Supporting Palestinian women writers...new book release

Those of you who know me personally know how much I respect the written word. It is in this spirit that I write you as part of my ongoing efforts to support Palestinian culture and arts, especially writing, and more specifically women writers.

One of the up and coming woman writers whom I’m supporting is Fida Jiryis. Fida is from the Palestinian village of Fassouta, near the border with Lebanon. She is a dear friend and dedicated colleague.

Fida recently wrote this article about Palestinians living in Israel. A few years back, she and I penned this joint piece about Land Day in Haaretz:

Fida’s second Arabic collection of short stories, titled AL-KHAWAJA, has just been released by a publisher in Haifa, Kul Shee Library. It is getting rave reviews as you can see at: http://bit.ly/al-khawaja

AL-KHAWAJA is a sequel to Fida’s first book of short stories titled Hayatuna Elsagheera (OUR SMALL LIFE). Both books depict daily life in a Palestinian village in the Galilee, which could be a village anywhere in the world. With wit, humor and an always present sense of reality, Fida brings villagers and their daily trials and tribulations to life in a light, comic setting.

As part of supporting this new publication, I’m reaching out here to the Palestinian Diaspora communities and our communities of solidarity to help get this book distributed. The book is in ARABIC and is an easy read.

We are asking for each community to commit to selling 10 or more copies. If you are not an Arabic reader, consider ordering the book and passing it on as a gift to those who are. The funds received from book sales are going to cover the costs of publication, distribution, and getting the book into Palestinian high schools, along with book readings.

PRICE (shipping and handling included when purchased directly): $12 each

TO ORDER:

1. USA/CANADA: Send check payable to SAM BAHOUR along with return mailing address to:

Sam Bahour

2909 Biscayne Ave.

Youngstown, OH 44505-2111

2. PALESTINE: available at the following bookstores

3. eBay: http://bit.ly/buy-alkhawaja-ebay

4. eKtab: ebook version at http://bit.ly/buy-alkhawaja-ektab

5. REST OF WORLD, contact Sam at sbahour@gmail.com

PLEASE PASS THIS ON AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS.

P.S. Fida has also recently completed her first English manuscript of a non-political, women's fiction novel and is seeking to get it published, so we would be grateful to anyone who can link us to a publisher/agent.

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One Palestinian Man’s Reading of Susan Abulhawa’s My Voice Sought The Wind

By Hatim Kanaaneh

I am no romantic poet. Yet Susan Abulhawa’s first published collection of poems (My Voice Sought The Wind, Just World Books, 2013) slices directly to my heart. Like her, I once wrote poetry in Arabic. A group of us, high school friends in Nazareth some of whom went on to become ‘real poets,’ put out an occasional handwritten pamphlet of poetry. And like Susan, my cultural exile robbed me of the finesse and flare of my mother’s tongue. I must admit though that, unlike her, I don’t suffer any phantom pains where it once sprouted in my heart. It was too long ago.

Susan opens with an ode to olive oil, the cure-all salve for all Palestinian wounds and the explosive charge in our mystical weaponry. I inherited some ancestral olives and a multi-millennial olive stands in my front yard. I drool reading Susan’s recipe:

And without bread or Za’ater, dip your finger in this oil
Press it between your tongue and palate
 
Do it again
 
Until you hear the primal calls of an earth packed
  beneath boot steps and tank treads
 
And it will haunt you with an unexpected song
 
I warble to the song in my heart and tears of joy flood my eyes.

I come to the second poem, ‘Black,’ where Susan addresses a very personal issue. Openly! She names names and recalls pain and humiliation. She looks in the mirror and has a dilemma: Are we white or black? European or African? Palestinians of my age are not used to our national poet, the late Mahmoud Darwish, describing his nose as “fucked up” though it actually was.  Have some shame, woman! You must watch your language if you want me to nominate you as Darwish’s rightful heir. But by God, despite her loose tongue, or perhaps because of it, I am drawn to the black side in her conundrum where she doesn’t miss a step. She is up front, powerfully pointing her finger, calling a spade a bloody spade, and hitting the mark every time. It doesn’t pay to be bashful in identifying the European as our collective rapist:

            A European took my grandma’s house
            Painted my country white
            Kicked us out to the cold curb
            Killed our neighbors
            Cut my brother’s balls off
            Motherfuckers fucked my mother
            Then dragged me by the hair
                 and told me I needed liposuction
    And a nose job
 
… dug up my ancestors bones
Built a “Tolerance Museum” over their graves

Moreover, she doesn’t shy away from taking on

“My Arab brethren (who)
Considered me human ONLY
After I got a USA passport.”

