Palestine!
The Palestinians have a rich history of poetry and their poets speak eloquently for real equality and real justice, but also about life, love and relationships...
Enough for Me
by Fadwa Tuqan, a Palestinian poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Enough for me to lie in the earth,
to be buried in her,
to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish ...
only to spring forth like a flower
brightening the play of my countrymen's children.
Enough for me to remain
in my native soil's embrace,
to be as close as a handful of dirt,
a sprig of grass,
a wildflower.
Walid Khazindar was born in 1950 in Gaza City. He is considered to be one of the very best Palestinian poets; his poetry has been said to be "characterized by metaphoric originality and a novel thematic approach unprecedented in Arabic poetry." He was awarded the first Palestine Prize for Poetry in 1997.
This Distant Light
by Walid Khazindar, a Palestinian poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Bitterly cold,
winter clings to the naked trees.
If only you would free
the bright sparrows
from your fingertips
and unleash a smile—that shy, tentative smile—
from the imprisoned anguish I see.
Sing! Can we not sing
as if we were warm, hand-in-hand,
sheltered by shade from a sweltering sun?
Can you not always remain like this:
stoking the fire, more beautiful than expected, in reverie?
Darkness increases and we must remain vigilant
now that this distant light is our sole consolation ...
this imperiled flame, which from the beginning
has constantly flickered,
in danger of going out.
Come to me, closer and closer.
I don't want to be able to tell my hand from yours.
And let's stay awake, lest the snow smother us.
Here We Shall Remain
by Tawfiq Zayyad, a Palestinian poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Like twenty impossibilities
in Lydda, Ramla and Galilee ...
here we shall remain.
Like brick walls braced against your chests;
lodged in your throats
like shards of glass
or prickly cactus thorns;
clouding your eyes
like sandstorms.
Here we shall remain,
like brick walls obstructing your chests,
washing dishes in your boisterous bars,
serving drinks to our overlords,
scouring your kitchens' filthy floors
in order to snatch morsels for our children
from between your poisonous fangs.
Here we shall remain,
like brick walls deflating your chests
as we face our deprivation clad in rags,
singing our defiant songs,
chanting our rebellious poems,
then swarming out into your unjust streets
to fill dungeons with our dignity.
Like twenty impossibilities
in Lydda, Ramla and Galilee,
here we shall remain,
guarding the shade of the fig and olive trees,
fermenting rebellion in our children
like yeast in dough.
Here we wring the rocks to relieve our thirst;
here we stave off starvation with dust;
but here we remain and shall not depart;
here we spill our expensive blood
and do not hoard it.
For here we have both a past and a future;
here we remain, the Unconquerable;
so strike fast, penetrate deep,
O, my roots!
Existence
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
In my solitary life, I was a lost question;
in the encompassing darkness,
my answer lay concealed.
You were a bright new star
revealed by fate,
radiating light from the fathomless darkness.
The other stars rotated around you
—once, twice —
until I perceived
your unique radiance.
Then the bleak blackness broke
and in the twin tremors
of our entwined hands
I had found my missing answer.
Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
Don't you remember the coalescence
Of our spirits in the flames?
Of my universe with yours?
Of the two poets?
Despite our great distance,
Existence unites us.
Nothing Remains
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Tonight, we’re together,
but tomorrow you'll be hidden from me again,
thanks to life’s cruelty.
The seas will separate us ...
Oh!—Oh!—If I could only see you!
But I'll never know ...
where your steps led you,
which routes you took,
or to what unknown destinations
your feet were compelled.
You will depart and the thief of hearts,
the denier of beauty,
will rob us of all that's dear to us,
will steal our happiness,
leaving our hands empty.
Tomorrow at dawn you'll vanish like a phantom,
dissipating into a delicate mist
dissolving quickly in the summer sun.
Your scent—your scent!—contains the essence of life,
filling my heart
as the earth absorbs the lifegiving rain.
I will miss you like the fragrance of trees
when you leave tomorrow,
and nothing remains.
Just as everything beautiful and all that's dear to us
is lost—lost!—when nothing remains.
Labor Pains
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Tonight the wind wafts pollen through ruined fields and homes.
The earth shivers with love, with the agony of giving birth,
while the Invader spreads stories of submission and surrender.
O, Arab Aurora!
