Considering Trump’s recent racial slurs at an oval office meeting on immigration, this is an increasingly relevant time to review a journal featuring the various plights and pleasures covered by American writers from North African and Middle Eastern countries. In its 21st issue, Fifth Wednesday continues its longstanding effort to publish writers who “..have the creative and intellectual power to make generous contributions to our understanding of diversity, community, compassion and cultural learning.” The Publisher’s note describes the contributors as people “who have come to our land to find a more certain, a more peaceful, a more prosperous future,” and who know “the many hardships caused when a nation, any nation, will not or cannot provide the conditions for its citizens to live without fear, hatred, and violence.”
From poetry to fiction and nonfiction, it’s clear that these writers have several common threads between them. They long for lands lost and share stories of assimilation, shaky new gains and incredible loss. Many of them also have a talent for linguistics and an eye for sociolinguistics, which is referenced in several pieces throughout the journal. Ibtisam Barakat uses wordplay in her poem, "Pain in Three Languages." In Arabic the word means "distance," while it translates to "suffering" in English. The poem evolves with each new translation and takes a turn with the French word pain translating to "bread," which permits the poem to take a celebratory ending. It’s a simple poem which explores the depth of sociolinguistics. Any monolingual lover of words should be inspired to take on a second language after reading this gem.
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian’s poem, "Multilingual," has a byline which speaks for itself; “Reduced emotional resonance of language.” This poem begins, “If language were a city, I’d be homeless in its alleys,” and ends with the poet wondering if any other language could do the heaviness of her lines quite the same justice as her mother tongue does. These poems alone would make this journal a standout read for any multilingual student or teacher.
Furthermore, Lena Zaghmouri’s short nonfiction piece, "The Psyche of a Palestinian-American writer," makes this journal a worthwhile read for any teacher or student, period. This piece talks about Lina’s experience sharing her personal essay in a nonfiction workshop, which she describes as “harrowing.”
In the essay, Lena feels nervous about submitting this essay about the tumultuous marriage of her interracial parents, as any student would. As a Palestinian-American, she admits to feeling even more nervous about reinforcing negative stereotypes about Palestinian men and leaves out key truths about her father to avoid denigrating her culture.
The reception of her work is cringeworthy and her reaction is heart wrenching. Lena struggles between the loss of interest in telling her parents’ story and the disinclination to be robbed of it. Although this narrative of personal pain feels extremely intimate, Lena acknowledges that she is sharing a common experience. She writes, “Of course, I know-and knew then-that many writers, especially writers of color, had faced this sort of predicament often-having others take their writing and shape it into something unrecognizable, either by their revisions or their perceptions.”
"The House in Aleppo that I Would Never Get to See," a poem by co-editor Hedy Habra, expresses loss mostly in terms of descriptions of the house passed down by grandmothers who promised that one day, the poet would get see the house. This poem is reminiscent of a mother mourning a baby in terms of wasted beauty and all the lost possibilities. The reader herself can’t help but become deeply engaged in the scenery, infatuated with the image of “the marble fountain inlaid with pink stone,” while simultaneously burdened with the knowledge that these scenes will never be carried out. Habra envisions the possibilities of the house, even in times of war, “…the secret passage leading/from the cave to the once imposing Citadel,/offering the possibility of an escape…” but again, even with the compromise of using the house to alleviate “the anxiety of living under constant threat,” Habra writes in mourning.
The marks of PTSD are also a prevalent theme in the journal. Philip Metres discusses the effect war has had on his father in his short, touching poem, "Veteran, Father." Elmaz Abinader shares a story titled "Fourth of July" from the forthcoming novel, The Language of Dreams.
"The Fourth of July" is a story which leads the reader to believe the main character is hiding in response to real bombings, “In the closet alone, she rests her head against a back wall. Clothes hang in front of her…She wishes she had a cigarette or a hand to hold.” The reader slowly realizes that the main character, Dede, is reacting to the sounds of American fireworks in the days preceding the annual fourth of July celebration. Dede compares her current intolerance for noise to her normal reaction fireworks in Beirut and attributes the change to the bombings she suffered through. She asserts, “It’s almost as if our hearing had to adjust to fear what we never feared.”
Fifth Wednesday notes that “President Donald Trump signed an executive order early in 2017 that banned travel to the United States by the residents of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.” For this Fall 2017 issue, the journal chose to feature a stunning collection of photos from each of these seven countries, as a “a link to peoples and cultures we dare not turn from.” This journal certainly succeeds in its effort to portray a shared humanity and convey the importance of an accepting multicultural American society.