Finally Susan declares for Black:

I am Palestinian
And in the blue and bruise of my heart
I am become Black
Because Black is beautiful
And the beautiful in me
Is Black

It is difficult to skip a line in this slim collection of hard hitting, highly charged poems. They, every one of them, come alive for me as I savor their Palestinian flavor and universal truth. I find myself wrestling, almost physically, with one evoked image after another. None is barren enough not to hold my attention and force my immersion in it. I wipe my tears and struggle across Susan’s Ramadan in exile and her brief homage to Mahmoud Darwish, the other “Voice of Palestine”:

            We saw you tear off your limbs
            To pass through the narrow passage
 
            Now you know
Where birds fly after the last sky

Next, aroused from a fitful sleep, I come to “The Siege” and shed copious tears again. First I manage to cope with Suraya whose “poetry assembles as dreams” and with Mjahid, the Palestinian gladiator who

            … looks upward
            And plays his oud to
            Hang the stars back in place
            After the sky has fallen.

But when I get to Laila and Yousef, the separated Gazan lovers who have their

            Eyes upon the same empty moon
            And sky devoid of promise
 
            The winds caress her cheeks
            And, miles away, wrap around him
Until their fingers find each other
Inch closer.
Interlace
And they hold hands
 
Across sky and wind and moon and miles

I am vanquished again. I take a cold shower to quell the tears in my red-shot eyes. I manage to recoup my tranquility. I eat breakfast with my foreign wife and get back to Susan’s “Sister Palestinian I” where I find myself taking things personally. The woman knows how to appeal to a Palestinian father’s sensibilities:

            When your father, king of his castle,
                was forced to sleep on dirt
            You served him coffee and scrubbed his feet
                to save his pride

That really works for me. But, God damn it, why do you have to be so bitchy? I didn’t have anything to do with all of that

The day you played hopscotch
When they pulled the land from under your feet
 
I had nothing to do with it
 
When your mother went mad and died with anguish (when)
Your tears watered a refugee’s garden

I never forced my daughter into an arranged marriage. I never raped or hit my wife nor ever claimed that European women were more “exciting fucks.” I never abandoned my wife to prostitution. And I never forced “the heart break of an empty orgasm” on anybody. You forgot? I am your brother! And they’ve cut my balls off. Take all of your insults back! Right now! Or, by God, I will go back on nominating you!

When I cool off I move on to “Sister Palestine II” where my detractor takes a well-deserved swipe at our common enemy, the Israelis colonizing our country,

a country siphoned from our veins
where the hills of God are carved and paved
and apartheid metastasizes into the wadis
through the sanasil and precious groves.

But, Susan, you got mixed up: Lena didn’t commit suicide. She was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. They even confiscated her poster. You must have forgotten; you were only a little child then, a first-grader.

And Ahmad: Do you mean Muhammad Al-Durrah’s surviving baby brother in our every home?  He is a fine young man now. He graduated from college. Don’t you go on shaming him with “shivering in his own piss.” He needs your moral support as his older sister. We have to continue dressing each other’s wounds. Don’t remind him of failures. It was only an occasional accident. We all did it at the time.

Was it the spider web in the sky, the
White phosphorus death?
Or the sonic booms?

Whatever! Just sing him some Fairuz songs or one of Rim Banna’s Palestinian lullabies.

Now I come to “Wala” and am totally stumped. What comment can one make about verity itself? I dwell on it once then again and again. I go online and listen to Susan’s rendition of it and watch the accompanying superb video many times.  This is the stuff of magic, of addictive poison. All I get from seeing it is the urge to shoot up with it again. It must be the trance the mystic achieves with self-flagellation.