Tell the Usurper: childbirth’s a force beyond his ken
because a mother’s wracked body reveals a rent that inaugurates life,
a crack through which light dawns in an instant
as the blood’s rose blooms in the wound.
Hamza
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men
who did manual labor for bread.
When I saw him recently,
the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence
and I felt defeated.
But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said:
“Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,
and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.
This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters.
Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!”
Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen,
but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain.
At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back.
“Burn down his house!”
some commandant screamed,
“and slap his son in a prison cell!”
As our town’s military ruler later explained
this was necessary for law and order,
that is, an act of love, for peace!
Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house;
the coiled serpent completed its circle.
The bang at his door came with an ultimatum:
“Evacuate, damn it!'
So generous with their time, they said:
“You can have an hour, yes!”
Hamza threw open a window.
Face-to-face with the blazing sun, he yelled defiantly:
“Here in this house I and my children will live and die, for Palestine!”
Hamza's voice echoed over the hemorrhaging silence.
An hour later, with impeccable timing, Hanza’s house came crashing down
as its rooms were blown sky-high and its bricks and mortar burst,
till everything settled, burying a lifetime’s memories of labor, tears, and happier times.
Yesterday I saw Hamza
walking down one of our town’s streets ...
Hamza-the-unextraordinary man who remained as he always was:
unshakable in his determination.
Kamal Nasser was a much-admired Palestinian poet, who due to his renowned integrity was known as "The Conscience." He was a member of Jordan's parliament in 1956. He was murdered in 1973 by an Israeli death squad whose most notorious member was future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Here is one of his poems:
The Story
by Kamal Nasser
translation by Michael R. Burch
I will tell you a story ...
a story that lived in the dreams of my people,
a story that comes from the world of tents.
It is a story inspired by hunger and embellished by dark nights of terror.
It is the story of my country, a handful of refugees.
Every twenty of them have a pound of flour between them
and a few promises of relief ... gifts and parcels.
It is the story of the suffering ones
who stood waiting in line ten years,
in hunger,
in tears and agony,
in hardship and yearning.
It is a story of a people who were misled,
who were thrown into the mazes of the years.
And yet they stood defiant,
disrobed yet united
as they trudged from the light to their tents:
the revolution of return
into the world of darkness.
Kamal Nasser was a Palestinian Christian who was murdered by an Israeli death squad in 1973. One of the members of the death squad was Ehud Barak (born Ehud Brog), who ruled as Israel’s tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. His adopted Hebrew name Barak means "lightning." As a younger man, Brog/Barak was a member of a secret assassination unit that liquidated Palestinians in Lebanon and the occupied territories. In the 1973 covert mission Operation Spring of Youth in Beirut, which was part of the larger Operation Wrath of God, he disguised himself as a woman in order to assassinate Palestinians. The raid resulted in the deaths of two women, one of them an elderly Italian. Two Lebanese policemen were also killed, along with the poet Kamal Nasser.
Nasser was the PLO's most prominent Christian and he enjoyed "great appeal" in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq "both as a distinguished poet and likeable personality." He was the “conscience of the Palestinian revolution,” according to Nazih Abul-Nidal, who worked with him on the magazine Filastin al-Thawra. Nasser “had the most democratic outlook of all Palestinian leaders at the time,” he recalls. He respected opposing views, admired the commitment of young people, and was a major recruitment asset for the Palestinian revolution. “That is why he was put high on the hit-list.” The previous year, the Israelis had murdered another renowned Palestinian writer and activist in Beirut, Ghassan Kanafani, by booby-trapping his car. Nasser’s successor, Majed Abu Sharar, was also assassinated by Israelis, in Rome in 1981 while attending a conference in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
According to Maan Bashour, a member of the PLO information committee and a representative of the Arab Liberation Front, the Israelis targeted Nasser specifically because he was seen as "the freedom fighter from Ramallah" and as "a cultural and media star with his popular and especially Christian credentials."
The funeral of Nasser and his fallen comrades was attended by the full spectrum of Lebanese and Palestinian political leaders, including those of the “isolationist right,” notably the late Pierre Gemayel. Karim Mroue describes it as having been “the biggest funeral in Lebanon’s history” with around half a million people mourning in the streets.
Barak was rewarded for his acts of terrorism by rising quickly through the ranks to become the youngest army chief of staff in Israeli history. He was elected prime minister of Israel and also served as Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister in Binyamin Netanyahu's government.
