Nine Butler, The Con
The street is empty
as a monk’s memory,
and faces explode in the flames
like acorns –
and the dead crowd the horizon
and doorways.
No vein can bleed
more than it already has,
no scream will rise
higher than it has already risen.
We will not leave!
-
Exodus, Taha Muhammad Ali
Among the cascading
levels of destruction in the ongoing onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza
lies the flattened house of Palestinian poet Othman Hussein and his family in Rafah
in southern Gaza. On July 17, the poet’s home was completely destroyed,
although Hussein and his relatives were fortunate enough to escape harm. This
incident follows the demolition of the Palestinian artist Raed Issa’s home in
an airstrike on July 15. Are these what Israel loosely terms “militant
targets”? Why would they intend to demoralise and obliterate culture? What
threat does a poet pose?
Throughout the history of
the colonised world, the role of the intellectual and literary luminary has
been to engage in a struggle to ‘write back’ reality. The work of poets,
novelists and persons of pen has been crucial to the attainment of political
liberation as they seek to craft a sense
of collective identity, producing common myths, symbols and social vision by
interpreting material conditions and constructing the meaning of the
independent existence for the community . For the poet to take on a leadership
role in her community is an essential part of Arab cultural history. Poets are
considered persons of visions and prophecy, and have, since pre-Islamic times,
played a critical role in their society. Bassam Frangieh, specialist in Arab
literature and culture, is of the opinion that Adb al-Rahim Mahmoud was the
first notable Palestinian poet-defender of the modern era in Palestine who is
known to have carried his “soul in the palm of his hand”, as he expressed his
sentiment in verse and action, fatally defending his village in a siege by
Haganah, an Israeli terrorist organisation of the time, in 1948.
But writers in this
context go beyond reflection and evocation of society; they become active
agents in the production of community. German literary critic Walter Benjamin,
in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’, argues that the intellectual’s impact as
a cultural producer extends to the articulation, through the language of
culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses cannot express for
themselves. Benjamin conceives of an organic translation of meaning between
intellectual, society and nation in a similar vein to that of Frantz Fanon, who
saw intellectuals as the artisans of “national culture”, a concept Fanon
defines as a “whole body of efforts made by people in the sphere of thought to
describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created
itself and keeps itself in existence”. In the context of a liberation struggle
– like that of Palestinians against the settler-colonialist Israeli state that
established itself on Palestinian land in 1948, expelling the indigenous
populous in the first of a continuing wave of ethnic cleansing – Fanon terms
the scripting of this national culture “combat literature”.
Thus, Palestinian poetry,
as the voice of self-expression under Israeli occupation, is a form of
figurative reply in the face of actual and cultural domination. Alongside the
military occupation and the political and economic stranglehold – Gaza is
widely considered an open-air prison – Israel has waged a merciless war on
Palestinian history, identity and culture. Archaeological excavations
throughout Israel are infamous for the destruction of entire layers of ancient
evidence of Islamic and Arab presence. Israeli historians have engaged in a
classic tale of selective colonial narration in which the past of the
indigenous population has been erased in parts and selected in others as
fitting to the national ideology of the colonial state. It is still widely
claimed in Israel and among its Zionist supporters elsewhere that Palestinians
as a unique ethnic entity never existed independent of Zionist proximity,
and/or that a Palestinian history and identity is a pure fabrication by
neighbouring Arab states in order to delegitimise Israel. Artisanal and
artistic symbols and skills have been reappropriated as ‘Israeli’ and part of
‘Hebrew style’ art and regional Arab delicacies such as humus, falafel,
tabbouleh and labneh have all been rebranded. The Palestinian flag and other
symbols of their collective identity, such as the kheffiyeh (a headdress worn
by men), are met with direct hostility and confiscation once one crosses over a
checkpoint from the occupied territories into Israel. I was apprehended for two
hours in Tel Aviv airport upon leaving Israel in late 2012 for having
Palestinian cultural artefacts and literature in my backpack. My Hebron
ceramics were shattered, my external hard drive confiscated and my luggage
strewn all over the floor. I am not even Palestinian.
Palestinian cultural
producers have consistently been under fire from Israel in a similar
fashion to the intellectual leadership and the press. Many of the leading
voices of poetry have tales of exile, imprisonment and a perpetual search for
awda – return. As Edward Said has warned, “if you need a thought police to
champion a cause, something is wrong”. It is precisely because it has been
under literal and figurative siege from Israel that Palestinian cultural and
literary identity is perhaps more defined and distinct than that of
neighbouring Arab states.
Poets have become the
leading producers of a Palestinian collective ethos, exemplifying the
resistance movement as their poems are inflamed in song and leading to the
designation of Palestinians as the “poets of resistance”. The works of Mahmoud
Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad, Samih al-Qasim, Ghassan Zaqtan and Othman Hussein,
among numerous others, have been translated and distributed widely. Indeed,
Darwish is considered one of the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th
century.
Fittingly, Hamas, the
Palestinian Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip, regularly
publishes poetry on its website, through various media outlets, and in
published collections. Hamas does this to harness the widespread consumption of
the literary form, which unlike in many other communities transcends class
barriers. In Gaza, poetry is a medium of political mobilisation and ideological
consolidation, and Hamas is intensively engaged in producing and promoting
literature on all levels of society. The Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has
published several novels and his work is well received throughout the Arabic
literary world. Fathi al-Shiqaqi, the founding leader of another Palestinian
Islamist party, Islamic Jihad, wrote poetry extensively and at times
incorporated it in diplomatic letters to convey the intensity of his concern and
emotions over affairs.
A further poet-leader of
Hamas, Ibrahim al-Maqadmah, has come to mind often in the past few weeks as I
hear the barrage of racism from liberal and mainstream global media,
regurgitating the loathsome Israeli term of “human shield”. To claim that an
entire people do not love their children enough to reflexively protect them in
danger, that the same poetry-writing leadership are such barbarous individuals
that they offer up their children, wives and elderly to be bombed by Israeli
soldiers is a claim of such hate and explicit racism that I simply cannot
comprehend the dark void of its origin and intended usage.
Al-Maqadmah wrote many of
his verses from an Israeli prison before he was assassinated in 2003. In this
painful poem, he recalls the memory of his child’s death and the funeral he
could not attend:
O, the mother of Ahmad: this is a wedding for Ahmadthe dream gets bigger, as Ahmad gets olderthe more he hurls stones at the soldierswhenever he is woundedwhen he screams in the faces of the soldiers:‘the army of Muhammad will return, will return
Here, the grief expressed is diffused with what
political communication critic Atef Alshaer calls the “promise of the divine”.
The temporal chronology in this poetic excerpt is entirely jumbled. It begins
in the past dreams of a father – his dead son’s future wedding. Time progresses
from there, then jumps back to the near past of his son’s fatal confrontation
with Israeli soldiers, and then transcends to an eternal present: the
prophesised future return of a past divine figure. The collapse of time and
chronology is common to the recollections of the traumatised, as is the turn to
religion for solace, hope and reason in that face of incomprehensible
destruction and disorder, in every minute of Gazan life. To some extent this
view is a product of Israel, but it is not a borrowed and refigured brand – it
is entirely unprecedented in its desperation and despair. Whatever the reader
may draw from the future imaginations or role of the poet as a political leader
of Hamas, one cannot deny the love of a father for his child. Nor can one
dismiss the context in which he writes.
