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.
As I see it blowing up a street cleaner with a suicide bomb or shooting a Palestinian poet amount to the same thing. Nobody’s innocent here. But Howard I’ve got to say you sound damn foolish on the subject. You write like a tourist.
Dear Mr Weller:
If you would like a precise and unusual take on poetry and suicide bomber, try this poem below from Mark Yakich’s new book, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin, 2008).
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Booker
For a Suicide Bomber
If you stare right between your thighs
You will find that one of the many beauties
Of poetry is that you can go from a sedentary
Lump all the way to a lean, self-righteous
Hard-on without touching nostalgia. I
Have seen people exaggerate the flower
Of poetry. For example, it can make you have
Longer, more distinguished orgasms; it can
Make you fall in love with your worst enemy;
It can placate crotch odor. I have known men
And women who deliberately crap their own
Pockets and leotards trying to suffer the same
Misery of Buddha, Dante, Dickinson, and Li Po
It’s time to put the big myth about these
Pilots to bed. By definition their crying is
A low-intensity way to burn calories and their
Tears are a low-down way to get someone
Into the sack. Even so, I have worked with
Many people who felt they were climbing
Everest as they struggled through their first
Twenty-minute crying jag. Remember,
You have thought your whole life about how
Wonderful fame would be. Let your
Hand form a loose fist around my trigger
Point. The rules for success are clear: you
Must never give candy to a dandy; and
You must learn to die, like the Moors
On a Spanish galleon, in five-minute shifts.
Mr. Weiller lies when he says that “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” …. I’ve been living in Jordan for 40 years now, and been deeply involved in the cultural life in jordan and this is the first time i hear the name of Fawas Turki. O What a big lie
Mr. Weil(l)er did not write that, Sarab. Try analyzing what you’re reading before making a sanctimonious comment.