DARWISH
Mahmoud Darwish is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging ... his is an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered.—Naomi Shihab Nye
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), the Poet Laureate of the Palestinians, was the preeminent Arab poet of his day. Darwish was a Palestinian Arab born in the Galilean village of Barweh, which was razed to the ground by Israelis during the Nakba ("Catastrophe") of 1948, along with hundreds of other Palestinian villages. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Darwish became an exile, along with his family, because his ancestral village had been destroyed. The title of his first book, Wingless Sparrows, speaks volumes. It was published when he was nineteen. And yet Darwish rejected anti-Semitism, saying:
The accusation is that I hate Jews. It's not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.
As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment because of his political activism. He left Palestine in 1971 to study briefly at the University of Moscow, after which he worked for a newspaper in Cairo, then in Beirut as an editor of Palestinian Issues. When he joined the PLO in 1973, he was banned from reentering Palestine. Still, he recognized the humanity of the Jews; some were his oppressors, others his lovers:
I will continue to humanise even the enemy ... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels, but as human beings.
Palestine
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
April's blushing advances;
the aroma of bread baking at dawn;
a woman haranguing men;
the poetry of Aeschylus;
love's trembling beginnings,
a kiss on a moss-covered boulder;
mothers who dance to the flute's sighs;
and the invaders' fear of memories.
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
September's rustling end;
a woman leaving forty behind, still full of grace, still blossoming;
sunlight illuminating prison cells;
clouds taking on the shapes of unusual creatures;
the people's applause for those who smile at their erasure,
mocking their assassins;
and the tyrant's fear of songs.
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
Lady Earth, mother of all beginnings and endings!
In the past she was called Palestine
and tomorrow she will still be called Palestine.
My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life!
Identity Card
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Record!
I am an Arab!
And my identity card is number fifty thousand.
I have eight children;
the ninth arrives this autumn.
Will you be furious?
Record!
I am an Arab!
Employed at the quarry,
I have eight children.
I provide them with bread,
clothes and books
from the bare rocks.
I do not supplicate charity at your gates,
nor do I demean myself at your chambers' doors.
Will you be furious?
Record!
I am an Arab!
I have a name without a title.
I am patient in a country
where people are easily enraged.
My roots
were established long before the onset of time,
before the unfolding of the flora and fauna,
before the pines and the olive trees,
before the first grass grew.
My father descended from plowmen,
not from the privileged classes.
My grandfather was a lowly farmer
neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Still, they taught me the pride of the sun
before teaching me how to read;
now my house is a watchman's hut
made of branches and cane.
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name, but no title!
Record!
I am an Arab!
You have stolen my ancestors' orchards
and the land I cultivated
along with my children.
You left us nothing
but these bare rocks.
Now will the State claim them also
as it has been declared?
Therefore!
Record on the first page:
I do not hate people
nor do I encroach,
but if I become hungry
I will feast on the usurper's flesh!
Beware!
Beware my hunger
and my anger!
NOTE: Darwish was married twice, but had no children. In the poem above, he is apparently speaking for his people, not for himself personally.
Excerpts from "The Dice Player"
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Who am I to say
the things I say to you?
I am not a stone
burnished to illumination by water ...
Nor am I a reed
riddled by the wind
into a flute ...
No, I'm a dice player:
I win sometimes
and I lose sometimes,
just like you ...
or perhaps a bit less.
I was born beside the water well with the three lonely trees like nuns:
born without any hoopla or a midwife.
I was given my unplanned name by chance,
assigned to my family by chance,
and by chance inherited their features, attributes, habits and illnesses.
First, arterial plaque and hypertension;
second, shyness when addressing my elders;
third, the hope of curing the flu with cups of hot chamomile;
fourth, laziness in describing gazelles and larks;
fifth, lethargy dark winter nights;
sixth, the lack of a singing voice.
I had no hand in my own being;
it was mere coincidence that I popped out male;
mere coincidence that I saw the pale lemon-like moon illuminating sleepless girls
and did not unleash the mole hidden in my private parts.
I might not have existed
had my father not married my mother
by chance.
Or I might have been like my sister
who screamed then died,
only alive an hour
and never knowing who gave her birth.
Or like the doves’ eggs
smashed before her chicks hatched.
Was it mere coincidence
that I was the one left alive in a traffic accident
because I didn’t board the bus ...
because I’d forgotten about life and its routines
while reading the night before
a love story in which I became first the author,
then the lover, then the beloved and love’s martyr ...
then overslept and avoided the accident!