I am that man,

The man you would have been
The man you should have been
Out there
Riding the family steed
The thoroughbred mares your grandfather
Raised and nurtured and loved
In a Palestine
Un-raped
Un-stolen

I battle the daily routine of insult and injury to access my hard labor camp. How can they do this to me? I haven’t seen my three children awake in months. I don’t have the cash for cigarettes. All that my loving wife can prepare for me is

A jibneh sandwich
With cucumber
In a plastic bag
Clutched in your callused laborer’s hand

And it never survives the five hours in the cattle holding pen where we are reduced to animals stampeding and trampling each other to death before I am allowed to escape.

But
You are out of the line
Fifteen men between you were pulled aside
And you tried not to look
Not to hear the one begging
Don’t hit me

I make it to where I seek to serve the settler masters. You never knew, of course; I was too ashamed to admit it even to my wife. But my “Zionist settler boss-man” has been putting me to work on “my Jiddo’s farm” where his Jaffa orange grove in Kufr Huj once thrived.  As you know, today the boss-man shouted insult at me:

Wala
Mish hon el yom
Not here today
Boy!
 
And all you can do is thank Allah that your
Wife and your babies are not
There to hear them call you
Wala

It is sweet of you Susan to keep that one just between us, not to have them insult me before my wife and children, not to rub my face in the dirt again. And I appreciate letting me keep the faith: I still have it in me to thank God for little favors. Many brothers and sisters have tired of thanking Him, Allathi la yushkaru ala makruhin siwah– no other but him is thanked for hateful matters.

I shall stop here. I am emotionally drained, exhausted. Let others handle your love affair with Neruda and the section where we gain a peek at your vicarious life and family affairs. Others may understand better your controlled anger at “The Way Things Are.” It is enough for me that I tried to answer the accusations you flung against me, your Palestinian brother. I tried to do it without raising your ire. I don’t want to harm our common cause.

It was not politicians or media moguls who first turned the tide against the massacres in Vietnam or who freed South Africa. It was men and woman of conscience who did that: poets, writers, pastors, singers, actors, dancers, comedians and all sorts of artists and intellectuals. This week I saw Annemarie Jacir’s film “Lamma shuftak.” At the MOMA, no less! Believe me, change is in the air. And it is brave people like you and the courage of the likes of those in charge of Just World Books that give us hope.

There is a job to be done. My age group couldn’t have done it. But we are ready to help. We both are fallahin and know the spirit of collective action. Once we knew how to do it in facing nature’s disasters and in dealing with its gifts of plenty in our fields. Let us all join together and kick ass, as you would say.

- Hatim Kanaaneh is a physician who has struggled for over four decades to improve the health of his Palestinian community in Galilee against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. He is the founder of the NGO The Galilee Society and the author of the book A Doctor in Galilee and of a forthcoming fictional trilogy.

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Susan Abulhawa’s My Voice Sought The Wind

Vacy Vlazna

Susie Abulhawa, Palestinian poet, exile, mother, lover, friend, stands naked in My Voice Sought The Wind; her collection of trenchant and beautiful poems replete with honesties and literary seductions.

Reading her poems is akin to being in conversation with a lyrically intelligent and passionate woman; a conversation that is at once intimate and universal shifting vividly in place and time, in emotion and insight, in self and the people of her poetic landscape.

There’s something so right, so apt that her first poem for this book is The Gift of Olive Oil for like the essence of the olive, her poetry is ‘A token/ Something from the soil of things shared ‘ and the ‘heritage’,‘longing’ and ’a wound’ are its recurring songlines. And each poem, when you linger and ‘Press it between your tongue and palate’ will yeild unexpected revelations into the darkness and radiance of human experience.

