[…] by Fady Joudah

I am not quite sure how to refer to […], and that is the point. “I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination,” author Fady Joudah told Electric Literature. “The ellipsis in brackets highlights the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”

Cover designer Mary Austin Speaker worked closely with Joudah on all aspects of the design, noting that they wanted the cover to reflect the silence underlying the poems.

[A]s we considered several busier cover designs, we began to see that this book required a minimalist cover in order for the pictographic title to be the focal point. This book is very much about silence—the majority of the poems in the book are titled, simply, “[…],” and we wanted a cover that offered that silence in a very direct, highly visible way.

I designed the package to carry the colors of the Palestinian flag when it’s viewed in full, and added a cloth texture not only to summon the flag but also to signify the interweaving of lives the book illustrates: what appears to be separate is actually woven of the same cloth. The front cover uses only green and black, while the back cover is a red field featuring a single poem. It was Fady’s idea to bisect the cover with two colors, which I agreed lent itself to the very idea of division that this book seeks to subvert with complexity, trouble, history, names, art—all the things that get subsumed by silence—represented here by the ellipsis in brackets as well as Fady’s name in both English and Arabic. The black field offers a space for grief, while the green field below represents land that remains alive despite besiegement. We made the decision to represent Fady’s name in both the English and Arabic letterforms in order not only to render Fady’s presence as Arab and as Palestinian American immediately legible to an American audience, but also to push the boundaries of book cover conventions—Arabic script is beautiful and illustrative, but of what? Printing the author’s name in Arabic invites us to try harder to overcome our gaps in understanding. It’s a start.

In an email to me, Speaker elaborated on the type:

I used Manofa because of its calligraphic look, and because it offers a condensed heavy weight. I wanted a bold, strong, expressive look for Fady’s name, so that it would complement the Arabic script rendering of his name and set with it as one visual unit together. I did offer a version of this cover with the title set in Manofa Medium Condensed as well, but the author preferred Minion for how it reads as more typically Western/English. This book is very much written from a liminal perspective between American and Palestinian perspectives, so the blending of typefaces, with a skew in the direction of Arabic (e.g., title = Western/English, author’s name = English with a calligraphic / Arabic-honoring typeface, author’s name in Arabic = Arabic) speaks directly to the author’s experience as a member of the Palestinian diaspora, speaking to diasporic Palestinians, non-Palestinian Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians all at once—not to limit the audience, but to put a finer point on those whom the book addresses explicitly. The poems arise from these addresses, and address a much larger, more international audience and some astonishingly big subjects (time! nation-building and how it shapes people! love!), but I think it’s safe to say the events that occasioned these poems grows directly out of Fady’s experience as a Palestinian-American.