I also played no role in surviving the sea,
because I was a reckless boy,
allured by the magnetic water
calling: Come to me!
No, I only survived the sea
because a human gull rescued me
when he saw the waves pulling me under and paralyzing my hands!
Who am I to say
the things I say to you
outside the church door?
I'm nothing but a dice throw,
a toss between predator and prey.
In my moonlit awareness
I witnessed the massacre
and survived by sheer chance:
I was too small for the enemy to target,
barely bigger than the bee
flitting among the fence’s flowers.
Then I feared for my father and family;
I feared for our time as fragile as glass;
I feared for my pet cat and rabbit;
I feared for a magical moon looming high over the mosque’s minarets;
I feared for our vines’ grapes
dangling like a dog’s udders ...
Then fear walked beside me and I walked with it,
barefoot, forgetting my fragile dreams of what I had wanted for tomorrow
because there was no time for tomorrow.
I was lucky the wolves
departed by chance,
or else escaped from the army.
I also played no role in my own life,
except when Life taught me her recitations.
Are there any more?, I wondered,
then lit my lamps and tried to amend them ...
I might not have been a swallow
had the wind ordained it otherwise ...
The wind is the traveler's fate: his fortune or misfortune.
I flew north, east, west ...
but the south was too harsh, too rebellious for me
because the south is my country.
I became a swallow’s metaphor,
hovering over my life’s debris
from spring to autumn,
baptizing my feathers in the cloud-like lake
then offering my salaams to the undying Nazarene:
undying because God’s spirit lives within him
and God is the prophet’s luck ...
While it is my good fortune to be the Godhead’s neighbor ...
Just as it is my bad fortune the cross
remains our future’s eternal ladder!
Who am I to say
the things I say to you?
Who am I?
I might have not been inspired
because inspiration is the lonely soul’s compensation
and the poem is his dice throw
on an unlit board
that may or may not glow ...
Words fall ...
as feathers fall to earth:
I did not plan this poem.
I only obeyed its rhythm’s demands.
Who am I to say
the things I say to you?
It might not have been me.
I might not have been here to write it.
My plane might have crashed one morning
while I slept till noon
then arrived at the airport too late
to visit Damascus and Cairo,
the Louvre, and other enchanting cities.
Had I been a slow walker, a rifle might have severed my shadow from its cedar.
Had I been a fast walker, I might have disintegrated and vanished like a fleeting whim.
Had I dreamt too much, I might have lost my memories of reality.
I am fortunate to sleep alone
listening to my body's complaints
with my talent for detecting pain,
so that I call the physician ten minutes before death:
dodging death by a mere ten minutes,
continuing life by chance,
disappointing the Void.
But who am I to disappoint the Void?
Who am I?
Who?
Excerpt from “Speech of the Red Indian”
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Let's give the earth sufficient time to recite
the whole truth ...
The whole truth about us.
The whole truth about you.
In tombs you build
the dead lie sleeping.
Over bridges you erect
file the newly slain.
There are spirits who light up the night like fireflies.
There are spirits who come at dawn to sip tea with you,
as peaceful as the day your guns mowed them down.
O, you who are guests in our land,
please leave a few chairs empty
for your hosts to sit and ponder
the conditions for peace
in your treaty with the dead.
Passport
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
They left me unrecognizable in the shadows
that bled all colors from this passport.
To them, my wounds were novelties—
curious photos for tourists to collect.
They failed to recognize me. No, don't leave
the palm of my hand bereft of sun
when all the trees recognize me
and every song of the rain honors me.
Don't set a wan moon over me!
All the birds that flocked to my welcoming wave
as far as the distant airport gates,
all the wheatfields,
all the prisons,
all the albescent tombstones,
all the barbwired boundaries,
all the fluttering handkerchiefs,
all the eyes—
they all accompanied me.
But they were stricken from my passport
shredding my identity!
How was I stripped of my name and identity
on soil I tended with my own hands?
Today, Job's lamentations
re-filled the heavens:
Don't make an example of me, not again!
Prophets! Gentlemen!—
Don't require the trees to name themselves!
Don't ask the valleys who mothered them!
My forehead glistens with lancing light.
From my hand the riverwater springs.
My identity can be found in my people's hearts,
so invalidate this passport!
