Palestinian poet, Taha Mohammad Ali, died on Sunday. He was born in the village of Saffuriya in Mandate Palestine in 1931. He completed his formal schooling until the fourth grade but never stopped his pursuit of learning. In 1948 during the Palestinian Nakba, the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian from their homes during time of Israel's creation, Taha fled to Lebanon seeking refuge. In 1949, he smuggled himeself back into the Galilee and set up home in Nazareth, now in Israel. He opened up a souvenir shop to sell olive wood nativity scenes to Christian tourists and taught himself poetry. His life and work was recorded with much beauty by Jewish American writer, Adina Hoffman, in her book, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. The title taken from one Taha's poems that reads:
Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don’t aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn’t worth
the price of the bullet
(you’d waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn’t happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.
I wrote a diary last year about the effect on me of Hoffman's book and Taha's life. I republish it today in memory of a great intellectual and human being. May he rest in peace, a refugee no more.
Becoming Palestinian, Becoming Human
Reading has always been a life-affirming process for me. I relate to characters in books in many ways. Sometimes I feel empathy for their struggles; other times, I wonder what motivates them. Characters in literature allow me to expand my view of who is human by exposing me to more of our experience on this earth. However, reading Adina Hoffman’s biography of Taha Mohammad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, was more than a life-affirming experience; the book provided text that sums up my life’s work: to show the Palestinians for the humans that they are.
I came upon this passage in Zadie Smith's new collection of essays on her emotional reaction to reading Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. It expresses a parallel experience to the one I had reading Hoffman's book.
[W]hite novelists are not white novelist but simply “novelists,” and white characters are not white characters but simply “human,” and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past and those doing so now will seem like black women talking about a black book. When I began this piece, it felt important to distance myself from that idea. By doing so, I misrepresent a vital aspect of my response to this book, one that is entirely personal, as any response to a novel shall be. Fact is, I am a black woman, and a slither of this book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason.
Identity issues for hyphenated Americans--immigrants and their children-- are always complex. Palestinians face demonization, misrepresentation and political and military warfare in U.S. politics and in the media. As a Palestinian-American adolescent I fought hard against my Palestinian identity, seeking to be all-American, even if my family never bought peanut butter and my father insisted on listening to Um Kalthoum in the car. I asked by family to not speak Arabic around my friends and to switch to the radio when we got near my school. I was a typical shy, insecure American child that wanted to disappear into the woodwork.
My family was not overly political. We watched the evening news, sure, but I wasn’t really sure what Palestine was. I remember my parents being very upset when I chose Israel as the country I would research for a fourth-grade assignment. They pulled out a map to explain why Israel wouldn’t be their first choice for a report topic, but my identity was not strongly Palestinian. My parents focused our circle of identity around Ramallah, the West Bank town we come from and where my father spent his first 25 years. The Ramallah people are tribal and close-knit and even though a great majority has left the now bustling city for the United States, their familial kinship remains supreme and marriage outside the Ramallah community is frowned upon to this day.
I was in college before I found the Palestinian in me. Finally freed of the stifling confines of American high school culture and the narrow identity of Ramallah daughter and sister, the university years gave me liberty to try on new identities for size. I was very conscience of the comfortable upbringing my upper middle-class, business-minded parents had afforded me. I did all I could to hide my wealth by opting for thrift-store dresses that simply horrified my mother. Anti-conformist I became. I found like-minded souls among anthropology majors and spent a lot of time in the department talking to Peace Corps returnees and hippies born a decade too late. When I settled on anthropology as my major, I soon realized that I would have to study a language and was excited to learn that Arabic was an option. How fortunate I was to land in intensive Arabic in the summer of 1990. I was in love with the Arabic language in the first week.
After that wonderful summer of daily 4-hour lessons in Arabic and rushing home before the highly predictable Florida summer afternoon storms, I was hooked on Arabic and the literature of the Arabs. I scoured the stacks of the library for any Arabic literature I could find in translation from classical Arabic poetry like Mutanabbi to 20th century novelists like Tayeb Saleh. The World of Rashid Hussein caught my eye one day. I devoured in one sitting this hagiographic book about the young Palestinian poet who died too young of what his friend, I.F. Stone, said was the disease called “homelessness”. Rashid knew my heart, it seemed. He was a Palestinian kindred spirit.
Here's one is an excerpt from a talk Rashid Hussein delivered at the First Meeting between Jewish and Arab writers held in Tel Aviv on October 9, 1958:
We go on living in two separate worlds. If the wall that is built between us were of glass, we would have long since shattered if; if it were of rocks or cement, we would have demolished it or walked over it. But the wall between us, my friends, is invisible; it is a barrier built within our hearts. That is why it is more difficult to overcome.
(page 179,
The World of Rashid Hussein by Kamal Boullata)
When I read Adina Hoffman’s account of the extremely adorable and real Taha Mohammad Ali, I was taken back to this formative time when I became a Palestinian. One passage describing her subject’s writing made me weep:
[H]is freedom of thought, his lack of pretension, his devout secularism, his tolerance, his clarity, his willingness to learn lessons from East and West, universal and local, old and new alike..
[page 212,
My Happiness]
I wept because in these words, I recognized myself and the great majority of Palestinians that I know. These words defy all the cartoon images of the “terrorist” Arab and make Taha Mohammad Ali and all Palestinians human.
When I saw that Taha Mohammad Ali was on the schedule for this year's Palestine Festival of Literature, I almost bought an airline ticket last minute. I longed to hear Taha recite his poetry. Look at this amazing video of his premiere U.S. appearance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 2006:
By all accounts, this year's Festival has been an amazing event showcasing international and local writers and celebrating the power of culture over the culture of power. Perhaps by learning about Palestine's poets and writers, you will learn what other international artists that participated in the Palestine Festival of Literature: Palestinians are human and resilient, no different than me and and no different than you.
In his eulogy for Rashid Hussein in 1977, I.F. Stone wrote:
It seems as if there are forces in Israel which fear the Arab friend more than the Arab terrorist. They broke his heart. They suffocated his spirit. They tore him from the roots which nourished his muse. They killed him, and they will kill the chance of peace if we let them, if we forget Rashid, who let us see that we have kindred spirits among our Arab brothers, that a life in common is possible.
(page 132,
The World of Rashid Hussein)
Let's hope a day come when the likes of Rashid and Taha (of which there are many examples in their community) are the ones that first come to mind when Palestinians are mentioned.