Prophets and fugitives

By Youssef Rakha
Last Sunday in the Lotus Hall -- home to the Palestine Solidarity Week -- the day had begun with a short documentary and a performance by the Abbad Al-Shams Choir, which saw a small group of well-trained Palestinian boys delivering some of the best-loved songs in the classic resistance repertoire. Judging by attendance alone, the Cultural Pivot seminar may have been slightly less popular, but as a well-rounded statement of the Palestinian Authority's contribution to "a culture under occupation," the seminar was perhaps the more beneficial of the day's events thus far. It consisted of a long, detailed address by novelist Yehya Yakhluf, now under-secretary of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, a discussion of questions by the audience and the occasional comment by Michel Sendaha who, in the absence of GEBO chairman Samir Sarhan (who was scheduled to do so himself), took on board the task of coordinating the proceedings. Also absent was legislator and historian Tareq El-Bishri, who was scheduled to attend; many believe his contribution would have been invaluable.
Yakhluf spoke expansively on a range of issues, from the Palestinian Book Fair, established in Gaza in 1996, to the destruction of historic mosques by the Israeli state. But perhaps his most significant focus was the question of Palestinian cultural identity and how it plays out on the internal and the regional scale. Yakhluf began by reporting on a statement signed recently by Israeli writers and calling for peace. "We are the peace camp," the statement evidently commenced. As Yakhluf pointed out, however, neither Israel itself nor anyone who condones the oppression and brutality it practices as a state can be truly for peace. "The Intifada is the message," Yakhluf resumed poetically, "the message of freedom, of Palestinian reality and of peace." He alluded to the popular support for the Intifada throughout the Arab and Islamic World, testimony to the support of the peoples, "if not that of the Arab regimes." In other contexts, Yakhluf emphasised both the frailty of Israel's claim to a unified heritage or cultural identity and the Israelis' consistent endeavour to wipe out all vestiges of Palestinian culture, "to the point of taking the olive trees for their mortal enemies."
Questions about Palestinian identity have arisen since the Oslo peace accords, Yakhluf explained, and the Intifada comes as an answer to all of them. Such questions concern, first and foremost, what Yakhluf called "the essential human being in Palestine," whose spirit "the occupation has failed to destroy." According to Yakhluf, following the peace accords, an Arab friend asked him whether the literature of the resistance -- according to the novelist, the defining genre of Palestinian writing throughout the second half of the 20th century -- was about to become a "literature of the resolution."
The implication, as Yakhluf went on to elucidate, is that what might be seen as political compromises imparted by the Palestinian Authority during the Oslo negotiations would translate into a culturally and nationally compromised literary undertaking. Similarly, regarding the question of relations with Israel, Yakhluf said that Palestinians were suspected of being agents of normalisation. Indeed, as he indicated clearly, some had gone so far as to claim that "Palestinians are the bridge over which Israel will penetrate into the fabric of Arab society." A related but less contentious question concerns Palestinian literature in relation to Arabic literature at large: "Does Palestinian literature go off on a tangent? And can it be approached in the same context as literature from the rest of the Arab World? Does it involve a different context?" Yakhluf spent half an hour denying these and the aforementioned claims at length; he pointed up the Intifada as their most effective refutation.
"Palestine is like any other part of the Arab World," Yakhluf affirmed, "and Palestinians remain as patriotic and 'Arab' as other Arabs." As the Intifada has shown, "the offspring of the Palestinian people are universally proud of their Arab identity, Muslims and Christians alike." Alluding to national unity among the Palestinian people, Yakhluf went on to say that Arab identity is palpably alive within Palestine. "Even those who have lived inside Israel for more than half a century have preserved it." As the Intifada has shown, the claim that Palestinians are agents of normalisation proves nonsensical. "Palestinians reject that Zionist, expansionist, racist project more determinedly than any other people," Yakhluf declared. And they invariably identify themselves as Arab Muslims or Christians, nothing else.