For Yael Lerer, Darwish is "like a mirror showing Israelis the painful reality [of the occupation]." Lerer said, "We wanted Mahmoud Darwish to be the nice Arab guy, but he reminds us that he is a Palestinian — one who has a well and a fig tree and the house of his grandfather. And as much as Israel would have liked to eliminate his legacy, he cannot be erased from memory. He is an Israeli citizen by virtue of birth — hence the deep-rooted symbolism. He confronts us with the Palestinians, Palestinian nationality and the Nakba in a way that cannot be ignored. For us Israelis, it is intolerable."
Mahmoud Darwish was only six years old when Barweh/Berwah, the Palestinian village of his nativity, was completely obliterated, destroyed by an encroaching Israeli army, and he was forced to flee with his mother to a refugee camp in Lebanon. Later, they returned illegally to the village of Dayr-al-Asad.
Asked for something in celebration of the second anniversary of the State of Israel, an eight-year old Darwish wrote: "You can play in the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I cannot. You have a house, while I have none. You have celebrations, while I have none. Why can't we play together?" The following day, Darwish was summoned by the Israeli military governor who ridiculed his Arabic language and threatened both him and his family. The young Darwish left his office shaken, unable to understand why a poem had so upset the military governor. In ensuing years, he was imprisoned several times and frequently harassed by the Israeli apparatus, always for the same crime: reading poetry or traveling in his own country without a permit.
Darwish lived in exile for more than twenty years, primarily in Beirut and Paris, until he was allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1996. But even then he spoke as if his exile continued, since he did not consider the West Bank his personal "homeland." A central theme in Darwish's poetry is watan, or homeland.
His poetry earned international acclamation and has been translated into 35 languages. He also founded the prestigious literary review Al Karmel. In 1998 he published Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems. In 2000 he published Jidariyya (Mural) a book-length poem about his near-death experience of 1997. By speaking eloquently for himself and his fellow Palestinians, Darwish made it impossible for history to ignore them:
We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.
Darwish's influences include the Arab poets Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, along with Rimbaud and Ginsberg. He also admired the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, but described his poetry as a "challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?" Darwish became a voice of compassion and reason, speaking for young men driven to martyrdom by despair:
We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair ... We have to understand—not justify—what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope—a political solution—they'll stop killing themselves.
In March 2000, Israeli education minister Yossi Sarid proposed that two of Darwish's poems be taught in Israeli high schools. Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected the proposal on the grounds that Israel was "not ready." This sounds suspiciously like white supremacists saying their children are "not ready" for the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Langston Hughes. No doubt the incident had more to do with Israeli politics and racism than poetry. With the death of Darwish the debate about including his poetry in the Israeli school curriculum has been re-opened.
Mahmoud Darwish Quotations and Epigrams
If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.—Mahmoud Darwish
My love, I fear the silence of your hands.―Mahmoud Darwish
The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.— Mahmoud Darwish
Be worthy of the aroma of bread and summer flowers, for your mother’s clay oven is still lit, each loaf a warm greeting.—Mahmoud Darwish
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to construct a single word: Home.—Mahmoud Darwish
Be strong as a bull when you're angry, weak as an almond blossom when you love.—Mahmoud Darwish
Sunset is here, tormenting the stranger with its beauty.—Mahmoud Darwish
Slow down, O horse saddled with seasons!—Mahmoud Darwish
Besiege your siege … there is no other way.—Mahmoud Darwish
We Palestinians suffer from an incurable disease called "hope." Hope for liberation and independence. Hope for a normal life where we shall be neither heroes nor victims. Hope to see our children go to school without danger. Hope for a pregnant woman to give birth to a living baby, in a hospital, and not to a dead child in front of a military control post. Hope that our poets will see the beauty of the colour red in roses, rather than in blood. Hope that this land will recover its original name: "land of hope and peace." Thank you for carrying with us this banner of hope.—Mahmoud Darwish
I've just restacked this striking post eith this note because more people need to read it.
In countries such as Palestine, the poets seem to be the unsilenced and unbreakable voices of the oppressed, reminding us that the struggle will never cease until they have what they rightly deserve - peace and justice.
Here we shall remain,
like brick walls deflating your chests
as we face our deprivation clad in rags,
singing our defiant songs,
chanting our rebellious poems,
then swarming out into your unjust streets
to fill dungeons with our dignity.