Earlier this year, Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, published a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems (Banipal, 2022), including poems by sixteen Palestinian poets from diverse backgrounds. I recently had a chance to interview Sawaie over email about this work. Our correspondence ranged over several topics, including the inspiration behind this translation project, the criteria Sawaie used to select the poems in his anthology, the choices he faced in rendering different rhetorical devices into English, and the place of the anthologized poems in Palestinian literary history and in the Palestinian struggle.
Eric Calderwood (EC): Talk to me about the inspiration behind this project. Why did you think that now was a good time to publish a new anthology of Palestinian poetry?
Mohammed Sawaie (MS): The genesis of the project began with reading the poem “He is calm and so am I” (“Huwa hadiʾ wa-ana ka-dhalik”) by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with two of my assistants, while directing a University of Virginia language program at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 2012. It occurred to me then to translate this poem—and the comments on the translation led to a Eureka moment! Following that summer, I started to think seriously about compiling a list of Palestinian poets and their poems to make their translation available to English readers, who, outside specialists, are generally not informed about Arabic literature, let alone Palestinian literary production—especially poetry.
As Palestinians continue to struggle for their home country and their own independent state, they are continually faced by a strong adversary that controls every aspect of their lives. In their struggle against Israeli occupation, the daily violent acts culminate in flareups, devastating wars, invasions of homes, killings, imprisonments, and so on. Such events often go unreported in the Western media, unless there is a large-scale war. Nevertheless, due to the wide use of social media, more and more people are becoming increasingly aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians—the female and male poets of varied generations—who are best qualified to tell their stories, their history, their suffering, their alienation in their diasporic places of residence, and their aspirations for a safe home to return to, to identify with, and to build, on par with other fellow human beings.
EC: In the anthology, there are Muslim and Christian poets, poets with varying levels of education, as well as poets born at different moments of the twentieth century and who lived through the major events of modern Palestinian history—from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), to the Nakba of 1948, to the present. Could you discuss your selection process for this anthology?
MS: Readers may not be aware that Palestinians enjoy one of the highest levels of education in the Arab world despite their nakba, their expulsion from their indigenous homeland, and dispersal in the world. Poetry is often believed to rise and develop because of adverse situations; consequently, there are innumerous poets among the fifteen million or so Palestinians worldwide, poets of varying degrees of quality and recognition by readers in the Arab world.
Perhaps this is an appropriate time to say a word about the style of Arabic poetics. Prior to the 1940s, Arab poets—Palestinians included—largely composed in the classical mode of composing poetry, which means adhering to one meter and the same rhyme throughout the poem (regardless of length). Around the mid to late 1940s, many Arab poets forsook this classical style and adopted a new mode of writing poetry, called al-shiʿr al-hurr, free verse, in which the monometer and monorhyme were abandoned.
The question of selecting poets to include in this collection gave me pause; in fact, it created a dilemma as to who to include and exclude. In the end, I made a conscious decision not to include poems written in the classical style, but I want to assure readers that this choice was not out of an aversion to the classical mode of writing on my part; rather, the choice was due to translatability. I then decided to make a selection based on places of residence. I gave preference to poets who stayed in Palestine at the time of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and lived in this newly established state despite all the hardships they describe in some of their works. Then I chose poets who lived in the parts of Palestine that Israel did not occupy at the time of its establishment, namely what later came to be known as the West Bank. As is known, these territories were occupied by Israel in later years, in the June 1967 war. The poets from this category either continued to live under occupation, or had to migrate to neighboring Arab countries. Poems by these poets convey their experiences and those of their compatriots. The last category represents those Palestinian poets who left their country in 1948, and had to live in diaspora in neighboring Arab countries.
Additional criteria for the selection of poets and their poems were gender and generation. Women poets as well as young male poets were included in the interest of having a representative cross-section of Palestinian poets and poetry.
EC: Although the poets in the anthology represent different backgrounds and historical periods, I detected some common themes and rhetorical figures that run through their work. For example, many of the poems in the anthology feature personification, apostrophe, and/or repetition. In “The Plague” by Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003), the speaker apostrophizes the wind and repeats a refrain: “Oh, winds, blow and drive the clouds towards us. / Let the rain descend! / Let the rain descend! / Let it descend.” In a similar vein, the speaker in Zeinab Habash’s “Kufr Qasim” (1976) personifies and apostrophizes Kufr Qasim, a Palestinian village that was the site of a massacre by Israeli forces in 1956. Why do you think that such elements of personification, apostrophe, and repetition are so common in this anthology? Is it because these are rhetorical figures that, in some sense, resist death, inanimateness, and silence?
MS: As you know, the language used in poetry, unlike the prose of history books or the news, is characterized by many rhetorical devices. Such devices are employed for specific reasons the poet has in mind—to emphasize a notion, to drive in this or that intended notion, to convince, to express a certain emotion. Or for reasons relating to rhyme. In the year Tuqan’s poem was written, members of the Israeli army’s elite Golani Brigade entered the city of Nablus, Tuqan’s hometown, and committed acts of humiliation on its residents. The repetition of “Let the rain descend” in this poem replicates the level of vehemence the poet and people in the city generally must have felt toward the occupying forces; their evil deeds are compared to a plague that touches the whole population of the city. The rain that the poet is praying for in the three lines at the end is understood to be a cleansing medium to rid the city of abuse and the occupying forces. The use of these rhetorical devices is, as you suggest, to resist death, inanimateness, and silence. By the use of apostrophe, Tuqan and Habash are highlighting the issues at hand, provoking emotions of anger and deep sadness. For instance, in Habash’s poem, the personification of Kufr Qasim as a woman whose children were massacred evokes a sense of shock, anger, and sorrow.
EC: There are some lovely moments of alliteration in your translations. For example, in Asma Rizq Toubi’s poem “To Jaffa” (1972), the speaker says, “She rushed to Jaffa alight with, / nostalgic memories, / and from walkway to walkway / wishing to . . . ? / Wishing for what . . . ?” (my italics). How does such alliteration capture, in English, some of the musical effects of the original Arabic?
MS: In the original Arabic, the poet Asma Rizq Toubi employs alliteration in almost every other line. The use of this device contributes to melody, rhythm, and moves the poem forward at a rather fast clip. It helps to portray the psychological conditions of those persons returning to Jaffa in search of their ancestral homes, from which they were displaced in 1948, and also expresses their feelings of eagerness to find out what has become of their houses, the nostalgia they felt for them, as well as the fear, shock, and sadness for what might have befallen them. Yet, one senses a deep anxiety about the unknown and can almost feel the beats of the “visitors’” hearts, creating an emotive effect.
EC: Although your anthology includes work by sixteen poets, the poet whose work is best represented is Salem Jubran (1941–2011). You’ve translated nineteen of Jubran’s poems, covering the period between 1964 and 1975. Why did you decide to give such prominence to Jubran’s work?
MS: Three prominent Palestinian poets were born and raised in Palestine before the establishment of Israel in 1948, and they continued to live under the harsh conditions of Israeli society: Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, and Salem Jubran. These poets, and many other writers, were activists against the Israeli authorities; they were placed under periodic house arrest, imprisoned periodically, restricted in travel and movement. They were often thrown out of their workplaces for signs of opposition to the local military ruler or the state, and also wrote at different times in the literary supplement of the Communist newspaper al-Ittihad and other Arabic publications. Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim were translated widely into English and some other languages, but Salem Jubran was not as fortunate in this regard. He did not enjoy the international exposure that Darwish and al-Qasim shared, through their participation in international youth communist camps and gatherings that were held in the Eastern Bloc countries. This encouraged me to include several poems by Jubran.
Furthermore, al-Qasim and Darwish were prominent and popular in poetry mahrajans, the poetry gatherings that were held within Palestinian communities in the state of Israel to express their political views publicly, to connect with and defend Palestinian citizens, and to promote their struggle for civil rights and equities with Jewish citizens in the state. Jubran, in contrast, tended to be muted, muffled in public fora, despite the inner protestation that was latent in his writings. His poetry is thought-provoking, cerebral, expressed in quiet, muted lines. Yet, it is a record of how he experienced his daily life in Israel.
EC: I was particularly struck by Jubran’s poem “On Native Americans” (1964), which suggests a connection between Native Americans and Palestinians. As you know, this connection was also explored in Mahmud Darwish’s famous poem, “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man” (1992). How would you situate Jubran’s poem in a longer Palestinian tradition of writing about Native Americans or, more broadly, the issue of indigeneity?
MS: Palestinians, having suffered forcible expulsion from their native land in 1948 and the subsequent wars of 1967 and 1973, often compare their fate and treatment to the natives of the colonies in America, Africa, and Asia. The example often cited is that of South Africa, where Europeans forces, Dutch and later English, occupied the lands, confiscated the fertile swaths for their own benefit, contributed to brutal treatment of the natives at all levels, created ghettos for the indigenous population, established military rule over the population with strict, harsh, and at times inhumane rules that restricted movement, imposed curfews, imprisoned at will, and enforced all kinds of mistreatment. Salem Jubran and Mahmoud Darwish, as you mention, are aware of the brutal treatment that the indigenous people of the Americas faced and the deprivations that they had to endure. Such a treatment of Native Americans by the European colonizers resembles, in these poets’ views, the fate that Palestinians were subjected to by the establishment of Israel at the hands of white Europeans—the majority of whom migrated from Western European countries to Palestine and established a state through the expulsion of the indigenous native population. Not only did they deny rights to ancestral lands, but they also contributed to the dispersal of the native peoples all over the world, and caused them to live in refugee camps that were not fit for humans.
EC: Your anthology introduced me to the work of Marwan Makhoul (b. 1979), whose poems give voice to the contradictions and tensions experienced by Palestinian citizens of Israel. Makhoul addresses this issue head-on when he writes, in “Daily Poems”: “There are matters I don’t comprehend. / I am not Israeli, / nor am I fully Palestinian.” Makhoul’s work also grapples with the challenge of finding a grammar for talking about Palestine and Palestinian time. On this point, the speaker of “Daily Poems” says, “My grandfather told me: / Palestine is a past tense defective verb. / My father said: / but it is a present tense verb.” How do you read these lines? And where would you place Makhoul’s work in the longer literary tradition that is represented in your anthology? That is, what does Makhoul have in common with the poets who came before him, and how does his work break new ground?
MS: Marwan Makhoul represents a new generation of poets among Israeli Palestinians, who, while well informed of the Palestinian poets who came to prominence before him, is steeped in the Arabic literary heritage and draws on it in rather selective ways. Unlike the preceding generations of poets whose poetry focused on the nakba, its history, the loss of homeland, and the abhorrent treatment of Palestinians, Makhoul has surpassed the nakba poetry by focusing on human issues in aesthetic ways, relying on focused poetic imagery. He does not lament the loss of the homeland—which does not mean he does not feel the loss of land, culture, and so on; instead, he states the issues and treats them rather objectively. His choice of words in poems is not a goal in and of itself; words are rather a rhetorical means to communicate his ideas while infusing the text with overlapping layers of beauty. He has acquired a high standing among Palestinians in Israel, as well as elsewhere in the Arab world, through addressing the concerns of people and by interacting with them in poetry readings, which attract thousands. In his political poems, he refrains from the use of slogans. He simply expresses his own feelings about what an individual Palestinian faces in Israeli society. In a famous poem, “An Arab at Ben Gurion Airport” (“ʿArabi fi matar Bin Ghuriyun”), he describes and states factually—yet with a hilarious choice of words and direct criticism—the discriminatory treatment of Palestinians and other nationals of Palestinian origin when arriving at Ben Gurion Airport, compared to how Israeli Jews are treated.
The quoted lines “There are matters I don’t comprehend. / I am not Israeli, / nor am I fully Palestinian” tackle an important issue among Palestinians in Israel (who comprise 20% of the country’s population)—namely the question of identity and their standing within the state of Israel. While they hold Israeli citizenship with, theoretically, equal rights, Israel still applies over fifty laws that privilege Jews over non-Jewish citizens. Chief among those laws is the Law of Return, which grants Jews from anywhere in the world automatic citizenship rights if they apply for it, while denying the same right to Palestinians.
I interpret the poem “Daily Poems” as a treatment of the debate among Palestinians in Israel about the question of identity. The poem provides the views of three generations in this family. In the eyes of an older generation of Israeli Palestinians, the indigenous homeland was a thing of the past, as reflected in the grandfather’s statement that “Palestine was a past tense defective verb.” The grandfather in this case is resigned to the fact that Palestine was confiscated, taken over, appropriated. It is no longer Palestine to him. On the other hand, the next generation of Palestinians in Israel (and perhaps elsewhere) views the status of the country to be in flux, as reflected in the line “My father said: / but it is a present tense verb.” The youngest generation recognizes that the country is no longer the homeland of the indigenous Palestinians, yet also feels that the question of its status remains open for debate. The grandson admits that his grandfather and his father are both right in viewing Palestine as they do, yet, in the poem, a fighter jet shrieks close to the speaker—a symbol of continued wars and possibly a change of status!
Mohammed Sawaie is a Professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, USA, and author of many books and articles on aspects of the Arabic language, both in Arabic and English. His latest publication is The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems, published by Banipal Books, London, 2022.
Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. His second book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, will be published by Harvard University Press in May 2023. In addition to his scholarly publications, Calderwood has contributed essays and commentary to NPR, the BBC, Foreign Policy, The American Scholar, and McSweeney’s Quarterly.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: