to celebrate that place where two countries and three states meet, and that makes it even more magical.”
Web Posted: 09/12/2004 12:00 AM CDT
Robert Bonazzi Special to the Express-News
Somewhere Between Mexico and A River Called Home: Poems
By Marian Haddad
Pecan Grove Press, $15
San Antonio poet Marian Haddad's first full-length book of poems embraces life and death in a voice both earthy and spiritual. This passionate cycle of hymns leaves no doubt as to the narrator's identity or viewpoint. There are poems for a mother and father from the last of their eight surviving children (Parts I-II); elegies to a dying sister in the third part; and songs from a daughter of fertility in the final section.
For Haddad, water flows from the Syrian Desert of her parents' origin to her arid El Paso birthplace. The opening poem begins: "I lived first/in the house of my mother,/not in-between walls/of stucco or brick,/but in the one house/of children, there,/in the uterus/that held and cupped/the fetus ..." ("House of Children").
The initial series catalogs a painful but respectful relationship with her mother, followed by five charming poems about her aging father. "I have become/a mother, here,/in a room/where time/has turned. My father, my/child, now/burrowed/in this corner ... ("Coddling My Father").
The long title poem that makes up the second section turns to the moving pages of a childhood album and returns to family saga before her time, retelling the parents' tale of courtship, emigration and survival in a new place. This river narrative meanders through the familiar immigrant experience but with its own pulsing current that pauses at the shoreline. There her father "tends his backyard haven/his fruit trees/tomatoes red with life/his little forest/where he finds that young man/strong as a rock/who dug the earth beneath him/and made it rise again."
The third section — about sister Nawal, "the eldest and wisest one" — includes 23 pages of rumination on dying... Yet there are powerful antidotes in "The Body": "I have not written yet of you/lying back and quiet, beautiful again./How you looked more than eighty/at the moment of your leaving./How death casts age upon us,/the death of a flower in its ragged/and terse unflowering."
The last section transforms daily narratives of stifling hospitals into mythic gardens beyond place and time. Being incarnated as Saturn in "Resurrection" creates fresh turns: "She bids me to immerse myself in water,/past the patch of trees. She prays I will bear/children, that they will swim like truth/around my sphere."
There follows a long, evocative lyric that does not pray to a male god, but speaks from the female godhead: "We are florid/and fecund./ We are/the umbilical cord/to the underworld/and the higherworld/and the world rotating/around us. We,/the nexus,/the bearers/and birthers./I have carried/you, sweet pit/of fruit/inside me./Go then/likewise,/and bear/the fruit/of your being ..." ("Cypress, Daughter of Fertility")...intensely serious...scrupulously honest...Meanwhile: "Out of the earth/we have sprung," and a clear spring runs through it. Marian Haddad will have a reading, signing and reception from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Friday at the Louis J. Blume Library on the St. Mary's University campus.
Robert Bonazzi is a San Antonio writer, poet, essayist and publisher. His Poetic Diversity column appears monthly in the Express-News.
Where Arab-American Meets Tex-Mex
Poetry Worthy of Your Bookshelf
"Somewhere Between Mexico and a River Called Home"
by Marian Haddad
Can you be Arab-American and Tex-Mex at the same time? If you talk to poet, writer and professor Marian Haddad, the answer is a resounding yes. You only have to talk her for a few minutes to get a feeling of the richness of culture and diversity of tradition running constantly through her mind. Haddad was born “somewhere between Mexico and a river called home,” in El Paso. She is truly a woman of Texas and certainly a citizen of the world, both characteristics that saturate her poetry.
Somewhere Between Mexico and a River Called Home is a book of Haddad’s poetry published by Pecan Grove Press here in San Antonio, where she currently lives and works. It is a startlingly introspective collection of Haddad’s ideas of home and her love poems to her family. One of the opening pages displays a collage of photographs of her parents and her many brothers and sisters, before and after they traveled to the United States from Syria. But the real portraits are found in the poems themselves, which Haddad uses as a tool to bring us into the midst of her family home--with all its tender nurturing, its painful struggles and its celebrations.
