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This article aims at showing how the poetry of Joy Harjo and Saadi Youssef becomes the imagined geography of the Muscogee (Creek) nation and Iraq respectively. Despite the different contexts of struggle, both poets depict a national community through imagining a decolonized geographical space where intellectuals and poetry act as witnesses to defy the colonial erasure of memory. This article will attempt to highlight certain intellectual and literary texts that take active part in imagining and presenting an anti-colonial counter discourse that would lead to a new understanding of national identity and nation. It will rely on Bill Ashcroft’s theory of Postcolonial Utopianism and building imagined homelands as well as Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. Representative poems from the two poets, Joy Harjo and Saadi Youssef, will be examined in order to shed light on the theoretical and imaginative creation of nations.

The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” These questions underscore the compelling need for the guiding voices of Arab intellectuals at this deeply divided present moment in the Arab world that has effectively seen the destruction of seemingly stable nations and identities. It is important to understand why and how easily “things fell apart” for Arab nations and peoples under the destructive influence and direct intervention of imperialist and Zionist agendas and forces. What does it mean to speak truth to power in the current Arab and global context where the destruction of Arab nations, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen has become the all too familiar, convenient, and accepted status quo, which is marked by destructive and exclusionary discourses? It has become incumbent upon the Arab intellectual/writer/poet to lead the self-examination process in order to provide an understanding of the current Arab situation within its greater global context and construct a revolutionary and insurrectionary oppositional discourse that would expose and dismantle the current defeatist and divisionary discourses. Antonio Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and consent, Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses, and Edward Said's important ideas on the intellectual's critical consciousness, secular criticism, and beginnings are the theoretical lenses used to help decipher the catastrophic happenings in the Arab world. This study also examines excerpts of literary works by important Arab poets/intellectuals, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Bader Shaker Al-Sayyab, Saadi Youssef, and Yusuf Al-Ani.

A poem is presented.

A poem is presented.

Asked why U.S. poets don't normally play a more visible role in public debates, Dan Halpern, v-p, editorial director of Ecco Press and copublisher of Fourth Estate books, finds the situation \"very complicated. The poets of Latin America-Neruda, de Andrade, Vallejo - and the great Eastern European poets, especially in Russia, speak to the people. When a new book comes out in Russia, it sells 100,000 copies, and they're lined up the day it's released. The poets somehow connect with the population.

A poem is presented.

\"Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems\" by Saadi Youssef and translated by Khaled Mattawa is reviewed.

Mattawa examines two poems that explore the dynamics of how self-knowledge and freedom conjoin in creating the solidarity and reverence for human life necessary for democracy. Walt Whitman's rangy, sprawling, repetitive, and endearing Democratic Vistas is a passionate defense of democracy, an ardent response to Carlyle's screed \"Shooting Niagara.\" The second poem is by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef.

WITHOUT AN ALPHABET, WITHOUT A FACE: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef TRANS. FROM THE ARABIC BY KHALED MATTAWA. Graywolf $16 paper (2160 ISBN 1-55597-371-X