A Map of Absence Read online

  I will depart from my step … I cannot bear it!

  I will search for a road.

  There is no road but me

  and these are my steps.

  In my body is the next step.

  [ … ]

  Whither go the doves?

  Whence come the waves of swallows?

  Forbidden to me to cross again and again the threshold of my questions, forbidden to me my food and drink.

  If I do not restore the markings of my face and recover the flame of pride

  Forbidden to me my land.

  Forbidden to me my sky.

  Fashionable freaks flutter around my grave, having dropped time.

  They said: Do you sing?

  I said: I will sing in the name of him who kills the awaited life.

  In the name of my beginning and end

  And a song strangled with string.

  I will sing my second elegy,

  the geography of distant words and elevated images.

  I will sing my flesh on bloody roads

  and the Book of my exodus from the cruel paradise.

  I will sing to my name,

  I will sing in my name,

  and in my name the sea swallows the crew of a lost submarine.

  And the death storm sings its splendid melodies.

  In my name, my name is written on water

  and my body is erased on water.

  They said and I said.

  They assailed and I assaulted.

  I am the problem.

  The sniper of Beirut tarried. Death spared me in my exile, my homeland, my shroud, my Golgotha.

  There is no solution, warring or peaceful ... I am the problem.

  I am: the songs and the wheat buds, the cannons and the bombs.

  There is no good without me

  and no evil without me.

  I am: the impossible possible the beautiful ugly the tall short the intruding enemy the honorable friend the lowly mighty the noble rogue the serious boor the slim stout the sand palm the lightning flood the desert ruin

  I am the sky scrapers the sky the absence the advent the ascent the descent

  I am the impossible possible

  There is no shade but me

  No form but me

  no solution but me

  My burden is as large as my back

  My back is as large as my life

  My life is as large as my patience

  And my patience is graceful, graceful

  And my patience is spacious, spacious.

  Translated by Ferial Ghazoul

  FADWA TUQAN

  Hamza

  Hamza was just an ordinary man

  like others in my hometown

  who work only with their hands for bread.

  When I met him the other day,

  this land was wearing a cloak of mourning

  in windless silence. And I felt defeated.

  But Hamza-the-ordinary said:

  ‘My sister, our land has a throbbing heart,

  it doesn’t cease to beat, and it endures

  the unendurable. It keeps the secrets

  of hills and wombs. This land sprouting

  with spikes and palms is also the land

  that gives birth to a freedom-fighter.

  This land, my sister, is a woman.’

  Days rolled by. I saw Hamza nowhere.

  Yet I felt the belly of the land

  was heaving in pain.

  Hamza – sixty-five – weighs

  heavy like a rock on his own back.

  ‘Burn, burn his house,’

  a command screamed,

  ‘and tie his son in a cell.’

  The military ruler of our town later explained:

  it was necessary for law and order,

  that is, for love and peace!

  Armed soldiers besieged his house:

  the serpent’s coil came full circle.

  The bang at the door was but an order –

  ‘evacuate, damn it!’

  And generous as they were with time, they could say:

  ‘in an hour, yes!’

  Hamza opened the window.

  Face to face with the sun blazing outside,

  he cried: ‘in this house my children

  and I will live and die

  for Palestine.’

  Hamza’s voice echoed clean

  across the bleeding silence of the town.

  An hour later, impeccably,

  the house came crumbling down,

  the rooms were blown to pieces in the sky,

  and the bricks and the stones all burst forth,

  burying dreams and memories of a lifetime

  of labour, tears, and some happy moments.

  Yesterday I saw Hamza

  walking down a street in our town –

  Hamza the ordinary man as he always was:

  always secure in his determination.

  Labour Pains

  The wind blows the pollen in the night

  through ruins of fields and homes.

  Earth shivers with love,

  with the pain of giving birth,

  but the conqueror wants us to believe

  stories of submission and surrender.

  O Arab Aurora!

  Tell the usurper of our land

  that childbirth is a force unknown to him,

  the pain of a mother’s body,

  that the scarred land

  inaugurates life

  at the moment of dawn

  when the rose of blood

  blooms on the wound.

  The Deluge and The Tree

  When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge

  of dark evil

  onto the good green land

  ‘they’ gloated. The western skies

  reverberated with joyous accounts:

  ‘The Tree has fallen!

