Empire, Exile, and Entropy: Political and Cosmic Forces in Fady Joudah's Tethered to Stars

الإمبراطورية والمنفى والاضمحلال: القوى السياسية والكونية في ديوان فادي جودة مشدود إلى النجوم

Abstract

This paper examines how Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars (2021) enacts a poetic dialogue between empire, exile, and entropy—forces both political and cosmic that define the poet’s moral and aesthetic universe. As a Palestinian-American poet and physician, Joudah situates his lyric voice between the trauma of displacement and the vastness of cosmological decay. Through close readings of six central poems—“Black Hole,” “Event Horizon,” “Oxygen,” “Mausoleum for a Scorpio,” “Listening Suture,” and “Gemini”—the essay argues that Joudah fuses postcolonial critique with astrophysical imagery to propose a theology of impermanence and interconnection. Drawing on theoretical insights from Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, the analysis shows how Joudah’s poetics transforms exile into a moral and epistemological stance: estrangement as resistance and as clarity. The paper further demonstrates how his treatment of entropy parallels the political unraveling of empire, re-casting cosmic dissolution as both metaphor and method for reimagining justice and belonging. By situating Tethered to Stars within the framework of anti-colonial thought and contemporary cosmology, this study positions Joudah’s work as a pioneering contribution to twenty-first-century transnational poetics—one that entwines the fall of empires with the slow dispersal of stars, and turns loss itself into a form of illumination.