Matt Mooney, a Galway native, lives in Listowel.
He has seven poetry collections. Won The Pádraig Liath Ó Conchubhair Award.
Deputy Editor of The Galway Review. Published in The Blue Nib, Feasta, Vox Galvia, The Stony Thursday Book, The Galway Review, The Mill Valley Literary Review, Howl, Ragaire and in many international anthologies. His latest published book is a collection of poems titled ‘ The Moon and Báinín’.
Paul Catafago’s The Palestinian Freedom Now Suite
reviewed by Matt Mooney
‘Tread softly ere you tread on my dreams’, Yeats said to his readers, and I am very conscious of this warning in my attempt here to unravel the thoughts of Paul Catafago, son of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother who was born in Queens New York and now lives in New Orleans in:
‘a country that funds
the subjugation
of my father’s people’.
Bold and brave, full of true grit and steadfastness his indomitable spirit bounces off the pages of his third poetry collection The Palestinian Freedom Now Suite as he writes with heartfelt love and compassion for his displaced people going through catastrophic tribulations in his homeland at the hands of the IDF. Mandela said, ‘I have a dream‘ and so has Paul, expressed clearly in the last lines of Remember Us:
Remember.
We too shall return
Remember we shall return’.
These poems certainly display the quality of steadfastness in the DNA of his people, his countrymen and country women.
‘Remember our Sumud,
how steadfast we are.
Palestinian food and hospitality is highlighted at the very start of this book, Hummus, mezze, smelts, tabbouleh, fattoush, baklava, baladi (giant tomatoes), all tumble out of ‘The Best Hummus’. He has us enjoying not only the prospect of his enticing menus but suggests we have a smoke of Hookah after enjoying the food in true Palestinian style. He gushes with pride in what he will serve up to you,
‘Come
we will have a feast in your honor
and I will make you
the best coffee you ever had’.
His tone changes to one of regret suddenly when he has to admit to himself and to us the raw reality of the situation there as it stands now. Quickly life as a light comedy turns to tragedy. His family features in nostalgic lines:
I would like to take you there’
take you to my family’s
orange groves,
show you the house
where my father
lived as a young boy’
maybe we can take a drive
50 miles south to Gaza.
‘It’s so beautiful in Gaza
we can sit on the beach,
we can swim in the Mediterranean sea.
but oh they have made Gaza a prison’
and take you to Acca
where my grandfather was
born
but my family’s houses
no longer exist.’
In an instant blue skies cloud over so to speak because of the Israeli occupation and he practically breaks down when the reality strikes him:
‘This is not political
It’s all so personal
so very personal,
and I can’t stop crying’.
In Identification there’s a subtle black humour in it in the way he uses repetition in a clever way of throwing at you the contrast between the beautiful way it was for them once and the brutal truth of what it is like now to be a Palestinian in Palestine. It’s a fine piece of writing:
‘And my father’s family
owned orange groves,
they were in the orange
business in Jaffa
my grandmother’s family
owned part of Mount Carmel
in Haifa on the Mediterranean coast.
That’s very Palestinian.
And when
I went to Palestine
the first time
I was shot by soldiers
of the Israeli Defense Forces.
That’s very Palestine.
His emotional ties with his fatherland unfurl in waves poem after poem. Some waves break with alarming strength on the shores of our minds, those of us who care deeply for a beautiful people in the throes of genocide. In his poem ‘A Type of Palestinian’ he rounds on those who dare to classify him. They soon found out they were dealing with a poet of steely resistance and steadfastness, Sumid, a virtue he extolls in his people suffering inhuman duress.
‘I am not a meek and mild Palestinian,
I am an angry Palestinian.
I will write about the olive trees they uprooted
and I will say I am the roots’.
If it has been one long nightmare for us on the wings so far away in safety to watch what is happening day by day in Gaza what must it be like for a poet with emotional ties with it, whose roots are there and who chose to be a resistance writer from a distance? We always look for hope and it in his poems that speak of better times there that we find it, in his poignant folk memories like:
‘I long for
the old
songs that
celebrated life’.
I have already mentioned Remember Us and its significance as to where they stand, the Palestinians. This is a remarkable and memorable poem in which the poet sets out his patriotic stall for the world to evaluate, a flagship poem on the tragedy of his people’s genocide:
And in despair like those in the rest of the world who care deeply enough he says:
They will kill our children
and justify the killings.
They will do horrific things
to us and never be held accountable’
And you will become weary.
There is pride of place too and pride in his people in every stanza.
‘Remember we
did not idolise
material or money’.
And,
Remember though
we were a people
who worshipped
the creator in different ways’.
