Palestinian poet and short story writer Taha Muhammad Ali grew up in Saffuriya, Galilee. During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, he moved with his family to Lebanon for a year; since then he hadlived in Nazareth, where he owned a souvenir shop. Self-taught through his readings of classical Arabic literature, American fiction, and English poetry, Ali started writing poems in the 1970s.
Taha Ali
His collections in English include Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (2000) and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006). There’s also a great biography, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman.
To me, his poems are fragile and graceful creatures, their minds purified by the village winds, their hearts full of power.
There’s something so special in his work. It’s hard for me to describe what it is. Maybe it’s his life – self-taught, working in a souvenir shop, attended only a few international poetry festivals, never really enjoyed or had his international fame. That wasn’t his thing. To some it seemed like he takes nearly as much pride in his Nazareth souvenir shop as in his poetry.
Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”
—
Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
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.
Ali always seemed so humble and wise, a survivor, a gentle mind. I think he’s work is remarkable and essential in every poetry collection. In a direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, he combines the personal and political as he details both village life and the upheaval of conflict. Comparing Ali to his contemporaries, John Palattella commented in a review in the Nation: “Whereas Darwish and al-Qasim, like most Palestinian poets, have favored the elevated and ornate rhetoric of fus’ha, or classical Arabic, Ali writes nonmetrical, unrhymed poems that blend classical fus’ha with colloquial Arabic.”
Ali spoke the language of the village, the language of the people. And that made his work more spacious, for all of us to take our place in it. It’s the melancholy and exuberance, it’s the land and the memory…
You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”
And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.
You can listen to him reading his poem Revenge at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival (there’s an english translation too). His body language and emotion is amazing. And the poem – gives me shivers.
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbours he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbours or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
“In my poetry,” Taha Muhammad Ali said, “there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it a new with your imagination.”
He died in 2011. A great man, a great poet.
