Mar 26th 2009
MOST writing by Palestinians for the foreign reader depicts them either as hapless residents of the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 or as scattered refugees. This, along with the never-ending stream of news from the West Bank and Gaza, no doubt contributes to the popular notion of a Palestinian as someone who lives anywhere but Israel.
This is ironic, because all the grandees of Palestinian literature in Arabic, such as Emile Habiby, a novelist, and Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who died last year, are among those Palestinians who have made up one-fifth of Israel’s population since the state’s birth in 1948. In fact, notes Adina Hoffman, it was not until after the 1967 war reconnected them with their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza that they fully understood that, despite 19 years as citizens of a country that still prefers to call them “Israeli Arabs”, they were still just as Palestinian as those “outside”. Until then, they had been (and, to some extent, still are) viewed as collaborators with the Jewish state.
Thanks to an obsession with schooling that Israel inherited from the British Mandate governors, Arab literacy in Palestine had shot up since the start of the 20th century. At the same time Israel’s birth had left the isolated “inside” Palestinians searching for a means of expression. The 1967 reunification unleashed a vibrant, hitherto hidden Palestinian literature on the rest of the Arab world. The young Darwish and his contemporaries, writers of populist, nationalist verse, were lionised abroad as the voices of a “literature of resistance”, which suddenly became a legitimate alternative to the armed resistance often preferred by Palestinians in exile. The “1948 Palestinians”, as those in Israel now often call themselves, went from being reviled as quislings to being hailed for their sumud, or steadfastness in refusing to leave their native land.
Taha Muhammad Ali was also wrestling with poetry when Darwish, ten years his junior, dropped his sumud and fled the country in 1970 after constant harassment from the Israeli security services. An industrious Nazareth souvenir-shop proprietor, Mr Muhammad Ali had spent much of his life in his ancestral village of Saffuriyya and then, after 1948, as a refugee in Lebanon, before stealing back into Israel and settling in Nazareth. (Saffuriyya, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages, was razed and replaced by a Jewish one.)
A voracious and largely self-taught reader, he had long been friendly with the top writers and had penned some literary criticism. But it was not until 1971, when he was 40, that he finally felt ready to write down the verses that had been brewing for years within him. He was in his 50s when he published his first book, and over 70 before Ibis Editions, a small Jerusalem press run by Ms Hoffman and her husband, Peter Cole, a noted translator of Hebrew as well as Arabic poetry, brought out his first collection in English.
Mr Muhammad Ali shied away from the overtly activist writing of the younger poets. Instead he used deceptively simple language and quirky tales as a way, as he liked to say, to “aim over here to strike over there”. The title of Ms Hoffman’s book is a line from a poem, “Fooling the Killers”, that gently admonishes unnamed hunters not to take aim at what they perceive as the writer’s happiness, because “my happiness bears/no relation to happiness.”
The pointed yet forgiving honesty of Mr Muhammad Ali’s writing and his bumbling, endearing presence onstage seem to have captured the hearts of both local and foreign audiences, bringing him a measure of global fame in his twilight years. And although Ms Hoffman admits that he is an odd choice of subject when there are still no biographies of his more famous contemporaries, his unassuming life makes him in many ways the ideal mirror for the “Palestinian century” of the book’s subtitle. Veering between biography, history, journalism and memoir, this painstakingly researched work is a human-scale picture of the generally under-reported history of the Palestinians in Israel as well as an accessible introduction to their poetry. Rather like the poet himself seems to be, Ms Hoffman’s book is unpretentious, principled and utterly charming.
MOST writing by Palestinians for the foreign reader depicts them either as hapless residents of the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 or as scattered refugees. This, along with the never-ending stream of news from the West Bank and Gaza, no doubt contributes to the popular notion of a Palestinian as someone who lives anywhere but Israel.
This is ironic, because all the grandees of Palestinian literature in Arabic, such as Emile Habiby, a novelist, and Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who died last year, are among those Palestinians who have made up one-fifth of Israel’s population since the state’s birth in 1948. In fact, notes Adina Hoffman, it was not until after the 1967 war reconnected them with their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza that they fully understood that, despite 19 years as citizens of a country that still prefers to call them “Israeli Arabs”, they were still just as Palestinian as those “outside”. Until then, they had been (and, to some extent, still are) viewed as collaborators with the Jewish state.
Thanks to an obsession with schooling that Israel inherited from the British Mandate governors, Arab literacy in Palestine had shot up since the start of the 20th century. At the same time Israel’s birth had left the isolated “inside” Palestinians searching for a means of expression. The 1967 reunification unleashed a vibrant, hitherto hidden Palestinian literature on the rest of the Arab world. The young Darwish and his contemporaries, writers of populist, nationalist verse, were lionised abroad as the voices of a “literature of resistance”, which suddenly became a legitimate alternative to the armed resistance often preferred by Palestinians in exile. The “1948 Palestinians”, as those in Israel now often call themselves, went from being reviled as quislings to being hailed for their sumud, or steadfastness in refusing to leave their native land.
Taha Muhammad Ali was also wrestling with poetry when Darwish, ten years his junior, dropped his sumud and fled the country in 1970 after constant harassment from the Israeli security services. An industrious Nazareth souvenir-shop proprietor, Mr Muhammad Ali had spent much of his life in his ancestral village of Saffuriyya and then, after 1948, as a refugee in Lebanon, before stealing back into Israel and settling in Nazareth. (Saffuriyya, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages, was razed and replaced by a Jewish one.)
A voracious and largely self-taught reader, he had long been friendly with the top writers and had penned some literary criticism. But it was not until 1971, when he was 40, that he finally felt ready to write down the verses that had been brewing for years within him. He was in his 50s when he published his first book, and over 70 before Ibis Editions, a small Jerusalem press run by Ms Hoffman and her husband, Peter Cole, a noted translator of Hebrew as well as Arabic poetry, brought out his first collection in English.
Mr Muhammad Ali shied away from the overtly activist writing of the younger poets. Instead he used deceptively simple language and quirky tales as a way, as he liked to say, to “aim over here to strike over there”. The title of Ms Hoffman’s book is a line from a poem, “Fooling the Killers”, that gently admonishes unnamed hunters not to take aim at what they perceive as the writer’s happiness, because “my happiness bears/no relation to happiness.”
The pointed yet forgiving honesty of Mr Muhammad Ali’s writing and his bumbling, endearing presence onstage seem to have captured the hearts of both local and foreign audiences, bringing him a measure of global fame in his twilight years. And although Ms Hoffman admits that he is an odd choice of subject when there are still no biographies of his more famous contemporaries, his unassuming life makes him in many ways the ideal mirror for the “Palestinian century” of the book’s subtitle. Veering between biography, history, journalism and memoir, this painstakingly researched work is a human-scale picture of the generally under-reported history of the Palestinians in Israel as well as an accessible introduction to their poetry. Rather like the poet himself seems to be, Ms Hoffman’s book is unpretentious, principled and utterly charming.
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