“Report of the Special Committee To Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories”<\/a>, wherein the UN first fully acknowledged the torture and indefinite detention without trial which underpinned Israel\u2019s penal policy in relation to the Palestinians. Zayyad was a member of Maki, the Israeli Communist Party, which sought to organise both Hebrew and Arab workers across national lines.<\/p>\nZayyad is a very different poet to Mahmoud Darwish, widely seen as Palestine\u2019s \u201cnational poet.\u201d In a sense his work is cruder \u2013 it makes no effort to hide behind metaphor. For him dispossession is dispossession pure and simple. It is a brutal act done to further colonial aims. It is not cloaked in symbolism about lost Edens, as with Darwish, say, or Salem Jubran. It should be noted that Aida Bamia\u2019s translation of these poems is somewhat rough and ready \u2013 which serves the poetry well on one level by allowing the rage at its heart to stand out \u2013 but seems occasionally misjudged (I doubt Zayyad would have described his gaolers as \u201cpesky\u201d\u00a0 as her translation of \u201cEvening Chat in Prison\u201d has it.)<\/p>\n
What stands out, though, is that this is a poetry written from a life of resistance, and that the language used is intended to be part of the process of resistance, not a means to prettify it or mystify it. In \u201cBitter Sugar\u201d, for instance, Zayyad states that he writes \u201cfor the destitute\u201d and all of the poems here demonstrate that same fidelity \u2013 the task is to exemplify the anger at dispossession in language that aims to be as harsh as the necessary struggle which Zayyad committed himself to. \u201cAnd I bloody my usurper\u2019s face\/With poems sharp like knives.\u201d Elsewhere, in \u201cBehind Bars\u201d, he says that \u201cMy poems pour\/The cup of humiliation over your troops\/And rub their faces in the mud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bitter Sugar<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nAnswer me,
Palestine, I call your wound drenching with salt.
I call it, screaming : let me melt away in it, then pour me.
I am your son, the tragedy left me here,
My neck under your knife.
I live on the rustle of nostalgia,
In my olive groves.
I write bittersweet poems for the paupers,
I write for the destitute.
I dip my pen deep in my heart,
In my veins.
I eat the hard steel wall,
I drink the October wind,
And I bloody my usurper\u2019s face
With poems sharp like knives.
If the wreckage breaks my back,
I would replace it with a case
Made from the rocks of Hitteen.<\/p>\n
Zayyad\u2019s poem \u201cUnadikum\u201d (\u201cI Shake Your Hand\u201d) was set to music in the early 1980s. In 2021, it was adopted as a spontaneously chanted anthem by Palestinian demonstrators; \u201cI did not disparage my homeland\/Neither did I yield\/I confronted my gaolers, alone, naked and barefoot.\u201d It is difficult to imagine a time when such chants and such resistance will not yet again resonate in the face of militarised repression \u2013 but it helps to remember that the poem embodies a history of resistance across decades , in the face of brutality and betrayal, and was written by a man who was committed to a secular, revolutionary solution to the Palestinian struggle.<\/p>\n
I Shake Your Hand<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nI implore you,
I shake your hands,
I kiss the ground on which you tread,
And I say: I will redeem you.
I offer you my eyesight,
The warmth of my heart I give you.
The tragedy I endure is my share of your plight.
I appeal to you,
I shake your hands.
I did not disparage my homeland,
Neither did I yield.
I confronted my gaolers, alone, naked, and barefoot.
My hand was bleeding,
Yet, I did not give up.
I maintained the grass over my forefathers\u2019 tombs.
I implore you; I shake your hands!<\/p>\n
That revolutionary tradition is not entirely defeated. In 2011 Israel was racked by large-scale strikes \u2013 social workers, doctors, railway workers against privatization\u00a0 of education, health, and welfare services, and for public housing and for larger social-sector budgets. Among the slogans raised were \u201cTahrir Square is here in this town\u201d and against \u201cMubarak, Assad, Netanyahu\u201d. If Israeli workers can, at least momentarily, recognise common cause with the Arab spring, nothing is then entirely lost. Zayyad\u2019s goal was \u201cTo recuperate the future from the darkness of greed\/Lest it be bought and sold\u201d. (\u201cEvening Chat in Prison\u201d).<\/p>\n
However bleak the times, however popular Netanyahu\u2019s government of bigots may seem, it\u2019s worth remembering that the success of Likud in building a coalition with the far right in the Knesset ought to at least put to death any remaining illusions \u2013 for the fragments of the Israeli left seeking to reorganise \u2013 that there can be any parliamentary solution to any of the political problems it faces or that adherence to left-Zionism is anything other than a slow train to the same destination.<\/p>\n
Zayyad\u2019s poetry tells of another possibility, a conception of justice through revolt: \u201cWhoever robs the right of others by force\/How can he protect his right when the scale tilts?\u201d. Zayyad\u2019s blunt, angry poetry also suggests that what so often now passes for a political poetry that seeks to cover over its politics and have it dancing behind the words, just out of view. is of no real value to us either politically or aesthetically.<\/p>\n
\u00a0We Are Here To Stay: Poems by Tawfiq Zayyad, translated by Aida Bamia, Smokestack Books 2023, ISBN\u00a09781739772260, is available here.<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the start of 2023, the state of Israel installed a new government. This new ultranationalist religious cabinet included Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lawyer who had already established…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":15055,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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