“Even though they walk daily to the gallows, Palestinians would rather love life where death is king than live life where love is dead.”
~ Yousef Khanfar
When Israeli forces started uprooting Palestinian olive trees in 1967, Mahmud Darvish wrote, “The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh/ The olive tree is the hillside’s modest lady,” in The Second Olive Tree. When the young children of Palestine took to the streets to pelt the humongous Israeli tanks with stones, Fadwa Tuqan wrote, “They died standing, blazing on the road/ Shining like stars, their lips pressed to the lips of life/ They stood up in the face of death/ Then disappeared like the sun,” in Martyrs Of The Intifada. When Israel began colonizing Palestinian lands, one after another, Tawfiq Zayyad wrote, “In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee/ we shall remain/ like a wall upon your chest/ and in your throat/ like a shard of glass/ a cactus thorn/ and in your eyes/ a sandstorm,” in Here We Will Stay. For Palestinians, poetry is not just a literary genre; it is an instrument of protest, of rebellion, of swearing vengeance upon those who have usurped their land, culture, life, everything.
Resistance literature has always been one of the most efficient weapons in the arsenal of the oppressed against the oppressors, and Kate Shannon from The New Yorker tells us why; “No dictator can take creation itself away, nor erase from the people’s consciousness existing art that has already worked its magic.” In recent and modern history, literary resistance has become almost as important and pervasive as armed resistance. When a group of twenty-three Iranian teenagers was captured by the Ba’ath forces during the Iran-Iraq War of 1983, Ahmed Yousafzadeh, one of the captives, published a book titled Those 23 People, to highlight the suffering of the prisoners. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, while people were being abducted from Africa and sold into slavery in the American colonies, Harriet Beecher Stowe penned his novel titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted, in harrowing detail, the daily horrors of life endured by slaves, and catapulted the anti-slavery cause to the forefront in the US. In wake of the mounting racial discrimination in the States, James Baldwin wrote the nonfiction book, The Fire Next Time, poignantly exploring the fury, frustration, and disillusionment riddling the black community in America. Hence, in times of socio-political upheavals and injustices, people have lifted the pen as readily as they have brandished a rifle, because as Iranian writer Azar Nafisi says, “The poet and the tyrant are rivals for the possession of reality. Tyrants have always known the danger of poets and writers.”
Up until 1948, Palestinian literature had largely been part of the Arab literary movement, which was inspired by Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese literature, and thrived during the first half of the century. However, after 1948, the wheels of a new literary movement were set in motion; poetry became the dominant genre and underwent significant changes in terms of themes, technique, and quality.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 concluded with a brief literary sabbatical which was succeeded by a patriotic awakening of sorts as poetry became the mode of expression for people, their nationalistic fervor, their unbridled rage at having been dispossessed of their land. During this time, Palestinian poetic language and technique also underwent an evolution. Arab literary trends collided with foreign poetic style, leaving deep fissures in the traditional rules of technique, and forging a new form in which the profound sorrow and anger of Palestinians figured predominantly. After 1948, Palestinian poetry essentially became representative of the harsh reality Palestinians found themselves in under the Israeli occupation. Poets ferociously penned verses dripping with not just grief, but also a retaliatory vehemence and an unwavering steadfastness or sumud, the Palestinian cultural value of perseverance. The reason poetry became the most popular and sought after genre in Palestinian resistance literature is because it could spread easily and quickly by oral recitation, and did not have to rely on publication. Furthermore, since ancient times, poetry has been intimately associated with the Arabian sense of identity, cultural heritage, and communal history. In the Arabic tradition, the role of the poet is not limited to the realms of literature, but is actively invoked in political and social activities. Within this tradition, the role of the poet has been of major significance. From the pre-Islamic era when poets were charged with the task of composing celebratory odes in praise of tribal heroes or ridiculing verses to defame enemies, through the pre-modern period when poets were patronized by the Islamic rulers to extoll their virtues and narrate the tales of their valor, to the modern period where Palestinians defy the Israeli apartheid and express their desire for communal freedom through the poetic language, poetry has always been an essential pivot point in Arabian history and culture.
Since 1948, Palestinians have ardently used poetry as a vehicle to create resistance and assert their identity. At the same time, these poems seek to arouse the Palestinian sense of revolt to struggle against the Israeli settler-colonialism and the numerous injustices dealt to them every day in Gaza and the West Bank. For example, in his poem The Passport, Mahmud Darvish writes:
Do not ask the valleys about their mother
The sword of light cleaves from my forehead
And from my hand springs the river’s water…
All the hearts of people
Are my nationality
So take away my passport.
In these lines, Darvish uses the image of the passport to defy Israel’s relentless attempts to extirpate the Palestinians from their land of birth, nationality, and culture, and annihilate their sense of identity in doing so. In addition, the images of sword, light, hands, and water also serve as metaphorical expressions of resistance. Another poem, Fadwa Tuqan’s To Christ, uses Al Quds (Jerusalem) as a rallying symbol of Palestinian identity, and depicts how this symbol is being mutilated under the Israeli occupation:
Lord, father of universe,
Jerusalem’s feasts are crucified
This year.
On your day,
All the dells, O Lord
Are silent!
They rang
For two thousand years
But now
They are dumbfounded,
The domes are black
Black news overwhelms all
Jerusalem walls
On the cross
Jerusalem bleeds
On the hands of torture.
During a live Al-Jazeera Stream, Palestinian poet Ibtisam Barakat said, her voice quivering with tears, “There is a Naqba that has been going on for seventy years; geographical and political, a Naqba of life, but there is also an emotional Naqba that is happening with all the Palestinians all over the world, and we don’t have a place to express it. Poetry is just a tiny oasis where we can express some of that Naqba.” In the end, for Palestinians, poetry is not just mere words stringed together in verses; it is a way of reclaiming the voice that they have been so cruelly stripped bare of.
Palestinian Poetry to read/listen:
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Fadwa%20Tuqan%20Palestinian%20Poet%20Poetry%20Picture%20Bio.htm
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52553/i-have-a-seat-in-the-abandoned-theater
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=46724
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vFJE93LTI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thVPpbpqVbo