Some of the most vivid imagery in the collection centers around the idea of the mother. Here is an excerpt from her poem entitled “Reverence”:
I will kiss
Although Haddad writes many of these beautiful tributes to her parents, the poems are by no means free of conflict. Much of their intimacy comes from starkly honest lines about “falling from grace,” grief and loss. It is a very tricky thing to write in a confessional way. Over the years I’ve come across angry confessionals, whiny confessionals, depressive confessionals—but Haddad’s poetry is really a confessional of strength. She unabashedly speaks about the emotional dynamics of her family life, but never asks for pity. Rather, the poems are a celebration of that slow molding of our identities as on a potter’s wheel—with the fragments of pain, memory, home and family embedded deeply within.
I believe that some people are called to record their history. To take a written snapshot of the slice of time, place and people they belonged to. It is when people like Marian Haddad answer that call that we can continue to gather together the album of humanity, and really start to understand the things that bring us together rather than tear us farther apart. Somewhere Between Mexico and a River Called Home is a bringing together of cultures and identities in one place. It is a place where someone can be Syrian, Texan, Mexican, Christian, mystical and countless other things all at once. In a divided world, that is a gift worth opening.
Transmountain Drive
Three moons and five suns ago, I stood on your desert mountain,
companies of angels brushing me with breeze, cool on my skin.
from which I sprang. I will wrap my arms around your houses,
tucking your natives in for the night, muslin that converged colors,
Like a fire, fervid and flashing, sun skimmed our rooftops. Like a god,
by Angela Mercedes Becerra
from BEYOND THE BOOK
for WOAI.COM
the feet
of my mother.
I am not ashamed
to bow down
towards grass, wet
with clear sky
water. I will bow
down to her who birthed me,
in whose center
I was housed,
in whose waters
I swam,
from conception
to the coming out.
Bow down
to her
who gave me
life, kiss the flesh—
each digit
achy with gout,
the tireless travel
of the old,
the bearing of things unseen.
El Paso, Texas
by Marian Haddad
purple skin sheathing the night. I gazed downward on the multi-
lights of my city, quivering like the souls of Don Juan de Onate’s dead
and the Twelve Travelers. I lay in your seven laps of light, three
Like a holy man, I sat looking down on your colored clutter
of stucco and brick, crows swooping deep into your core
and out of you. I will come back to you, bulwark
I will grind myself against your walls, stain myself in the juice
of your berries. I remember your nights, when sky came down slowly
to meet the summit of you, came down like a sheet of muslin
color that poured out of sky like a pallet of peacock, until all citizens
within your bastion and all those across your river
in their blue and pink houses lay under a cincture of orange.
it dropped down, stamped its name on our dry land. I will come back
to three moons and five suns ago, sleep in and on your belly,
ten million stars flickering like Aztec tears in your skies.
EXCERPTS FROM TEXAS A&M INERNATIONAL’S CAMPUS NEWSPAPER, THE BRIDGE
Written by Bridge Staff Writer, Alfonso Salinas II
Printed on April 29, 2005
Title: Poet Visits University as Part of Writer Series
As part of Texas A&M International University’s “Voices in the Monte Series”, poet Marian Haddad conducted a presentation about the craft of writing as well as a reading of her poetry April 14.
A native of El Paso, Haddad noticed many similarities between her border town and Laredo.
Beginning her discussion on craft, some of Haddad’s initial insight was, “we (poets) write about what we know.” . . .
“Imagery has to be sharp,” she mentioned, adding, “In our poetry, we show the world to others.”
Revision was another key requirement Haddad emphasized was important for writers . . . she mentioned some helpful exercises writers can use to gather their thoughts.
The first involves typing (or writing) continuously for twenty minutes without stopping. What this exercise does, she explained, is allow the poet to tap into the subconscious imagination. The technique allows the writer to experiment . . .
The second method was simply to write at one’s own pace and to provide extensive details . . .
Several suggestions Haddad offered current and potential writers were to write truthfully, tell a story, and describe experiences.
Towards the end of her presentation, she said, “The poem knows more than the poet.” . .
When asked about the significance of an M.F.A. for writers . . . having obtained her degree from San Diego State University, she believes that seeking an M.F.A. introduces “a sustained community of writers.”
These individuals, as Haddad noted, share a “heightened interest” which is writing.