A Map of Absence Page 7
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