  The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane leaves no life in the

  Tree!’

  Had the Tree really fallen?

  Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever,

  not while the wine of our thorn limbs

  fed the thirsty roots,

  Arab roots alive

  tunnelling deep, deep, into the land!

  When the Tree rises up, the branches

  shall flourish green and fresh in the sun,

  the laughter of the Tree shall leaf

  beneath the sun

  and birds shall return.

  Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.

  The birds shall return.

  Excerpt from Call of the Land

  I ask nothing more

  Than to die in my country

  To dissolve and merge with the grass,

  To give life to a flower

  That a child of my country will pick,

  All I ask

  Is to remain in the bosom of my country

  As soil,

  Grass,

  A flower.

  All translated by Tania Tamari Nasir and Christopher Millis

  TAWFIQ ZAYYAD

  I Call to You

  I call to you

  I clasp your hands

  And kiss the earth beneath your feet

  And I say to you: I sacrifice myself for you

  And dedicate the light of my eyes to you

  And the warmth of the heart, I give you …

  The tragedy is that I live

  My share of tragedy is that of yours

  I call to you

  I clasp your hands

  I have not spared myself for my homeland or underestimated the power of my hands

  I have stood in the face of my oppressors

  Orphaned, naked and barefooted …

  I have carried my blood on my palm

  And have not lowered my flag

  And I have protected the green grass above the tombs of my ancestors

  I call to you, I call to you …

  Translated by Atef Alsha
er

  We Shall Remain

  As if twenty impossibles we are

  In Al-Lid, Ar-Ramleh and the Galilee

  Here … on your chests, staying as a wall

  Remaining we are

  In your throats

  Like a piece of glass, like cactus

  And in your eyes

  A storm of fire

  Here ... on your chests, staying as a wall

  Remaining we are

  Hungry we get … naked … we challenge …

  Chant poems

  Fill the street with angry demonstrations

  Fill prisons with pride

  Produce children … a revolting generation …

  after generation

  As if twenty impossibles we are

  In Al-Lid, Ar-Ramleh and the Galilee

  * * *

  Plant ideas, like yeast in dough

  The coldness of the Galilee in our nerves

  Live coal … hell in our hearts

  If thirsty we get rocks we squeeze

  If hungry we get soil we eat … and we never leave

  Our redolent blood we don’t spare …

  We don’t spare … we don’t spare …

  Here we have a past …

  A present …

  And a future

  Translated by Adib S. Kawar

  On The Trunk of an Olive Tree

  Because I do not weave wool,

  And daily am in danger of detention,

  And my house is the object of police visits

  To search and ‘to cleanse’,

  Because I cannot buy paper,

  I shall carve the record of my sufferings,

  And all my secrets

  On an olive tree

  In the courtyard

  Of my house.

  I shall carve my story and the chapters of my tragedy,

  I shall carve my sighs

  On my grove and on the tombs of my dead;

  I shall carve

  All the bitterness I have tasted,

  To be blotted out by some of the happiness to come

  I shall carve the number of each deed

  Of our usurped land

  The location of my village and its boundaries.

  The demolished houses of its peoples,

  My uprooted trees,

  And each crushed wild blossom.

  And the names of those master torturers

  Who rattled my nerves and caused my misery.

  The names of all the prisons,

  And every type of handcuff

  That closed around my wrists,

  The files of my jailers,

  Every curse

  Poured upon my head.

  I shall carve:

  Kafr Qasim, I shall not forget!

  And I shall carve:

  Deir Yassin, it’s rooted in my memory.

  I shall carve:

  We have reached the peak of our tragedy.

  It has absorbed us and we have absorbed it,

  But we have finally reached it.

  I shall carve all that the sun tells me,

  And what the moon whispers,

  And what the skylark relates,

  Near the well

  Forsaken by lovers.

  And to remember it all,

  I shall continue to carve

  All the chapters of my tragedy,

  And all the stages of the disaster,

  From beginning

  To end,

  On the olive tree

  In the courtyard

  Of the house.

  Translated by Abdel Wahhab el-Messiri

  MUIN BSEISO

  ‘NO!’

  His wounds said: ‘No!’

  His chains said: ‘No!’

  And the turtledove which shielded his wound with her feather

  Said: ‘No!’

  ‘No!’ for those who sold and bought

  Gaza’s silver anklet.

