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March 13th, 2021 
Awake Goy SO WHAT
New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005
by Taha Muhammad Ali
translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin
280 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $18
Mondoweiss readers—and others who have the courage to educate themselves—necessarily spend considerable time learning about the many wrongs Israel has inflicted on Palestinians – and about new miseries it may inflict tomorrow and beyond. We are well-versed in the vast, resulting unhappiness of Palestinians. What gets far less attention is the question of Palestinian happiness, if such a thing can really exist
Taha Muhammad Ali, a beloved poet from Nazareth who died in 2011, was pessimistic about the possibility but not entirely dismissive. Born in 1931, his life ended in a way in 1948 with the razing of his hometown. The entire population was scattered, some never to be found again. The rest of his existence, he lived under Israel’s boot. In the poem “Warning,” he confides that his happiness isn’t worth the price of the bullet that might be “wasted” on shooting it. “Trust me,” he tells would-be shooters, “my happiness bears no relation to happiness.”
Sounds pretty grim, but it doesn’t mean that Taha’s poems are not often deliciously funny, even shamefully ridiculous. It does mean that into his sweet, flakey confections he layered bitter flavors of defeat, dispossession, death, and rage. And it means that to understand his strange Palestinian happiness is to enter the Palestinian Absurd.
Take, for example, the character Abd el-Hadi the Fool. In the poem of that name, published in “So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005” translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin, Copper Canyon Press 2006, el-Hadi tells us how he used to be a dreamy naif, who “loved horses and poetry,” etc. However, hatred suddenly filled him for evermore, “after the rape of the light of morning’s laughter,” and other horrors.
“I wanted to burn down the world!
Wanted to stab it
in its soft belly,
and see it dismembered
after I’d drowned it.”
Now El-Hadi is waiting, waiting for his chance, communing with his rage. “Ages sluggish/ as the pulse of caverns/ drag on.”
His shameful folly is that, no sooner does the laughter of a child reach Abd el-Hadi, or he notices a fine-looking woman, then the despicable fool inside him springs up to hug the world and “greet the victim and the hangman as one.” Torn in half,
“He takes the world to the hair of his chest
like his daughter…
without there appearing on his face
any indication at all
that he’s bothered
by the sobbing
or the tears
pouring from the sockets of his eyes!”
Reading Taha’s poems can make you feel somewhat like a billiard ball caroming off one bouncy table-edge and another and then, rattle-thonk! into the corner pocket. That’s the way he liked it, he said, comparing his poetic method to playing billiards.
Taha also said, in an interview on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, “In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel.” And there really isn’t, except that he makes you feel, down in your chest, the dull ache and wry wonder of life as a Palestinian. His poems are not about Palestine, they are Palestine. This is why essayist and author Adina Hoffman titled her fearless, affectionate 2009 biography of Taha, “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century” from Yale University Press.
His poems don’t take you to the ancient mystic Rumi’s famous field “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” The fields he invites you to encircled his home in the large, farming village called Saffuriyya down the road from Nazareth–a village that no longer exists.
Saffuriyya was on the site of ancient “Sepphoris,” which thrived for 3,000 years, under Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, and back to Muslims. Today, Jewish Israelis have set up a moshav settlement there that they call Tzippori, It doesn’t show up in the poems. Nor does Israel itself appear, except as the nameless shadow of violence and loss.
Growing up, Taha was rooted in Saffuriyya. He impressed upon Hoffman that he was “a peasant [fallah], the son of a peasant” and that his ambition was to speak like his father, a favorite village storyteller and esteemed counselor. His dad’s popular sitting room, or madafeh, was a “university of the fallah,” with its rich oral culture.
From an early age, Taha had a gift for business, one on which his whole, impoverished family quickly came to depend. After only four years, he left the village school at age 12 and opened a grocery store. He worked there all day, every day, even as he kept reading voraciously when business was slow.