The first section under the heading of Palestinian, Black & Blue, speaks from the  bruising wound of the oppressed within Palestine and in exile. In Black’s fierce indictment of western racism,

I am the wrong kind of human

and Israel’s colonial supremacy,

A European took my grandma’s house

Painted my country white

the refugee child- Abulhawa- journeys along the vicious via dolorosa of exile, racist abuse and desperate conformity,

It is where I believed I was ugly

When I tried to be white

When I put down my flat bread and picked up a fork

And Mrs. Wall said I was “white enough” to

Stop being a “nigger-lover”

to adulthood and the rediscovering of  the integrity of her self,

I am Palestinian

And in the blue and bruise of my heart,

I am become Black

Because Black is beautiful

And the beautiful in me

Is Black

Yet, Abulhawa reveals that owning a Palestinian-self-in-exile comes with painful cultural loneliness;

Most don’t even know it’s Ramadan

Or that I’m fasting

There is no solidarity in el ghorba Ramadan in  el Ghorba

Abulhawa doesn’t shirk from truth about the toll of physical and emotional violence on women resulting directly from the emasculation of exile, ‘When they pulled the land from under your feet’,

The first time your husband hit you

It nearly knocked the country off your back

Then comes a second abandonment,

You loved him

And he left five months

After your second daughter was born

culminating in the disintegration of identity and family,

The girls you raised were not Palestinian

The house you built was not yours Sister Palestinian I

In Palestine, different forms of violence torture living and breathing Palestinians. To  bring us close to the horror of Palestinian life, in Awake on memories in GazaAbulhawa zooms from the  objectivity and distance of reports on Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza into the  terrified thoughts of a young Gazan man under bombardment,

Was it the spider web in the sky, the

White phosphorous death?

Or the sonic booms?

My eyes bulge

The better to see should

My heart break free

And make a run for it  Awake on Memories in Gaza

who clings to the useless calm of memories of a first love with Sameera that will be dead before it was born- typical of the loss within the inhuman Palestinian condition under the cruelest occupation:

Might there be mercy for us?

Perchance ten more will not lose a limb today

thousands will not leave school to scrounge for food.

Perchance Lena will marry, instead of committing suicide

and Ahmed will dream tonight, instead of shivering in his own piss. Sister Palestinian II

Wala and Picture of a Family Man echo across oceans the stark contrast between life for Palestinian families and the petty-by-comparison modern western malaise of urban angst. Wala is a searingly poignant poem and Abulhawa asserts the power of the personal pronoun to connect or not; with the use of ‘you’ we are not only drawn into, but walk in the vulnerability of the Palestinian father while the ‘he’ distances us from the Family Man.

Both are loving fathers deprived of a fulfilling fatherhood;

You kiss the faces of your sleeping babies

You haven’t seen them awake in months

and you wonder

Has Walid’s voice begun to crack yet?

Have Wijdad’s hips begun to flare?

How big was Suraya’s smile when she came home with her report card? Wala

and

He works impossible hours

Until the last moment before his children sleep

Then rushes to catch them

And as he carries them to bed

An ache of love overflows in him  Picture of a Family Man

Both men are trapped, one in a meaningless box of existential angst and the other, imprisoned in an Israeli cattle cage, struggles for existence. The former has choices, but the Palestinian has none behind the bars of daily humiliation:

the zionist settler boss-man yells

Wala, mish hon el yom!

Not there today, boy!

And all you can do is thank Allah that your

wife and your babies are not there to hear them call you wala

In the sections Love and Neruda and History of Love, Abulhawa the lover bares her ardour and wounds. Her passion, be it for a beloved or for a country, seethes images that makes your head turn and turn again;

Swim into my flesh

And taste the fever that burns my body

Feel the tempest in my breasts Earth’s First Story

There are a thousand ways to love

And I loved him ten thousand ways Untitled and Unfinished

I’d put my lips to his and close my eyes

And at the cusp of summer

We would know how truly gentle

Are these defiant hearts  Seasons of a Sapling

I peeled our shadows from the street

And made of them a dress

To wear to his birthday party What I Did Today, for Tomorrow

I slip from my flesh

And wander Arabia

To gather the poetry

You plant in the sand  Qais, Your Layla Speaks

Perhaps questions have no place in love

For questions demean the risks taken

The conveniences tossed

The fears abandoned

The courage

The beauty and greatness

Of heeding the urgency of the heart  Godly Lovelessness

As mother, Abulhawa evokes the magnificent archetypal act of love of a mother for her child,

In my chest there is a last beat I’d take from my heart for you

In my lungs a last breath I’d give to you  How You’ve Grown

This natural generosity of self overflows in Lexi while massaging her dying friend,

I tried to move life from my core

Through my hands

Into your feet

To your core

Grief inevitably passes through anger which rails in Cancer against the obscene ravaging of the disease in her friend, “Death is fisting her’ and the moments never to be cherished again,

Fireflies lighting the night

Freshly brewed coffee and the morning light

Good fitting blue jeans

Springtime and random smiles

Once the anger is spent, girlish humour,

Remember Faherty’s?

