A Map of Absence Read online

  A MAP OF ABSENCE

  Atef Alshaer is a lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He was educated at Birzeit University in Palestine and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he obtained his PhD and taught for a number of years. Alshaer is the author of several publications in the fields of language, literature and politics, including Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World and The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (with Dina Matar and Lina Khatib). He is also the editor of Love and Poetry in the Middle East and Language and National Identity in Palestine: Representations of Power and Resistance in Gaza (both forthcoming). Alshaer regularly contributes to academic and media outlets, including the BBC, Independent, Electronic Intifada and Monocle radio.

  ‘The Nakba emerges as an ongoing event, but always from the perspective of an expansive humanity that transcends what is specifically Palestinian. The voices in this anthology represent but a fraction of the richness of Palestinian literature in Arabic and English. The editor is to be congratulated on the judicious choices he has made.’ Yasir Suleiman, Cambridge University and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

  ‘The pieces in this essential collection stand up for human freedom, creative expression and freedom of speech against occupation, limitation and hatred. These stories will never be forgotten, and Atef Alshaer has collected them through the most talented writers out there.’ Bidisha

  A Map of Absence

  An Anthology of Palestinian

  Writing on the Nakba

  Edited by

  Atef Alshaer

  Saqi Books

  26 Westbourne Grove

  London W2 5RH

  www.saqibooks.com

  Published 2019 by Saqi Books

  Copyright © Atef Alshaer 2019

  Copyright for individual texts rests with the contributors.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain the permissions for copyright material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, however, the publishers will correct this in future editions.

  Atef Alshaer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-0-86356-990-6

  eISBN 978-0-86356-995-1

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound by Clays S.A.r, Elcograf

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Ibrahim Tuqan

  My Homeland

  Red Tuesday

  Ghassan Kanafani, A Present for the Holiday

  Abdelrahim Mahmoud

  The Martyr

  The Aqsa Mosque

  Abdelkarim Al-Karmi, We Will Return

  Samira Azzam, Man and His Alarm Clock

  Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

  Hunters in a Narrow Street

  In the Deserts of Exile

  Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed, The Pessoptimist

  Edward Said

  On His Experience of the Nakba

  Jerusalem Revisited

  Mahmoud Darwish

  To Our Land

  At a Train Station that Fell Off the Map

  On This Earth

  I Am from There

  Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh

  Samih Al-Qassim

  So What If

  The End of a Discussion with a Prison Guard

  Kafr Qassim

  Travel Tickets

  Persona Non Grata

  Fadwa Tuqan

  Hamza

  Labour Pains

  The Deluge and The Tree

  Call of the Land

  Tawfiq Zayyad

  I Call to You

  We Shall Remain

  On the Trunk of an Olive Tree

  Muin Bseiso

  ‘NO!’