Hoffman laid out the details of Saffuriyya’s fall, which happened overnight in July 1948, when he was just 17, under a heavy attack by Israeli forces. It was emptied, razed, and the land was parceled out to Jewish Israelis. Taha’s family fled to Lebanon but managed to sneak back into Israel about a year later and set up in Nazareth. Eventually, he went into the souvenir business, opening a shop on Casanova Street, just steps from the famous Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth.
In the years before the Israelis took the rest of Palestine — when the world scarcely noticed that any Arabs remained in Israel (under martial law) and few “Israeli-Arabs” were well-off or highly educated—Taha’s shop became an oasis for intellectuals and literati. He poured himself into deep study of classical Arabic and its literature, as well as English and its literary canon, and became a genial fixture, always there with a place to sit, drink coffee, and talk. In time, he began writing poems.
His business-mind was keenly in Nazareth, but his heart-mind roamed the vanished world of Saffuriyya. It was not so much that he thought back nostalgically to the old times but that he inhabited the vanished space. This stance was in keeping with his peculiar status under Israeli law as a “present absentee,” meaning one of the thousands of Palestinians who were driven from their homes during the Nakba but had managed to remain inside what had become Israel.
In some ways his fate wasn’t as bad as that of the far more numerous Palestinians who became refugees, but the absurdity of continuing to live both in your country and not at all in your country was exquisitely cruel. One of the closer analogies would be, say, to wake up in your bed and perceive that you had become a giant cockroach. In Taha’s short story, “So What,” which appears in the book of poems of that name, the young narrator is driven to try desperately to walk in two right-footed shoes. Before the boy accepts that the shoes are painfully useless, he resists those who try to warn him, barking, “So what? So what! So what!” to silence them. His hysterical, foolish question continues to haunt him.
In fact, the boy’s refrain captures a crucial element of the Palestinian Absurd, because “so what?” is basically what leaders of the “community of nations” have been telling Palestinians for generations. The dispossessed have been expected to act like their difficulties in living their lives had no malevolent cause, much less a cause that remains fully operative. The outside world’s eye-rolls, averted gazes, and seeming deafness – and, if necessary, testy condemnation – have taught Palestinians that they are expected to just forget their Saffuriyyas once and for all. To persist in their grieving and outrage is unacceptable. The best that it will get them is tired, condescending sympathy. Don’t worry, be happy.
After a while, this state of affairs becomes unbearably tedious. The Palestinian Absurd beckons. One turns to “Fooling the Killers,” also published in “So What” and translated by Cole, Hijazi and Levin, which asks “Qasim” where he is these days. The poet hasn’t forgotten his boyhood friend, “after all these years, / long as the graveyard / wall is long.”
He pictures Qasim now perhaps sporting a cane, but then inquires “Or did they kill you / at the foot of the Hill of Tin?” Or maybe Qasim never grew up, but is still a 10-year-old climbing trees?
Even if they did it, the poet muses,
“if, shamelessly,
they killed you,
I’m certain
you fooled your killers,”
After all, he points out, his friend’s body was never discovered on the side of the road, or in the river, or under the rubble, or in the morgue –
“and no one saw you
concealing your corpse,
so no one will ever set eyes on you,
and no earthly breeze
encounter a bone of your body,
a finger of your hand,”
Qasim fooled them! just like it was hide-and-seek,
“barefoot at dusk—forty years ago—
when we were little boys.”
Is there happiness in this heartbreaking, surreal poem? Or maybe Qasim is hiding in a field “out beyond” ideas of happiness and unhappiness?
And what solace do Palestinians find in the knowledge that the Absurd has nothing on that old Abd el-Hadi? In “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” also from “So What,” our hero remains impossibly friendly and so considerate that, “In his life he did not speak of the New York Times behind its back” – and who among you, dear Mondoweiss readers, can say the same?
Knowing that “His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea,” Abd el-Hadi is ready to go into action:
“were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.”
The most absurd part here is that the American crew would not think this hospitality was strange; they wouldn’t even notice it, or their host. And honestly, should the happy hero want them to?
For more on Taha Muhammad Ali’s continuing importance, see “An unlikely dramatic hero, poet Taha Muhammad Ali takes the Kennedy Center stage” by Jonathan Cook.
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