He lays down a marker as to how family life was rich in the way it was lived out and modeled.
It makes the contemplation of the genocide there that the whole world has witnessed all the more atrocious in its concentration on wiping out whole families all at once.
‘Remember that in our houses
there were four generations
who lived.
Remember we were a people
who honoured both
our elders and our children’.
These poems are a a treasury of memories, a folk and cultural treasury of Palestine, his homeland, which Israel is destroying step by step, obliterating their lives and their living culture.
The poet, Paul Catafago, makes an open call to us to stand by his people in these present circumstances:
‘Stand with us,
grieve with us.
Then struggle
for justice with us.
Read our poems.
Eat our foods
Wear clothes with
our embroidery.
Bear witness
to whom you know us
to be’.
In Borderline the poet refers to the abominable killing of children, some 50,000 up to May 2025.
‘You tell me the number of children we’ve
lost
it is a mathematics of erasure
it is a poetry of unimaginable loss
a theology of genocide’.
Here again his despair resonates with us and we feel at one with him:
All this in a book that any poetry lover would love to read and own, both for the beauty of its cover design and the urgency of its contents for the reader who seeks to see into the soul of Palestine.
His ‘A poem is a Knife’ would grace any great collection for its keenness of craft and its cleverness on the business of the sharpness of skill involved in getting down to saying it straight, whatever has to be said, without any frills. In its staccato, elongated shape, using repetition menacingly it grasps your attention unflinchingly:
‘In fact after the poem
has done what it needs to do to you;
rip you apart without prejudice,
it will come back and do it again
You’ll see
You’ll see:
A poem is a knife;
A poem is a damned knife’.
The latter section of this collection introduces us to the world of Jazz and before long we are mixing with the greats in that genre of music with which he is in love. In the light of his circumstances as a son of political refugees from the Arab world where Jazz with its deep rooted spirituality went back decades and add that to the fact that jazz originated in the African American community in New Orleans, his passion for and knowledge of jazz is not very surprising. One could imagine that it was his ‘bridge over troubled waters’. His poems here take a new turn and they lose nothing as we might say in the change of channel and just as ‘music has charms to sooth a savage breast’, so too we are soothed somewhat as we read them after taking the full impact of his poems about the horrific happenings in Gaza and their effects on his dreams and emotions. For him he said:
‘poetry is like
is like
life
and jazz is life and
jazz is life’.
The tragedy of his people does not go away either in his musical travels that take us into the lives of the legends like Coltrane crying for the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a scene one could easily transfer for any one of us to the devastation of Rafah and KhanYunis in rubble;
‘Coltrane begins to cry.
With his blessed,
blessed saxophone,
John Coltrane cries’.
In equal measure we are struck by the poignancy in the poem about a one of the best jazz singers in the Arab world, ‘Fairuz Takes You Home’:
‘Fairuz takes you
away from this
cold, strange place;
away from
your exile.
Today
Fairuz takes you
home’.
She takes you home’
His great hopes for Palestine, which he longs to see free, is shown so strongly in the title poem of his collection:
‘From the river to the sea
Free
Free
Free
Palestinians will be free
Free from occupation and apartheid
Free from God damned genocide’.
In ‘Roots’, the first poem in the book, he points out how his position jars him, understandably:
‘born in the US
a country that funds
the subjugation
of my father’s people’.
No wonder then he says later in the poem he dreams of returning to Jaffa where his grandfather had so many orange trees and where his father was born and there he said he would:
‘plant the seeds of
an orange tree,
and then my family will have
new roots in our ancestral
homeland’.
I commend Poet Paul Catafago on a singularly beautiful book of poetry that pulls you in and draws you on the moment you open it. I for one enjoyed the journey and you will too. It’s an unmissable read in the times we are in. His voice needs to be heard.
– Matt Mooney.
The Palestinian Freedom Now Suite is available from the publishers. The Bodily Press, priced at 18 dollars.
Two dollars of that will go to the Gaza Soup Kitchen.
…………………………………………………………..
Paul Catafago is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer born and raised in Queens, New York City. A long-time spoken word poet, Catafago is the author of three books, “Sumud: Poems of the Palestinian Diaspora” (Sligo Creek 2024), “Un Poema Es Un Cuchillo” (Coleccion Playa Sucia 2025) and “The Palestinian Freedom Now Suite” (The Bodily Press 2025). In the fall of 2025, Catafago will be participating in the Armada Libertad International Poetry Festival in El Salvador and The George Town Literary Festival in Malaysia. Paul Catafago lives in New Orleans where he has performed poetry with jazz musicians and produced documentaries about the city’s elder musicians.
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