However detrimental Jewish aggression has been to social and cultural life in Palestine -- and this was an occasion for Yakhluf to stress the role of the Palestinian Authority in the ongoing and increasingly difficult battle against such aggression -- the human being in Palestine remains untouched. Palestinian literature likewise remains essentially a literature of resistance, regardless of what position the Palestinian Authority might adopt on the political issues at hand, and notwithstanding the much broader thematic range in which Palestinian authors have operated, particularly in recent years. According to Yakhluf, Mahmoud Darwish's Sarir Al-Ghariba, a collection of love poems by the most widely celebrated poet of the resistance, is one notable example of resistance literature that tackles the occupation, but obliquely, focusing on other themes. Yakhluf sounded a note of optimism when he prophesied that the Intifada will give rise to "great literature indeed." Literature and culture are born in times of rising and rebirth, and the Intifada is a clear instance of both.
Following the Political Pivot, in which "the Palestinian issue in half a century" was reviewed, the Lotus Hall was witness to one of the Cairo Book Fair's highlights, a reading of poems written in solidarity with Palestine by the colloquial Arabic poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi, one of a handful of contemporary authors whose works exerted a popular magnetism so strong it enabled them to transcend intellectual circles, making El-Abnoudi a favourite media figure and a household name. As the poet himself indicated, he chose to share his session with Palestinian poet Ahmed Dahbour, "a poet whose work does not need explanation and who reaches the heart without resorting to the convoluted trickery that so many other poets display their muscles with." Alongside El-Abnoudi's emotionally ingratiating fare, Dahbour's poems sounded aesthetically refined, classical and melancholy. The intimate, informal and pessimistic discourse professed by both poets constituted the perfect counterpoint to Yakhluf's serious and optimistic address, drawing an instant and sometimes loud response from the droves of Abnoudi-lovers who crowded into a relatively small auditorium. Sarhan made a momentary appearance during the short break to honour the two poets.
Dahbour demonstrated Yakhluf's statement: however subtly evocative or romantically oriented, Palestinian poetry remains essentially a poetry of resistance. One poem he read was in the form of an epistle or a prayer addressed to a cloud. And while remaining ultimately ambiguous, at times that cloud seemed to refer to the homeland, at other times to the energy of resistance itself: "Do not rest or I will die... There are no trees around me/And I have ceased waiting for the post." Despite the predominance of beauty and calm in Dahbour's images and the formal virtuosity of his compositions, the militant spirit is evident: "If I once said Yes/It is a Yes to him whose hand is No." Similarly, the appearance of simplicity masks a complex interplay of ambiguity and symbolism: "And we know the nationality of tears/Since Adam wept." Another poem was addressed to the late Adli Fakhri, an Egyptian musician who not only was a friend of the poet but remains "an Egyptian landmark in Palestinian memory." Dahbour poignantly questions fate while eloquently divulging love, praise and memories.
Following Sarhan's brief appearance at the podium, El-Abnoudi stood up to face his audience, giving a short speech in praise of both Dahbour and Palestine. "el-mot 'Ala El-Asfalt ya 'Am 'Abdel-Rahman," one member of the audience roared, demanding excerpts from El-Abnoudi's long poem on Palestine, "Death on the Asphalt". With his trademark wit and the disarmingly familiar tone he adopts with people, El-Abnoudi replied, "What else do you think I came here to read?" The poem is an elegy for the Palestinian cartoonist Nagui Al-Ali, who was murdered on the street in London. A friend of his, El-Abnoudi explained, Al-Ali did not think he was doing anything extraordinary when he insisted on making a statement through his art; he was merely doing his job with the integrity worthy of an artist. "We were all imprisoned, made jobless and thoroughly disheveled by all that Nagui stood against. But the drive to kill is a different thing. Killing you," El-Abnoudi continued, prior to reading the poem, "means that you have stepped over all the lines set down for you." Written in the form of a plea to El-Abnoudi's mother to include Al-Ali in her ritual songs of mourning, "Death on the Asphalt" is both an intensely personal elegy and a resigned, pained reflection on the Palestinian question. Other poems El-Abnoudi read were self-questioning, humorous and explicitly ironic: "Doing is far from eloquently saying/Words in the end are only words/And blood is blood;" "How often have we tried to be/And neither were nor anything;" "Al-Quds: a summer dove/And the first of the prophets/And the last of the fugitives." El-Abnoudi's immediate appeal made the conclusion of this Palestine Solidarity day impeccably climactic, moving many to tears.
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