  They sold the bullets and bought a goose.

  Quaking goose!

  Stop for a moment.

  And listen to him

  Saying: ‘No!’

  Pity him; he did not die under neon lights,

  Between the candlestick and the moon.

  Pity him; there was no formal announcement

  or a dumb funeral.

  No moaning poem nor song.

  Stones!

  Let me compose, if only one line of verse,

  That I may recite it to all the men with long and false beards.

  Stop quaking for a moment

  And listen to him saying: ‘No!’

  Like the solid fence of a house in Gaza.

  Every day, he gets killed one thousand times,

  Quaking goose!

  Translated by Abdul Wahab Al-Messiri

  The Vinegar Cup

  Cast your lots, people,

  Who’ll get my robe

  After crucifixion?

  The vinegar cup in my right hand,

  The thorn crown on my head,

  And the murderer has walked away free

  While your son has been led

  To the cross.

  But I shall not run

  From the vinegar cup,

  Nor the crown of thorns

  I’ll carve the nails of my cross from my own bones

  And continue,

  Spilling drops of my blood onto this earth

  For if I should not rip apart

  How would you be born from my heart?

  How would I be born from your heart?

  Oh, my people!

  Translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye

  RASHID HUSSEIN

  Without a Passport

  I was born without a passport

  I grew up

  and saw my country

  become prisons

  without a passport

  So I raised a country

  a sun

  and wheat

  in every house

  I tended to the trees therein

  I learned how to write poetry

  to make the people of my village happy

  without a passport

  I learned that he whose land is stolen

  does not like the rain

  If he were ever to return to it, he will

  without a passport

  But I am tired of minds

  that have become hotels

  for wishes that never give birth

  except with a passport

  Without a passport

  I came to you

  and revolted against you

  so slaughter me

  perhaps I will then feel that I am dying

  without a passport

  Translated by Sinan Antoon

  Against

  Against my country’s rebels wounding a sapling

  Against a child – any child – bearing a bomb

  Against my sister studying a rifle’s components

  Against what you will –

  But even a prophet becomes powerless

  When his vision takes in

  the murderers’ horses

  Against a child becoming a hero at ten

  Against a tree’s heart sprouting mines

  Against my orchard’s branches becoming gallows

  Against erecting scaffolds among the roses of my land

  Against what you will –

  But after my country, my comrades, and my youth were burnt,

  How can my poems not turn into guns?

  Translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye

  TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI

  Exodus

  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’s al
ready risen.

  We will not leave!

  Everyone outside is waiting

  for the trucks and the cars

  loaded with honey and hostages.

  We will not leave!

  The shields of light are breaking apart

  before the rout and the siege;

  outside, everyone wants us to leave.

  But we will not leave!

  Ivory white brides

  behind their veils

  slowly walk in captivity’s glare, waiting,

  and everyone outside wants us to leave,

  but we will not leave!

  The big guns pound the jujube groves,

  destroying the dreams of the violets,

  extinguishing bread, killing the salt,

  unleashing thirst

  and parching lips and souls.

  And everyone outside is saying:

  ‘What are we waiting for?

  Warmth we’re denied,

  the air itself has been seized!

  Why aren’t we leaving?’

  Masks fill the pulpits and brothels,

  the places of ablution.

  Masks cross-eyed with utter amazement;

  they do not believe what is now so clear,

  and fall, astonished,

  writhing like worms, or tongues.

  We will not leave!

  Are we in the inside only to leave?

  Leaving is just for the masks,

  for pulpits and conventions.

  Leaving is just

  for the siege-that-comes-from-within,

  the siege that comes from the Bedouin’s loins,

  the siege of the brethren

  tarnished by the taste of the blade

  and the stink of crows.

  We will not leave!

  Outside they’re blocking the exits

  and offering their blessings to the impostor,

  praying, petitioning

  Almighty God for our deaths.

  Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin

  SALEM JUBRAN

  Refugee

  The sun crosses borders

  without any solider shooting at it

  The nightingale sings in Tulkarm

  of an evening

  eats and roosts peacefully

  with kibbutzim birds.

  A stray donkey grazes

  across the firing line

  in peace

  and on one aim.

  But I, your son made refugee

  Oh my native land –

  between me and your horizons

  the frontier walls stand.

  Translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye