Nihilism... (17)

Nah, I can't go for that..

Ibrahim Tuqan – My Homeland

My homeland
My homeland
Glory and beauty
Sublimity and prettiness
Are in your hills
Life and deliverance
Pleasure and hope
Are in your atmosphere
Will I see you?
Safe and comfortable

Sound and honored
Will I see you?
In your eminence
Reaching the stars
My homeland
My homeland

The youth will not get tired
Their goal is your independence

Or they die
We will drink from death
But we will not be slaves to our enemies
We do not want
An eternal humiliation
Nor a miserable life
We do not want
But we will return
Our great glory
My homeland
My homeland

The sword and the pen
Are our symbols
Not talking nor quarrelling
Our glory and covenant
And a duty to fulfil it
Shake us
Our honor
Is an honorable cause
A raised flag
O, your beauty
In your eminence
Victorious over your enemies
My homeland
My homeland

It’s really no surprise that resistance and literature go hand in hand
by Yassine Hariss

"Resistance can be summoned in many different ways. While most might think of protests, riots or boycotts as the primary means of revolt and objection, they’re not the only viable options. Nor are they always materially feasible considering oppressors’ tight grip and denial of the most basic of human rights.

Since the Nakba in 1948, resistance in Palestine against Israeli settlers has been articulated in all sorts of ways. For as long as Palestinians have experienced inter-generational pain, misery and chaos, the never-ending suffering has been channelled to fuel an irritating need to vent. It’s the catalyst behind generations’ strong will to not only speak but to also put pen to paper.

As we all know our representation in the media is completely flawed, inaccurate and quite caricatural. Whether it’s a product of 9/11, the infamous Arab Spring or simply due to Orientalism and racial prejudice, the region’s inhabitants have often been depicted as barbaric people only able to translate their frustration and anger through violent and bloody parades.

However, the reality is quite different. Although it is true that we’ve witnessed some of the world’s most awful events and had to elevate our voices through some extreme measures, it is always worth reminding how the region has also given birth to some of the region’s most adulated and compelling writers – and this includes Palestinian writers.

Back to the main point. Let’s not forget that if an image is worth a thousand words, according to Fadwa Tuqan, it’ll only take a single poem to create 10 Palestinian resistance fighters.

Sometimes in prose, other times in free-verse, we’ve compiled three poems published by Palestinian authors that will help you read between the lines and understand the strong bond between themselves and the promised land."

For as long as the Palestinians have endured occupation and oppression—first under the British in the 1920-30s, then by the Israeli state after 1948—they have produced writers and poets who have articulated not only humiliation and despair, but also resistance and the hope of liberation.

Israel’s most famous military commander of the 20th century, the notorious Moshe Dayan, once said of the great Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan that one of her poems was enough to create ten Palestinian resistance fighters.

The dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has written, “What political activists did not dare express, poets sang out with force…”

Tawfiq Zayyad: The Impossible

It is much easier for you
To push an elephant through a needle’s eye,
Catch fried fish in galaxy,
Blow out the sun,
Imprison the wind,
Or make a crocodile speak,
Than to destroy by persecution
The shimmering glow of a belief
Or check our march
Towards our cause
One single step…


Photo taken by Dino in Lyon France

‘You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring from coming.’
Pablo Neruda


Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was the pen name and later the legal name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, a well-known Chilean writer and politician. He was awarded the 1950 World Peace Prize and the 1971 Nobel Prize for literature. Walt Whitman was one of his icons, and he wrote an ode to honour him. He was a committed supporter of Stalin and Fidel Castro, and in his poetry, you can even discover some of this effect.

Neruda held numerous diplomatic posts in his life and served as a senator of the Communist Party of Chile. When Conservative President Gonzalez Videla banned communism in Chile, a warrant for Neruda’s arrest was also issued. For months his followers hid him in the basement of a house in the port of Valparaiso in Chile. Neruda then escaped to Argentina in exile through the mountain pass near Maihue Lake. Neruda became a close collaborator with the Socialist President Salvador Allende some years later.

I Am Explaining a Few Things

You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
And the metaphysics laced with poppies?
And the rain that often beat
his words filling them with holes and birds?
I’ll tell you everything that’s happening with me.
I lived in a neighborhood
of Madrid, with church bells,
with clocks, with trees.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because everywhere
geraniums were exploding: it was
a beautiful house
with dogs and little kids.

Federico, you remember,
from under the earth,
do you remember my house with balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Hermano, hermano!
And one morning everything was burning
and ever since then fire,
gunpowder ever since,
and ever since then blood
Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars making blessings,
... kept coming from the sky to kill children,
and through the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children’s blood.

You will ask why his poetry
doesn’t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

“I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theatre”

I have a seat in the abandoned theatre

in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall

the final act without longing ... not because of anything

other than that the play was not written

skillfully ...

Chaos

as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography

of the spectators’ impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts

and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses

sitting in our seats

I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon,

and wait, unless you’re the author!

—No

Then he asks me: And you are you the author?

—No

So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral

hero to escape from an obvious fate

He says: No hero dies revered in the second

scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would

revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend

what the iron has done to my brothers

So I say: It is you then?

He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked

witnesses

I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator

He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no

one is neutral here. And you must choose

your part in the end

So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?

Mahmoud Darwish
"The Palestinian poet received many awards while he was alive. In his poetry, we find the pain, chaos, and sadness that the conflict between the two states has brought to many. The conflict between Palestine and Israel has been an ongoing struggle since the mid-20th century. Before that, the land was a peaceful place where different religions coexisted. Today, Israel persist with illegal settlements and stealing land from the Palestinians., making a two state solution near impossible.
Darwish wrote over 30 poetry books and eight books of prose that are still read and loved by those who wish to see Palestine as an independent state. He used metaphors from everyday association that any Palestinian would recognize. His writings are taught in many schools in the Arab world, and the people of his homeland remember him as a role model and a peaceful symbol of the resistance."

Know their names..

Ahlam Bsharat

How I Kill Soldiers

Colonial soldiers,
what have they been doing
to my poetry all these years
when I could have easily killed them
in my poems
as they’ve killed my family
outside poetry?

Poetry was my chance
to settle the score with killers,
but I let them age outdoors,
and I want them to know decay
in their lives, their faces to wrinkle,
their smiles to thin out,
and their weapons to hunch over.

So if you, dear readers, see a soldier
taking a stroll in my poem,
trust that I have left him to his fate
as I leave a criminal
to his many remaining years,
they will execute him.

And his ears will execute him
as he listens to me reciting my poem
to grieving families,
he won’t be able to slink out
of my book or the reading hall
as the seated audience stares at him.

You will not be consoled,
soldier, you will not,
not even as you exit
my poetry event
with slumped shoulders
and pockets full of dead bullets.

Even if your hand,
tremulous as it is
from so much murder,
fidgeted with the bullets,
you will not
produce more
than a dead sound.

Translated by
Fady Joudah

—Ramallah

The thumbs downer

I use my thumb because I am dumb

I hide my disdain behind my screen because I'm mean

I would rather sit in the shadows with my thumb because I am dumb

-Dino





#BDS

Facts and reality these are not Ukrainian children. They are the 66 Palestinian children who were killed by Israeli warplanes in Gaza last May