A Map of Absence Read online

  The Hell that has been prepared for Refugees.

  Translated by Jonathan Wright

  Cracked Skin

  My country passed through here

  Wearing the freedom shoe.

  It went far away, leaving its shoe behind.

  It was running in a confused rhythm, like the beat of my heart.

  My heart, which was running in another direction, with no

  convincing reason!

  The freedom shoe was torn, old and fake,

  Like human values in all their dimensions.

  Everything left me behind and went away including you.

  The shoe is a confusing invention.

  It proves our ineligibility to live on this planet.

  It proves we belong to another place, where we do not need to

  walk for long,

  Maybe its floor is paved with cheap slippery ceramics.

  The problem is not with slipperiness, but with water.

  The problem of heat, broken glass, thorns, dry branches, pointed

  rocks.

  The shoe is not an ideal solution ...

  But it satisfies certain of our purposes,

  Exactly like the mind,

  Like emotion.

  My emotion is dead since you left me last time.

  I cannot reach you since my imprisonment

  inside a cement box engraved with cold metal rods.

  Since everyone forgot me, starting with my freedom,

  ending with my shoes which suffer from an identity crisis.

  Translated by Waleed Al-Bazoon and Naomi Foyle

  DAREEN TATOUR

  Resist, My People, Resist Them

  Resist, my people, resist them.

  In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows,

  And carried the soul in my palm

  For an Arab Palestine.

  I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution’,

  Never lower my flags

  Until I evict them from my land.

  I cast them aside for a coming time.

  Resist, my people, resist them.

  Resist the settlers’ robbery

  And follow the caravan of martyrs.

  Shred the disgraceful constitution

  Which imposed degradation and humiliation

  And deterred us from restoring justice.

  They burned blameless children;

  As for Hadil, they sniped her in public,

  Killed her in broad daylight.

  Resist, my people, resist them.

  Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.

  Pay no mind to his agents among us

  Who chain us with the peaceful illusion.

  Do not fear doubtful tongues;

  The truth in your heart is stronger;

  As long as you resist in a land

  That has lived through raids and victory.

  So Ali called from his grave:

  Resist, my rebellious people-

  Write me as prose on the agarwood;

  My remains have you as a response.

  Resist, my people, resist them.

  Resist, my people, resist them.

  A Poet Behind Bars

  Jelemeh Prison, 2 November 2015 (the day I was indicted)

  In prison, I met people

  too numerous to count:

  Killer and criminal,

  thief and liar,

  the honest and those who disbelieve,

  the lost and confused,

  the wretched and the hungry.

  Then, the sick of my homeland,

  born out of pain,

  refused to comply with injustice

  until they became children whose innocence was violated.

  The world’s compulsion left them stunned.

  They grew older.

  No, their sadness grew,

  strengthening in repression,

  like roses in salted soil.

  They embraced love without fear,

  and were condemned, not

  for their deeds, but for declaring,

  ‘We love the land endlessly,’

  so their love freed them.

  See, prison is for lovers.

  I interrogated my soul

  during moments of doubt and distraction:

  ‘What of your crime?’

  Its meaning escapes me now.

  I said the thing and

  revealed my thoughts;

  I wrote about the current injustice,

  wishes in ink,

  a poem I wrote ...

  The charge has worn my body,

  from my toes to the top of my head,

  for I am a poet in prison,

  a poet in the land of art.

  I am accused of words,

  my pen the instrument.

  Ink – blood of the heart – bears witness

  and reads the charges.

  Listen, my destiny, my life,

  to what the judge said:

  A poem stands accused,

  my poem morphs into a crime.

  In the land of freedom,

  the artist’s fate is prison.

  Both translated by Tariq Haydar

  AMIRA SAKALLA

  Poetry of Resistance

  Do not be ashamed

  at the persistence of your tears.

  Do not question

  how they flow.

  Do not look around

  at the stale faces of others.

  Asking how

  they do not know.

  You are not like them,

  especially when

  you cry.

  For when you cry,

  your tears are not yours alone.

  When you cry,

  you cry the tears

  of your ancestors.

  Palestine from the Sky

  I don’t want to be here

  confined in this body

  where the passage of time

  is my most

  intimate

  partner.

  All else is exile.

  All else is a flattened landscape.

  Crushed down,

  unearthed,

  swept off.

  and I must build again.

  I must build again.

  I don’t want to f*cking be here

  inside my body

  absorbing

  so many hits as the winds

  of time strike hard

  on my limbs and leave

  me rathering that I be broken

  into pieces

  and

  dissolved

  into sand

  because

  at least the sand all moves in the same direction

  when the wind blows.

  I want to escape my body and

  go where the souls go and know

  that they got to return and know

  that they got to fly and know

  that they got to know that I loved them

  before I knew.

  I don’t want to be here

  in my body because the body is a strong thing

  that protects the soul from damage

  and who says I deserve that?

  Who said what souls should leave

  their bodies so soon.

  I ran across continents looking for my home

  and in my exile I concluded that it is only

  my body but my heart and soul

  want to fly free,

  not subjected to the pain of my body.

  When will I finally blossom

  When will I finally bloom

  for the world to see

  When will the birds

  sing lines of my poetry?

  I hate the journey.

  I hate the path.

  I’m sorry, prophets of God,

  that I’d say that.

  But who deserves to arrive

  if Yaser1 could never

  see Palestine

  from the sky.

&n
bsp; We Weren’t Supposed to Survive But We Did

  We weren’t supposed to survive but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to remember but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to write but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to fight but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to organise but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to rap but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to find allies but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to grow communities but we did.

  We weren’t supposed to return but WE ARE.

  _________________

  1 Yaser Murtaja was a Palestinian journalist. He was killed by the Israeli army while covering protests at the edge of the Gaza strip on 6 April 2018.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (1980–)

  Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a published author of novels, short stories and poetry collections. She was born in Lebanon and completed her BSc degree in Civil Engineering at Al-Najah University. In 2005, she was awarded the Young Creative Writer Award by the Ministry of Culture, followed with the Young Writer Award for Poetry from the AM Qattan Foundation in 2006. Her short story for children, The Red Bird, was translated into English in 2011.

  Atef Abu Saif (1973–)

  Atef Abu Saif was born in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He is the author of four novels, Shadows in the Memory, The Tale of the Harvest Night, Snowball and The Salty Grape of Paradise; the memoir The Drone Eats with Me; a short story collection Everything is Normal; and the editor of the short story anthology The Book of Gaza. He is a regular contributor to several Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals and has a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence.

  Zuheir Abu Shayeb (1958–)

  Zuheir Abu Shayeb was born in the village of Deir Ghusun. He obtained a BA in Arabic Literature from Jordan’s Yarmouk University in 1983, and has worked as a teacher, graphic designer and an art critic. The author of several poetry collections, he currently lives and works in Amman as Art Director of Muassassah al-Arabiyya al-Dirassat wal-Nashr.

  Salman Abu Sitta (1937–)

  Salman Abu Sitta is a renowned researcher on and spokesperson for refugee affairs. He is Founder and President of the Palestine Land Society and General Coordinator of the Right of Return Congress, and has served as a member of the Palestine National Council. He comes from a village that bore his family name, the Abu Sitta spring well, in Beer Sheba District of Palestine, and as a boy became a refugee in the Gaza Strip. He received a PhD in Civil Engineering from University College London. His acclaimed autobiography Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoire was published in 2016.

  Taha Muhammad Ali (1931–2011)

  Taha Muhammad Ali was born in the village of Saffuriyya, Galilee. An autodidact, he owned a souvenir shop now run by his sons near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation. He published several collections of poetry and a volume of short stories.

  Hanan Ashrawi (1946–)

  Hanan Ashrawi is a Palestinian legislator, activist and academic. After receiving a PhD in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia, Dr Ashrawi returned to Palestine and established the Department of English at Birzeit University in the West Bank in 1978. She is the author of The Modern Palestinian Short Story: An Introduction to Practical Criticism; Contemporary Palestinian Literature under Occupation; Contemporary Palestinian Poetry and Fiction; and Literary Translation: Theory and Practice, and the editor of The Anthology of Palestinian Literature.

  Samira Azzam (1927–1967)

  Samira Azzam was a Palestinian writer, teacher, broadcaster and translator. She began publishing her stories in periodicals as a teenager under the nom de plume ‘Girl of the Coast’. She fled to Lebanon with her family in 1948 before moving to Iraq where she became the headmistress of a girls’ school and radio broadcaster for the Near East Asia Broadcasting Company. Azzam’s first set of short stories, Small Things, was published in 1954. She published two further short story collections.

