Reciting

Illustration by Mariam.

I grew up on dubbed dialogue and synchronized subtitles, on those Turkish soap operas with lip-synced romance, acting as odes to chivalric dedication and death, a poetic saga of the worldly life against a fervent paradise. If there’s a soundtrack for every emotion, soaps follow a maqam for hyperreal love, with rhymes for repeated heartbreak and unwritten fate like failed semiotics. I listened to medieval monorhymes offscreen as schemes for affectionate thought, but stanzas are broken refrains, overused. I loved stardom, the kingdom of literary salons, but I never felt I could record sound the way I understood it. Stars, listen. I have something to say. ◆

Maqam: Melodic modes in Arabic music.

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Rasha Alkhateeb is a Palestinian-American poet and received her MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from The University of Baltimore.