  The Vinegar Cup

  Rashid Hussein

  Without a Passport

  Against

  Taha Muhammad Ali, Exodus

  Salem Jubran, Refugee

  Ahmad Dahbour

  The Prison

  New Suggestions

  May Sayigh, Departure

  Izzuddin Manasra, Dawn Visitors

  Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns

  Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Without Roots

  Salman Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return

  Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima

  Yahya Yakhlif, The Hyena

  Ibrahim Nasrallah

  Street Olives

  Settlement

  Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

  Ghassan Zaqtan

  Remembering the Grandmother

  Beyond That

  Four Sisters From Zakariya

  Beirut, August 1982

  A Picture of the House in Beit Jala

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Different Ways to Pray

  Blood

  Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit

  How Palestinians Keep Warm

  Nathalie Handal

  Echoes: A Historical Afterward

  Here

  The Oranges

  Gaza City

  Jenin

  Bethlehem

  Sharif S. Elmusa

  Flawed Landscape

  In the Refugee Camp

  Liana Badr, One Sky

  Raba’i al-Madhoun, The Lady from Tel Aviv

  Selma Dabbagh, Out of It

  Ramzy Baroud, Under the Open Sky

  Fady Joudah

  Mimesis

  Immune

  Sleeping Trees

  Still Life

  Hanan Ashrawi

  Hadeel’s Song

  From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old

  Sayed Kashua, On Nakba Day

  Lisa Suhair Majaj, Fifty Years On

  Adania Shibli, Out of Time

  Zuheir Abu Shayeb, Martyr

  Najwan Darwish, Nothing More to Lose

  Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

  Children

  I’m a Destitute Woman

  Return

  Remi Kanazi

  Nakba

  A Poem for Gaza

  Toufic Haddad, Jiddo

  Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats with Me

  Ghayath Almadhoun

  Schizophrenia

  How I Became…

  Massacre

  Ashraf Fayadh

  Being a Refugee

  The Last of the Line of Refugee Descendants

  Cracked Skin

  Dareen Tatour

  Resist, My People, Resist Them

  A Poet Behind Bars

  Amira Sakalla

  Poetry of Resistance

  Palestine from the Sky

  We Weren’t Supposed to Survive But We Did

  About the Contributors

  Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Atef Alshaer

  CREATIVE writing is a process of engaging with human passions and concerns. However profoundly writing might be embedded within a particular tradition, it is always in a dialogue with present, lived experiences. In the case of Palestine, literature has been a source of national rebirth, documentation and emancipation, engaging with a burdened reality and an ongoing tragedy. This is encapsulated by the Nakba, literally, ‘the catastrophe’ – the moment in 1948 when almost half the population of Palestine were driven from their homes. Villages were ransacked, cities were levelled.
>
  The Nakba of Palestine is commemorated each year on 15 May. It is on this same day that the foundation of Israel has been celebrated annually since 1948. For Palestinians, the Nakba is a day blackened by the memory of the destruction that Israel inflicted on them, robbing them of their homeland and leaving in its stead loss, insecurity and instability. It is also a bewildering reminder that one’s nation still exists – in all but name.

  * * *

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Palestinians, like most Arabs, used poetry as their principal form of artistic expression. Arabic poetry has historically been performative, giving it a power and wide audience in the days before written literacy and the internet made it easier to spread the word. This performance aspect facilitated the memorising of poetry and thus its repetition in a variety of everyday contexts.

  We often associate spoken Palestinian poetry from the past century with protests, typically against colonialism and the ravaging of Arab land and people. This intense desire to write and perform drove poets of that era to adapt and hone their literary skills, and a movement towards free verse gathered pace. They were transcending the restrictions of the old formulae and establishing new poetic aesthetics. Moreover, their contact with European literary traditions, mainly British and French, encouraged them to explore the short story and novel forms in Arabic for the first time. But that is not to say that their work was no longer evocative of earlier, classical Arabic traditions. In particular, the classical poetic tradition, which extends from the fifth century to the thirteenth century covering the pre-Islamic, the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods, informs the language of Mahmoud Darwish and other Palestinian writings. Indeed, all modern literary Arabic writing is in one form or another indebted to Classical Arabic literature and the spirit of innovation that it represented.

  Palestinian literature emerged in the context of resisting the colonisation of the writers’ land. This necessitated the assertion of historical continuity, the statements of an ancient community linked to the broader Arab world, sharing with it a long-founded literary heritage as well as social and cultural norms. Yet with time, Palestinian literature developed in reaction to the internationalism and modernisation that several literary schools in the Arab world and beyond advanced. It evolved to transcend strict nationalist loyalties, even critiquing tribal forms of nationalism. Increasingly freed from ideology and its fetters, it was newly equipped to express the plight of humankind – all of our struggles, frustrations, insecurities and aspirations – in fluid, and sometimes subversive, ways.

  Yet it would be a gross simplification to suggest that a linear path has been followed. While this anthology takes a chronological view of Palestinian literature, starting in the 1930s, the writing here remains preoccupied with the same unanswered questions concerning the dispossession of the Palestinian people and their conditions of being occupied. After all, the quest for Palestinian freedom has yet to bear fruit.

  * * *

  This collection consists of poems, short stories, excerpts from longer fiction and memoirs of the Nakba. Some of the texts have been translated from Arabic while others were originally written in English. A solid and enduring constituency of Palestinians are writing in English, in ways that have brought the Palestinian tragedy to the attention of the wider world in candid and eloquent ways. Among their number are the Palestinian scholar and thinker Edward Said, Salman Abu Sitta, Ghada Karmi, Ramzy Baroud and Fady Joudah. The selected texts speak to different Palestinian communities, including those within historic Palestine, those in the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian diaspora.

  Also presented here are works by authors who have had intimate connections with Palestine, such as the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. Finally, we also celebrate the work of emerging writers in Palestine, such as Amira Sakalla, whose work is published here for the first time.

  We trace Palestinian writing over almost ninety years. With a certain amount of generalisation acknowledged, we can divide that span into three phases. The first extends from the 1930s to the 1950s, the second from the 1960s to the beginnings of the 1990s, and the third from 1993 until today. While the fate of Palestine remains the constant concern for its writers, each of these periods has its own defining characteristics. The first unfolds under Zionist attacks and the mass displacement of Palestinian refugees. The second covers the time when Palestinians formed a national movement and resisted the colonisation of their land. The third sees Palestinians debating the possibility, or impossibility, of peaceful resolution with Israel, following the Oslo Accords of 1993.

  The early generation of Palestinian poets composed poetry in classical form, using traditional, predictable patterns of rhyme, rhythm and metre. This gave way to free verse, particularly from the 1950s onwards. Despite becoming less rigidly structured, Palestinian poetry maintained an internal musicality, and was thus well suited to recitation at political protests. The voices of classical Palestinian poets, including Ibrahim Tuqan, Abdel Rahim Mahmoud and Abu Salma al-Karmi, typify the literature of the decades from the 1930s to the 1950s.