No, it was “Farty’s”  Lexi

and unrequited hope weave a life-filled lament for her beloved Lexi,

Maybe enough that we could make it to Spain

Take that trip to Oxford

Eat lobster until we burst

Drink until the world was healed

Build a playground

Just enough for you to be a mom

Your hair to flow long and golden again

And the shine to climb back into your eyes

There are 36 poems in this small volume that burst from the bindings to bind your heart and mind in a lyrical kinship with a poet who soars from ‘the precipice of history‘ bravely and with grace.

Susan Abulhawa is also the author of Mornings in Jenin and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine. My Voice Sought the Wind is published by Just World Books.

 ________________________________________

  Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. 

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A Witness to injustice in Palestine

Review of Pamela Olson’s Fast Times in Palestine

By Jamal Kanj

… As I read the book I tried to fathom what drove a young American woman from a small town in Oklahoma with a degree in physics to end up spending two years traversing military checkpoints and helping farmers harvest olives in the Middle East…

After graduating from Stanford University in 2002, the new graduate was working at a neighbourhood bar to save enough money for a backpacker holiday in the Greek isles when her French friend suggested Egypt as an alternative, less expensive destination. She travelled to Cairo and the Sinai, where she met an Israeli tourist named Dan who invited her to visit him in Israel.

The author tackles the paradox of occupation in very straightforward layman’s terms, describing how a 40-mile journey from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Nablus would take a full day…

Her journey took her across the Red Sea to Jordan, where she met – by chance – two peace volunteers, one British and one Canadian, who were on holiday from their work in Palestine. In the few days she spent with them in a central Amman hotel, she learned for the first time of the 3 billion dollars the US government pays Israel annually on behalf of American taxpayers.

Stories about occupation, the Palestinian people and human rights activism intrigued her, and she became interested in finding out for herself the truth about life in the West Bank. She jumped on the opportunity when they invited her to come along with them, and they took her to an unlikely tourist destination, a small Palestinian village called Jayyous.

The author tackles the paradox of occupation in very straightforward layman’s terms, describing how a 40-mile journey from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Nablus would take a full day crossing a separation wall, changing cabs six times and navigating permanent and flying Israeli military checkpoints. Meanwhile a much longer trip with her Israeli friend on “Jews-only settlement roads” could be completed uninterrupted in a much shorter time.

She also describes how the separation wall isolates villagers from their olive groves and farms – for many their only livelihood – while hilltop Jews-only settlements encroach on centuries-old trees and isolate Palestinian towns and villages into islands surrounded by Zionist colonies and the army that protects them.

The reader is able to feel the author’s inner glee at meeting beloved friends, pain while witnessing and experiencing the horrors of occupation and the melancholy of bidding farewell to people who became part of her family in Palestine.

Ever more fascinated by the wickedness of occupation and the joys of life among Palestinians, Pamela Olson took a low-paying job in Ramallah as an editor and head writer for the Palestine Monitor to study and document the daily human rights abuses under Israeli occupation.

Living and working in the Palestinian political capital, Pamela entered Palestinian politics from its widest doors by becoming the foreign press coordinator for a major candidate in the 2005 presidential election.

In her two years between Jayyous and Ramallah, the author takes the reader on an extraordinary expedition very few of us will ever get the opportunity to experience in a lifetime. She takes us along with her via immaculate descriptions of the spring greenery on hills and meadows – not yet raped by the concrete desertification of the Jews-only settlements – or smoking nargila (hookah) on porches with friends in Jayyous or sipping coffee at westernized cafés in Ramallah.

What makes this book special is the writer’s ability to keep the reader spellbound with her vivid descriptions of events, people and places. The reader is able to feel the author’s inner glee at meeting beloved friends, pain while witnessing and experiencing the horrors of occupation and the melancholy of bidding farewell to people who became part of her family in Palestine.

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