Les petites vieilles
In July 2024, I went to Toronto to speak with the poet Dionne Brand. As I walked back to my hotel one afternoon, passing students huddled over lattes and neighbors exchanging rote niceties, a friend called to tell me that Israel had bombed an UNRWA school in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 25 Palestinians. I thought of Brand’s poem “Nomenclature for the Time Being”: “The beautiful innocence of those // who live at the center of empire, their / wonderful smiles, their sweet delight and // and their singular creation of the / word, hope, when I am actually dying.” With piercing clarity, these lines articulate the terrible terms of imperial definition—how distance is not simply a neutral measure, but a willful construct that authorizes colonial violence.
This moment came back to me when I first read Marilyn Hacker’s sonnet “Les petites vieilles,” named after a poem by Charles Baudelaire. While Baudelaire observes a gathering of old women with a kind of contempt punctured by tenderness, Hacker centers the concerns of the women themselves and shifts the geography to attend to the West’s brutality, even as her poem remains set within the imperial core. “Les petites vieilles” thus forms a vexed knot of disidentification—desire and affiliation jostling with various forms of distance, all emplotted in a lineage of European writing. But by the poem’s final line, the women’s attention has turned away from Palestinian journalists working under fatal conditions and toward their own bodily needs; the word “starved” betrays their “beautiful innocence,” their distorted definition amplifying the gap.
— Claire Schwartz
Les petites vieilles
for Megan Fernandes
The two women in their eighties discuss
Palestinian journalists, while they
drink a glass of Sancerre on a terrace.
One of them just turned in her article
to the journal she’s written for since the first
Intifada, but it’s ten years since she’s been
back; she gets firsthand accounts from friends.
The other wishes she were in Beirut,
but the Beirut she thought she knew is not
there, friends scattered on three continents.
Zoom sometimes stretches distances. Arthritis
sucks, but they’d still both rather be
out there, talking to people, taking notes.
“It’s half-past eight. I’m starved. Let’s order food!”
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Marilyn Hacker is the author of 19 books of poems, most recently Calligraphies (Norton, 2023); two collaborative books (A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr, and DiaspoRenga, written with Deema K. Shehabi); and 22 translations of books by French and Francophone poets.