  The anthology begins with these voices. Ibrahim Tuqan belongs to a movement who, in the 1920s and 1930s, observed British and Zionist stratagems with their own eyes. His poem My Homeland is a historic national anthem for Palestine. It is a tender love song for its landscape and fauna and flora, and a statement of defence and defiance against the colonisers. His other most noted poem, The Bloody Thursday, commemorates the hanging by the British of three Palestinian nationalists, for taking part in the revolt against Britain’s repression of the Palestinians in 1936. The poem galvanised Palestinians and stirred them to resist, particularly as it was soon put into song. It was one of the early poems that served as a statement of mobilisation as well as the register of a collective Palestinian memory, while garnering wide Arab sympathy and support.

  Sacrifice and devotion to the land become significant themes in early Palestinian literature, commemorating, re-creating and reclaiming the homeland through language that evokes nostalgia, loss and resistance all in the same breath. Other poets from the 1930s to the 1950s who intensify this dynamic are Abu Salma Al-Karmi and Abdel Al-Rahim Mahmoud, who was killed by the British. Avowedly nationalist, yet rarely dogmatic or inhuman towards their oppressors, they paved a way for others to be sensitive as well as passionate.

  The short story began to gain ground in Arabic literature in the mid-twentieth century. In her tale Man and His Clock, Samira Azzam revisits Palestine before the Nakba and reflects on an ordinary life with all its blessings and bitter disappointments. Through this reflection, Azzam demonstrates the versatility of Palestinians and their dedication to modernisation. If the Nakba is present in this text, it is in gestures and hints. The pain of a nation is symbolised by the individual, for example the old man’s son, who dies on the rails beneath a steam train, introduced to the region by the British. Azzam inspired Palestinian writers to revisit the past as a way of talking about the present.

  The novelist and writer Ghassan Kanafani provides a bridge between the first and second generations. His poignant narratives epitomise the Palestinian experience in its most elemental form, against the backdrop of his personal story as a refugee forced to leave for the unknown. A story included in this anthology, A Present for the Holiday, describes the hardships and loneliness of the Palestinians as they become refugees. Palestinians are abandoned, left to fend for themselves, receiving meagre handouts from international organisations: ‘I remember nothing except the cold, and the ice that manacled my fingers and the can of soup.’

  Kanafani developed his literary techniques to employ modernist and postmodernist sensibilities in his depiction of fragmentary and unsettling situations. His methods included the use of streams of consciousness, making him less dependent on chronology and plot. He was free to explore psychological issues and individual behaviours. Kanafani’s characters, though tormented and existentially confused, are often revolutionaries seeking a solution: an end to thei
r sudden exile and displacement. He used a wide cast of characters, allowing him to reflect on class differences, labour exploitation and political marginalisation in line with his own political activism.

  The second generation of writers includes Tawfiq Ziad, Samih al-Qassim, Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish, among others. The places where they recited their poems were concentrated near the sites of Palestinian struggle, whether inside Palestine or outside in the diaspora. Poetry spread first through word of mouth, gained momentum through recitation in rallies, and was later distributed and preserved on cassettes. (Each generation uses the technology of its time to disseminate writing – today’s Palestinian poets have taken to social media.) Rather than speaking only to Palestinians familiar with the struggle, Palestinian writing from the 1960s onwards began to engage with people less familiar with the politics behind the experiences.

  Palestinians began to write in broader terms. This reflected the widening of Palestinian identity, as Palestinians were first forced to move away into new communities, sometimes abroad, and establish a diaspora. Trauma, ordinary struggles and snippets of daily life and habits became important sources of poetic content and composition. Writers occupied themselves with the complexities of life under occupation and became less embroiled in discourses of nationalist mobilisation.

  During the 1960s and 1970s, certain talented Palestinian poets came to occupy a prominent place in the Arab literary scene, influencing Palestinian literature for decades to come. They were working from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and from within historic Palestine that became Israel, and elsewhere. Writers also moved from one country to another, as they were mostly allied to the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organisation and subject to its stateless condition. This is the case for the poets Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Dahbour, Muin Bseiso, Mourid Barghouti and others.

  Nationalist poetry flourished at sites where there were direct confrontations with the Israeli occupation, such as in Lebanon, where the PLO was stationed from 1970 to 1982. This poetry extolled the virtues of resistance and celebrated Palestine and its nationalist cause. Other novelists and writers were diagnosing the more internal problems of Palestine. In general, throughout their history, Palestinian writers tended to embrace nationalism as a means to unite their people and galvanise them towards the liberation of Palestine. But they were also critical of certain aspects of the struggle, and of archaic forms of behaviour prevalent in the greater Arab world, including patriarchy and dictatorship.