  Liana Badr (1950–)

  Liana Badr was born in Jerusalem and raised in Jericho. She is a prize-winning film writer and director, and the author of novels, short stories, poetry collections and children’s books, which have been translated into several languages. Badr runs the Cinema and Audiovisual Department at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah. She has worked as a volunteer in various women’s organisations and as a field reporter and editor of the cultural section of Al Hurriyya. She is the founding editor of the periodical Dafater Thaqafiyya.

  Ramzy Baroud (1972–)

  Ramzy Baroud is an Palestinian-American journalist, media consultant, author and internationally-syndicated columnist. He is the editor of Palestine Chronicle, the former managing editor of Middle East Eye and the former deputy managing editor of Al Jazeera online. He is the author of four books, including The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, which have been translated into several languages. Baroud has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara.

  Muin Bseiso (1926–1984)

  Muin Besiso was a prominent poet and writer with a prolific output. Born in Gaza, he started publishing his poetry in the Jaffa-based magazine al-Hurriya. He studied at the American University of Cairo and was imprisoned in Egyptian jails twice, 1955–1957 and 1959–1963. He became a member of the Communist Party in Gaza and a notable member of the Palestinian National Council. His writing includes several poetry collections such as The Traveller and When Stones Rain; plays including The Tragedy of Che Guvera, The Revolution of the Blacks and The Rock; and numerous prose works and articles.

  Selma Dabbagh (1970–)

  Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer of fiction. Her first novel, Out of It, was a Guardian Book of the Year. It has been translated into Arabic, French and Italian. In 2014, her play set in Jerusalem, The Brick, was produced by BBC Radio 4 and nominated for an Imison Award. She has written for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, GQ and other publications and is currently working on her second novel and a film project.

  Ahmad Dahbour (1946–2017)

  Ahmad Dahbour was one of Palestine’s most celebrated poets. Born in Haifa, his family fled to Lebanon in 1948, eventually settling in a refugee camp in Homs, Syria. Though he didn’t complete high school education, Dahbour was an avid reader and published his first collection of poetry at eighteen. He went onto publish twelve further collections. Dahbour was the editor of Lotus magazine, editor-inchief of Albayadir, general director of the Culture Department of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Deputy Minister of Culture of the Palestinian Authority. He was presented with the Tawfiq Zayyad Poetry Award in 1988, the Medal of the Order of Merit and Superiority by Mahmoud Abbas in 2012, and the Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity in 2015.

  Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008)

  Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birweh in the Galilee in Palestine. He became a refugee at age seven. He worked as a journalist and editor in Haifa and left to study in Moscow in 1970. His exilic journey took him to Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, Paris, Amman and Ramallah, where he settled in 1995. He is one of the most celebrated and revered poets in the Arab world. He published more than thirty books, and his poetry has been translated into thirty-five languages. Darwish was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by France in 1993, was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize in 2001, the Prince Claus Award in 2004, and the Cairo Prize for Arabic Poetry in 2007.

  Najwan Darwish (1978–)

  Najwan Darwish is a poet, journalist, editor and cultural critic from Jerusalem. Described by the New York Review of Books as ‘one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation’, his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages. Hay Festival Beirut selected him as one of the thirty-nine best Arab writers under the age of fo
rty and, in 2014, NPR listed his work Nothing More to Lose as one of the best books of the year. He is Chief Editor of the culture section of Al Araby Al Jadeed newspaper and is a literary advisor for the Palestine Festival of Literature.

  Sharif S. Elmusa (1947–)

  Sharif S. Elmusa is a poet, academic and translator of Arabic poetry and fiction. His poems and essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Mizna, The Indian Quarterly, Jadaliyya and in his poetry collection Flawed Landscapes. He is the co-editor of Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. Elmusa was Associate Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, and taught at Georgetown University, Qatar, and Yale University.

  Ashraf Fayadh (1980–)

  Ashraf Fayadh is an artist and poet, born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents. In November 2015 he was sentenced to death by beheading on the charge of apostasy. The Saudi Court overturned the sentence three months later and imposed an eight-year prison term with eight hundred lashes. Several international organisations, including English Pen and Human Rights Watch, have condemned his harsh imprisonment and sentence.

  Emile Habibi (1922–1996)

  Emile Habibi was born in Haifa. In 1943, he became secretary of the Palestinian Communist Party. He was a prominent member of the League of Arab Intellectuals and a founder of the National Liberation League in Palestine. Habibi represented the Israeli Communist Party in the Knesset between 1952 and 1972. He received wide renown with his second novel The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, which was translated into sixteen languages. Habibi was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Israel Prize in Literature. In 1991 he was selected as the most important author in the Arab world by al-Majalla magazine.