Eating the Archive

Eating the Archive by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh offers a stunning portrait of life in the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, where Qasmiyeh was born. The poems examine even the harshest aspects of the camp with tenderness, pondering existential questions about time, family, language and identity. A mother's blurry photograph, a father's sharpened knife, blood stirred into watery lentils and other glimpses into Qasmiyeh's upbringing enrich this raw and profound collection.

About the Author :
Born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a poet and translator whose doctoral research at the University of Oxford examines containment and the archive in 'refugee writing'. Time, the body, and ruination inform his poetry and prose, which have appeared in journals including Modern Poetry in Translation, Stand, Critical Quarterly, GeoHumanities, Cambridge Literary Review, PN Review, Poetry London and New England Review. Yousif is the Creative Encounters Editor of the Migration and Society journal, and his collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.

Review :
In Eating the Archive, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh offers object lessons on what is - and isn't - graspable: a photograph, a frying pan, a gun, language, time, prayer, a mirror, a razor, a divination bowl. Who is the author of the archive? The poet bears witness, to what lives and dies right in front of him, and inside him. He does this by writing, 'a trace still as it is still.' To read Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is to step into a caesura: a place where presence and absence engage with attention; a place where erasure speaks back; a camp of voices that refuse to be forgotten or silent. - Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry Unbound Federico Garcia Lorca suggested that every poet has a wound, but what if, as Yousif M. Qasmiyeh writes in his new book Eating the Archive, 'the wound is continuously postponed'? Enter memory lodged with shrapnel, where to view anything culminates in breathing through time that 'cuts through words'. This vast and beautifully parablesque second collection by Qasmiyeh is a poetics of rupture, of cracks and fissures. Here we find a writer so philosophically alert to the crossing of danger that is 'experience'. With a knack for echolalic narrative, Qasmiyeh is able to both fragment and distil time, looping back to remember and re-remember what happened to the author and his family from their time in Lebanon's Baddawi refugee camp. Eating the Archive offers us a densely physical consideration of language-the difficulties of writing to name anything that comes from the archive of mind and body through to the 'limb of a word'-where writing itself is risk. Qasmiyeh is one of the most exciting new writers of the twenty-first century. - James Byrne, Of Breaking Glass