Notes from "Gaza, Our Oracle-Ruin"

Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian poet killed at the age of 32 by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis. She was a shahiida (شهيدة), not a martyr. The Arabic word for martyrdom is about witnessing, as all artists and poets do. Her death was not a considered sacrifice, although it may be considered such. She was a victim of genocide.

I listened to Huda Fakhreddine read Abu Nada’s poem “Our Loneliness” today:

If not for Fakhreddine’s reading, the poem and its context would have been lost on me. The closing «وشدي حيلك يا بلد» is translated here by Salma Harland as “my country… pull yourself together,” although I think it’s also like “gather your wits, compatriots.” The Egyptian singer and songwriter Mohammad Nouh made it a refrain in a song that became popular, first being played down by the Egyptian regime after the ‘67 loss against Israel, then being played up after the ‘73 loss-with-more-face-saved against Israel. Fakhreddine in her lecture rooted the sentiment of «شدي حيلك يا بلد» in an Arabic tradition of poetry that returns to pre-Islamic times, for example, to Samaw’al ibn ‘Adiya and Al-Shanfara, whose shared theme of self-sufficiency and willful loneliness still resonates today, especially in Palestine.

This is why Fakhreddine said that “poetry takes history by the collar,” and that to understand poetry, both poem and reader must be liberated from the “extrapoetic.” Historians are given to the exercise of power, so it’s “safer to tune into the conversation of poets.” As a firm historicist, this idea challenges me. It turns on a notion of poetic timelessness that is strange to my American mind, and perhaps anyone who has lived in self-consciously revolutionary societies. Languages are living and not tools, Fakhreddine said, but does this not mean that their lifeways must change, even as the conversation continues? To take refuge in eternal, essential poetics is to hide from power. The first historians reap from us all anyway.