Hi, everyone, and welcome to Susurrus. I write this on the 30th of March, which is celebrated as Palestinian Land Day, and over the last week0–well, over the last six months almost, but particularly over the last week, I’ve been thinking about the war in Gaza … the latest of many wars, of a population in permanent exile or in permanent displacement, and wondering about the literature of such a people.

My introduction to Palestinian literature came, as it did for most of us I think, through Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish. But, perhaps because I do have Palestinian friends, I did read a fair bit of other literature, and this is what I want to talk about in this episode, which I write on such an important day for the people of Palestine.

Do you know, what we speak of as “nationhood”, Palestinians and particularly Palestinian poets and authors refer to–in English, and not in translation–as “landhood”?

Now, if you’ve been following the war, you’d know that the main accounts are Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Al Aqad, Bisan Owda and Hind Khoudary, of whom the former two have evacuated to Qatar and Australia respectively. 

I read one of Bisan Owda’s posts this week, where she called for everyone to commemorate Palestinian Land Day, when the people of Palestine, I quote “remember the theft of their lands by the Israeli occupation forces for 75 years.” 

We are witnessing a genocide, with hundreds of thousands of people maimed and missing and at least tens of thousands confirmed dead, and with people’s homes and memories reduced to rubble and with some of the most privileged in this land of relative privilege squeezed into refugee camps where they can barely get food. And they tell us that some of the most important events, violations by Israel, cannot be covered live because they don’t have communication lines. I don’t know how they are charging–and for how long they will be able to charge–their phone batteries and get to the equipment they need to bring us their updates.

So, I’m going to read out some of what Bisan Owda posted on Instagram, and then move on to some of the literature that the idea of “landhood” brings to mind. 

She says, “This year will be different for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the Gaza strip, who are prevented by the Israeli army from returning to their lands in the northern Gaza Strip  in preparation for its permanent occupation and the construction of settlements there.

“This year we really feel … what is the meaning of stealing land and houses? 

“We are witnessing an ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by the Israeli occupation with the support of world governments in 2024! This is done by expelling Palestinians from their homes through murder and intimidation. It is you, the free peoples of the world, who can return us to our lands.

We’re nearing 180 days of war now.

The idea of landhood is so crucial because Palestine has never been free. Of course, there was the Ottoman Empire until the British came and then we had Mandatory Palestine and then in 1948, the Nakba–the mass dispossession and displacement of Palestinians so that Israelis could occupy those homes. And then we had repercussions of this through to the six-day war of 1967, and since then, we can’t really say that Palestine has ever been free of occupation. 

Can you imagine what this must do to the mind of a writer, to always be under occupation? To know that nearly two-thirds of what was originally Palestine is now Israel, and that the occupier is ever expanding, ever displacing and expelling the colonised from their homes?

I want to read out some works, mainly of poetry, but also speak about some prose, by the writers of Palestine–people like Samih Al-Qasim, Ghassan Kanafani and Mu’in Bseiso. I think Bseiso is among those whom we must read because although he is widely translated, he is perhaps not as well known as the likes of Ghassan Kanafani who lived in Kuwait and Lebanon and Ibrahim Jabra, who lived in Iraq.

There are simply so many Palestinian writers that I think I should ideally do more than one episode about this, but this time, I’d like to look at one very interesting phenomenon that Mahmoud Darwish speaks of: he said that it was only when he went to Cairo in 1971 that he realised what it was like to see his own language on everything–that the first thing that struck him was that the traffic signs, road names, common phrases, and language of popular media was Arabic, since he’d been raised in a region where Hebrew was the primary language. How, then, he asked, did one learn enough Arabic to write poetry?

Of course, the poems I’m going to read today come to us in translation, but here’s one by Mu’in Bseiso, written in 1970, three years after the six-day war.

Brother! If they should sharpen the sword on my neck, 

I would not kneel, even if their whips lashed
my bloodied mouth
If dawn is so close to coming
I shall not retreat.
I will rise from the land that feeds our furious storm!

Next, I’d like to read from All faces but Mine, by Samih Al-Qasim, written in 1984:

You boast before the nations That the sky has chosen you As the messenger of civilizations; That you are the light of nations; That you are worthy, your people Are the source of worth

You flaunt and raise a sword Before the nations,
And raise a sword before me. And hurt me into the cave
Of my despair and death. And block the cave entrance, With iron malice and stone deceit. You dance at my death wedding. You stone my house and explode. You bridle my dream,
And weep, and shell, Complain and storm,
Raid, exceed, and explode.

(All Faces but Mine, 1984)

And, of course, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, whose “I belong there” might well have been written during the ongoing war:

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon, a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother .
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words to draw from them a single word: Home.

Both Darwish and Al-Qasim tied their activism and politics to their poetry, and saw it as having the larger purpose of educating people–their people, the occupied about all that was regressive about their own societies (sometimes seen in the early feminist-oriented writings of Samira Azzam) and create awareness and foster a sense of nationalism in fighting a colonial power, but also the people of the world outside, to pressure the occupying power to arrive at a solution that would be acceptable to all parties.

I think the dehumanisation of the Occupied People is best evidenced by Darwish’s famous Identity Card, and I’m going to read some verses from there:

Put it on record.
I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer. What's there to be angry about?
Put it on record.
I am an Arab ̃
Working with comrades of toil in a quarry. I have eight children
For them, I wrest the loaf of bread, The clothes and exercise books
From the rocks
And beg for no alms at your door, Lower not myself at your doorstep. What's there to be angry about?

And a few stanzas down:

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
I am a name without a title, Patient in a country where everything Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
My roots
Took hold before the birth of time 

Before the burgeoning of the ages, 

Before cypress and olive trees, 

Before the proliferation of weeds. 

My father is from the family of the plow 

Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant 

Without line or genealogy.

And then, he specifically addresses the occupiers:

Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
You stole my forefathers' vineyards And land I used to till,
I and all my children,
And you left us and all my grandchildren Nothing but these rocks.
Will your government be taking them too As is being said?

This was published in 1964, in the middle of what might have been the most turbulent decade for Palestinians in the last century.

This was also a time that saw the rise of other forms of writing in Palestinian literature. Among novelists, one of the best known of course is Emile Habibi, most famous for his The Secret Life of Said written in 1974. But there is also a short story writer, Muhammad Naffa, whose anthology The Uprooted, is something of a subtle commentary on being exiled in one’s own homeland. 

Since we’re running out of time, I’m going to end with one of Darwish’s most famous poems, which might as well have been written today, and I think it is only fitting that the last word spoken on Palestinian Land Day in this podcast should be his:

The Earth is closing on us

Pushing us through the last passage

And we tear off our limbs so we can fit in.

The Earth is squeezing us.

I wish we were its wheat

So we could die and live again.

I wish the earth was our mother

So she’d be kind to us

I wish we were pictures on the rocks

For our dream to carry as mirrors

We saw the faces of those who will throw

Our children out of the windows of this last place.

Our star will hand up mirrors.

Where shall we go, after the last frontier? 

Where will birds fly, after the last sky?
Where will plants find rest, after the last breath of air?
We will write our names in crimson smoke.
We will cut off the hand of the song so that our flesh can complete it.

 Here we will die, here in the last narrow passage and here our blood will plant  its olive trees.