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Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture

Olivia C. Harrison

in Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual Moroccan Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966–1971), the first text explicitly to connect cultural change in the Maghreb ... More

Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual Moroccan Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966–1971), the first text explicitly to connect cultural change in the Maghreb to an engagement for Palestine. It shows that Palestine was a central interlocutor not only in the journal’s increasingly militant political positions against the Moroccan regime, but also in its efforts at “cultural decolonization,” including the recovery of the Arabic language and the development of experimental literary forms independent from both French and Arabic canons. Abdellatif Laâbi’s translations of Palestinian poetry in particular became the site of a reflection on the politics of culture, displacing the journal’s founding mission—the elaboration of an autonomous Moroccan literature—onto the Palestinian context. If the poets who launched Souffles-Anfas could only write in the colonial tongue, Palestinian poetry in Arabic provided the model for cultural decolonization in an imperfectly decolonized Morocco.Less

The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel

Nadia Yaqub

in Literature and Nation in the Middle East

This chapter explores how some Palestinians use a traditional poetic genre, namely the oral Palestinian poetry duel, continually to create and maintain their Palestinian-ness and to define it, at ... More

This chapter explores how some Palestinians use a traditional poetic genre, namely the oral Palestinian poetry duel, continually to create and maintain their Palestinian-ness and to define it, at least among themselves, on their own terms. It begins by describing in very general terms the poetry in question. The Palestinian poetry duel consists of two or more poets who compose and sing in turn, each following strict rules of rhyme, metre, form and musical melody. The poetry studied here is typically performed in northern Palestine (The Galilee, parts of the Triangle, and northern areas of the West Bank) and are usually performed on public celebrations, most often village weddings. It is traditionally a rural phenomenon and is performed by and for men, although increasingly one finds it performed at gatherings that may include women as well. The poetry is sung, usually without musical accompaniment. The most striking feature of Palestinian oral poetry is that many lines in these poems are borrowed directly from the mundanity of phatic exchanges from Palestinian daily speech. However, it is within these sections of the performance, at least in part as a result of their phaticity, that the production of a distinctly Palestinian locality takes place.Less

The Land of the Poem

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

This chapter examines a short-lived phenomenon of Palestinian poetry festivals under Israel's first military rule and their disappearance after the 1967 war with Israel. It uses this history as a ... More

This chapter examines a short-lived phenomenon of Palestinian poetry festivals under Israel's first military rule and their disappearance after the 1967 war with Israel. It uses this history as a context for understanding the transformations of Palestinian poetry. Palestinian peasants living under Israeli rule turned to poetry as their historical repository, that is, their diwān. For these peasants, poetry functioned as the paramount language of their exile. Poetry captured the quotidian pulses of Palestinian dispossession from the very start. Palestine, erased from the maps of the world, was sheltered by the memory of its poets. After losing their homeland, Palestinians took poetry with them wherever they went. Palestinian poets lament the dispersion and dismemberment that befell their land and their fellowmen, including the poets themselves. Their poetry protested the confiscation of land, restrictions on mobility and speech, and the sorry plight of Palestinian refugees.Less

Redeeming Prose

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

This chapter examines the condition of prose in contemporary Arabic poetry, focusing on poets whose sounds are no longer tonally measured verse, but poetry that is a dream. The narratives of poets ... More

This chapter examines the condition of prose in contemporary Arabic poetry, focusing on poets whose sounds are no longer tonally measured verse, but poetry that is a dream. The narratives of poets such as Hussein al-Barghouti, Hilmi Salim, 'A'isha al-Mughrabi, Hussein Muhanna, and Izz al-Din al-Manasra focus on conditions and consequences of this dream. Their contemporary prose poetry was underlain by both prayer (salaa) and dream (hulm). This chapter explores how poets of highly secular sensibilities produce a seemingly otherworldly poetry, and how “the dream” of poets, their poems, underlie and undermine the secular to which they aspire. In the dreams generated by prose poets, measuring sound becomes completely obsolete and an “ordinary” public borders on irrelevance. The chapter concludes by analyzing how faith in the Palestinian revolution disappeared in Palestinian poetry, along with faith that poetry could affect anything outside poetry.Less

Modern Poets and “Conservative” People

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

With a mixture of nationalist, communist, and socialist voices, Nazareth used to be a venue in which to speak about redemption through Arab nationalism or communist internationalism. This chapter ... More

With a mixture of nationalist, communist, and socialist voices, Nazareth used to be a venue in which to speak about redemption through Arab nationalism or communist internationalism. This chapter focuses on how Arabic poetry in general and Palestinian poetry in particular is secularized and how modern Arab poets such as Edmoun Shehadeh, Ahmad Kiwan, 'Abd al- Karim Abu Khashan, Muhammad al-Batrawi, and Ahmad Dahbour push secularism into the Arab literary imagination. Shehadeh's road to his free verse poetry was paved by Iraqi poets such as Nazik al-Mala'ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Kiwan was dismayed by the Palestinian and Arabic poetry scene.Less

Memory for Beginnings

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

Palestinian poets continue to witness the weakness of power and the power of the weak, six decades into Israel's occupation of their homeland. Yet they and their fellow modernizing Arab poets needed ... More

Palestinian poets continue to witness the weakness of power and the power of the weak, six decades into Israel's occupation of their homeland. Yet they and their fellow modernizing Arab poets needed to abandon the measuring of sounds, the rhythmical discipline. As a result, they began to tread in a distinctly modern path that was different from the one trodden by poets from the pre-Islamic era until the middle of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on Palestinian poets who linger with the traditional forms, long lulled into irrelevance by years of searching for a secular modernity. It examines Palestinian poetry in order to critically assess the contingencies and ambiguities permeating the certitudes of secularism sought by poets of free verse and prose. It argues that the presence of modern secular power exceeds views such as those about separating religion from politics. This secular has to do with how poets think of and actually allocate their rhythms, how they imagine and represent the real, and how they attempt to connect with a public.Less

Introduction

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

Arab poets in general, and Palestinian poets in particular, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems in order to modernize poetic forms by turning to free verse and prose poems. ... More

Arab poets in general, and Palestinian poets in particular, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems in order to modernize poetic forms by turning to free verse and prose poems. Through these forms, poets, not “the sea,” stand sovereign over rhythms. Over the past seven decades, Arabic poems have become ever more silent, marked by ever more irregular rhythms. This book, an ethnography of “literary” transformation, investigates how forms of ethics, politics, epistemologies, and imaginaries have led to this prevailing silence in contemporary Arabic poetry. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven poets, including six women, the book shows how poets' emerging “silence” reflects contradictions and ambiguities of secular formations in modernity as movements in the sounds of rhythms, as well as beyond them. It argues that poetic forms and forms of life are inseparable and makes a number of assumptions about poetry, poets, and poetic form. It looks at the current Palestinian poetry, which is dominated by three forms: a traditional ode in use for more than 1,500 years and two modern arrivals, free verse and prose poetry.Less

Rhythms and Rulers

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

The sound was an important foundation of the Arab poetic tradition. The earliest rhythms of Arabic poetry probably evolved from a variety of sources, including the vast stillness of the sands or ... More

The sound was an important foundation of the Arab poetic tradition. The earliest rhythms of Arabic poetry probably evolved from a variety of sources, including the vast stillness of the sands or sweltering heat, and turned into a form that came to stand for Arabic poetry. This form has been known as qasida (ode) in Arabia for at least 1,600 years. This chapter explores some basic and influential concepts, techniques, words, figures, forces, and legends that animated and continue to animate the Arab poetic tradition, focusing on a set of encounters running through the history of Arabic poetry between political authority and the authority of poetry. It also examines the relation between Islam (and specifically the Quran) and poetry. By traversing the distance between the Quran and poetry, this chapter argues that in order to understand the place of local Palestinian poetry in the modern world, it is necessary to acknowledge its place in the larger Arab poetic tradition.Less

When Meter Melts

in Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry

The “Path of the Poem” (Darb al-Qasida) in Israel features poems by both Arab and Jewish poets, men and women. There are free verse and prose poetry, none of which are classical. Furthermore, none of ... More

The “Path of the Poem” (Darb al-Qasida) in Israel features poems by both Arab and Jewish poets, men and women. There are free verse and prose poetry, none of which are classical. Furthermore, none of the featured Arab poets is from the 1967 occupied part of Palestine, which allows identity to trail behind the borders of national sovereignty. Memory, including that of Palestinian poetry, is a site of contestation in the struggle for national sovereignties. This chapter explores the Arab prose poet's relation to rhyme, meter, and rhythm. The narratives of these poets, including Zakariyya Muhammad, Taha Muhammad Ali (Abu Nizar), Mahmoud Amin al-Alim, and Nida'a Khoury reveal the kinds of struggles they have faced to ensure the vitality of their techniques along secular lines of belonging. The foundational definition of Arabic poetry as a rhyming and measured speech has lost its authority over poetry.Less