Review: John Portelli’s ‘Here Was’: a roving, tender look at division and unity

Here Was

by John Portelli,

published by Word and Deed / Horizons

Place, longing and belonging are explored through the prismatic experience of the multilingual nomad in Maltese-Canadian John Portelli’s stunning – and seventh – collection of poetry, Here Was (Word and Deed, Canada; Horizons, Malta).

This collection, which has been translated from Maltese, is a roving and tender examination of the forces that seek to divide us, and the common humanity that ultimately unites us all.

Anyone who has been blind to the extent of the conflict and suffering happening in the world right now might find many of these poems prophetic. But of course, they’re not: Portelli – who is a professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto – has simply been paying attention.

The collection begins in Haifa, Israel, and immediately immerses us in displacement – not only of the traveller narrating the poem but also the other person in the piece: a Palestinian woman reluctant to admit to her identity, “as though she did not belong here”.

From here, Portelli’s poems move across seas and continents, from Toronto to Istanbul, Beirut to Al-Quds, Ramallah to Bologna, tuning into the commonality of oppression, longing and love. Portelli’s writing is at its best when all three of these emotions are explored at once. Consider this selection from the poem To My Mother:

When I fled the island

of melancholy and small-

mindedness,

burdened with the weight

of memories,

drained of emotion,

I clutched the photo tightly

of you holding me on your lap

From my new cold, distant land

 I could not bid

you farewell;

I wait for you

every day

unrelenting

impatient

hopeless

with love.

This longing and love are the cost of a nomadic life. All these tensions are held tight in this poem, and balanced to a beautiful, heart-wrenching effect. It’s a poem that asks us to consider the price we have to pay for wanting what we want, and if it is worth it.

The work is a shove out of our collective apathy

Portelli’s poems would seem to suggest ‘yes’, and also, sometimes, ‘no’. By being a global citizen, one experiences so much: an untethered existence – “I enjoy the spendthrift breaking on the wharf/amid the smells of grilled fish roasting chestnuts/between the chiming of the bells and the cries of the muezzin” (from The Lodos) – but inevitably, one will also miss so much: one’s family, a fixed sense of home and even oneself.

As Portelli writes in The Foreigner:

It seemed forever a life

unbonded with this land:

untuned notes strange

accents the irony of “Have a nice day”.

Still, the social and cultural awareness afforded by being exposed to many different people and places, as seen through the eyes and heart of Portelli, seem wildly and even radically soul-expanding. To have your perspective cracked open, however painfully, is a better alternative to remaining choked by mental, emotional and physical myopia.

I told you

I do not want to die

In a god-forsaken hospital in Toronto, tied to a bed

buried in tubes,

gaping at pale green ceiling

from a long, windowless corridor, breathless.

Portelli’s poems move across seas and continents. Photo: Shutterstock.com

These lines – the beginning of Does Death Come Easier If You Accept It –speak to the wanderer’s restlessness and need for continued expansion of self; the idea of being tied down being in a sense, worse than death.

The poem ends with the speaker hoping to meet his end on a beach, where he can eventually “become one with this all ending sea”. Just as in life, his travels help him become connected to others: their joys as well as their suffering.

As history continues to repeat itself and the events of the planet unfold, often catastrophically, around us, Portelli’s words are a powerful and tender reminder that turning away from the suffering of others shrinks our world and withers our humanity.

Here Was is a shove out of our collective apathy, and a stark reminder that what unites us will always outweigh what divides us, if we are brave enough to get out of our own heads and look – really look – at the world around us.