QUILLBLOG

Poetry in Palestine

Anvil Press’s current anthology Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory and Place includes an essay by Harbour Publishing owner Howard White about, among other things, the role of culture and literature in society. The Tyee has posted White’s essay, which recounts his meeting with Palestinian poet Fawaz Turki.

I met Fawaz at a big Amnesty International jamboree of oppressed writers in Toronto a few years ago, and one of the things that intrigued me about him was a rumour that he might be reduced to chopped liver by a Mossad hit squad at any time. I found it invigorating to think that I was sharing the planet with people who cared enough about poetry to shoot anybody over it.

I made use of a bar break to ask Fawaz if his notoriety wasn’t maybe to do with something besides versifying, like bombing buses. Fawaz was a bit piqued by this suggestion. Any damn fool can chuck a bomb while it takes brains to write a poem, and the Palestinian people understand this, he pointed out.

Back in Jordan it was nothing to have a crowd of several thousand gather on a few hours notice to hear him at an open-air reading. When he appeared in public, throngs of grown women followed him around ululating and fluttering their hands like leaves, chanting his name. His broadsheets outsold the newspapers. Poets like him and his buddies Mahmoud Darweesh and Fawazi el Asmar were far more important to the Palestinian cause than bomb-throwers, and far more worrisome to the authorities, and this was because of their ability to express the feelings of their people, Turki said. That is why so many of the poets known to Amnesty were behind bars, not only in Palestine but around the world.

I tried to picture this in Canadian terms. Prime Minister Harper is pacing around his desk ranting at General Hillier, “General, you and I will have no rest until we silence that traitorous menace Fred Wah, the Man Whose Name Is Breath!” Or: “I’m sure you know why you’re here, General. At 15:31 yesterday the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets declared war on conventional imperialist grammar. I want our fighting men to spare no effort until this sinister challenge is stamped out to the last slash and hyphen!” It didn’t quite click.