Nuh Ibrahim, "What a loss, O Izz al-Din!"

Nuh Ibrahim (1913-1938) was arguably the leading poet of the 1936 Arab Revolution in British-occupied Palestine. In 1936, Ibrahim joined the Palestinian national liberation movement, joining the same brigades that al-Qassam had organized. It was around this time that Ibrahim published a collection of his nationalist (or militant) poems, which was quickly banned in Palestine. He was imprisoned for five months in 1937 following the publication of his poem, “Commander Dill,” which skewered the top British military commander in Mandate Palestine. In October 1938, Nuh and three other militants were traveling outside the village of Tamra when they were killed by a British patrol who threw their bodies down a well. Later, local residents retrieved and buried the bodies in the local cemetery.

Though Ibrahim was only 25 years old when he was martyred, his poems and songs (almost entirely in the Palestinian Colloquial, rather than Modern Standard Arabic) remain popular, having been long part of nationalist song repertoires, and performed by bands such as Firqat al-Ashiqeen.

“What a loss, O Izz al-Din”

by Nūḥ Ibrāhīm

trans. Ahmed Saidam and Elliott Colla

Izz al-Din—What a loss!

Sacrificed for your nation

Who could deny your bravery,

O Martyr of Palestine?


Rest in peace, Izz al-Din,

Your death’s a lesson for all.

Oh—if only you’d lasted

Chief among freedom fighters


You gave your life and wealth

For the independence of your country.

And when the enemy came to you

You resisted them with firm resolve.


You resisted them with a steady heart

And your enemies feared you

Has Palestine ever seen

Someone as devoted as Izz al-Din?


You formed a league for righteous struggle

To liberate the country

Its goal: Victory or Death!

And you gathered together fervent men


You gathered together great, brave men

And with your own money, bought weapons

“Let us go to struggle,” you said. 

“To defend the homeland and our Faith!”


You gathered together the very best of men

Holding onto so many hopes.

But treachery, my Man,

Played its role to give them power.


Betrayal played its game

And then the disaster came

Blood came up to the knees

And you would not surrender or yield


You roared, “God is great!”

Like a fierce lion

But fate decreed

The will of Our Lord


How sweet is death amidst struggle

Compared to a life of oppression. 

His praiseworthy men answered,

“We die so that Palestine may live!”


The body has died, but the idea lives on,

And blood never turns into water!

We pledge before God, My Brother

To die as Izz al-Din died.


Recite the Fatiha, Brothers,

For the souls of the homeland’s martyrs.

And register this, O Time:

Each one of us is Izz al-Din

Source: Nūḥ Ibrāhīm, Majmū‘at qaṣā’id Falasṭīn al-mujāhida (Damascus: Maṭba‘at al-I‘tidāl, N.D. [1939?], 49-50.

يا خسارة ، يا عزالدين

للشاعر نوح إبراهيم


(عز الدين) يا خسارتك 

رحت فدا لأمتك

مين بينكر شهامتك

يا شهيد فلسطين


(عز الدين) يا مرحوم

موتك درس للعموم 

آه لوكنت تدوم

يا رئيس المجاهدين


ضحيت بروحك ومالك 

لأجل استقلال بلادك 

العدو لما جالك

قاومتو بعزم متين


قاومتوا بقلب ثابت

والعدا منك هابت

فلسطين مين قال شافت

مثل غيرة (عز الدين)


أسست عصبة للجهاد 

حتى تحرر البلاد 

غايتها نصر أو استشهاد

وجمعت رجال غيورين


جمعت رجال من الملاح

من مالك شريت سلاح

وقلت هيا للكفاح

لنصر الوطن والدين


جمعت نخبة رجال

وكنت معقد الآمال

لكن الغدر يا خال

لعب دورو بالتمكين


لعبت الخيانة لعبة

وقامت وقعت النكبة

وسال الدم للركبة

وما كنت تسلم وتلين


كنت تصيح الله أكبر

كالأسد الغضنفر

لكن حكم المقدر

مشيئة رب العالمين


محلا الموت والجهاد

ولا عيشة الاستعباد

جاوبوه رجاله الأمجاد

نموت وتحيا فلسطين


الجسم مات المبدأ حي

والدماء ما تصير مي

منعاهد الله يا خي

نموت موتة (عزالدين)


اقروا الفاتحة يا اخوان

على روح شهداء الأوطان

وسجل عندك يا زمان

كل واحد منا (عزالدين)

Nuh Ibrahim, "The Arab and Zionist Debate"

Nuh Ibrahim (1913-1938) was arguably the leading poet of the 1936 Arab Revolution in British-occupied Palestine. In 1936, Ibrahim joined the Palestinian national liberation movement, joining the same brigades that al-Qassam had organized. It was around this time that Ibrahim published a collection of his nationalist (or militant) poems, which was quickly banned in Palestine. He was imprisoned for five months in 1937 following the publication of his poem, “Commander Dill,” which skewered the top British military commander in Mandate Palestine. In October 1938, Nuh and three other militants were traveling outside the village of Tamra when they were killed by a British patrol who threw their bodies down a well. Later, local residents retrieved and buried the bodies in the local cemetery.

Though Ibrahim was only 25 years old when he was martyred, his poems and songs (almost entirely in the Palestinian Colloquial, rather than Modern Standard Arabic) remain popular, having been long part of nationalist song repertoires, and performed by bands such as Firqat al-Ashiqeen.

“The Arab and Zionist Debate”

by Nūḥ Ibrāhīm

trans. Ahmed Saidam and Elliott Colla


The Arab: 

I’m an Arab, my Dears. 

At death’s embrace, cast me

To erase the Zionist’s name

And defend my country, Palestine,

From the schemes of settlers!


The Zionist:

I’m a well-known Zionist

In this world, I play an open game

Wiliness and bluff are all that I own

I must have Palestine!

Palestine must be mine!


The Arab:

 It’ll be yours by early tomorrow morning

` When woe and falling befall you

And you meet the Angels at the Gates.

On Judgment Day, you poor fellow,

That’s when Palestine will be yours!


The Zionist:

I’m a fleer, not a fighter

My daughters answer for me

With them, I never lose

Out of a ten times, I win nine

I must have Palestine!


The Arab:

Uff—I spit on those kind of men

Who boast with such words.

Your hopes are all in vain.

Your luck is awful, it’s rotten.

Time to leave, you misbegotten..

The Zionist:

Khabeebee, listen to my words,

No matter what I see before me,

A national homeland remains my goal..

To Zionize Palestine… 

Palestine must be mine!

The Arab:

You’ll never live to see it!

Go on being freshly plucked

A sheep pretending to be a lion,

You will see the fatal sign

If you stay here in Palestine.

The Zionist:

I’m sick of the whole world

And the lands that rejected me.

Now you are also chasing after me,

To take away my Palestine 

Land of my ancient bloodline.

The Arab:

What a load of nonsense.

Sounds like you got lost in a dream.

Palestine is Islam’s birthplace,

Cradle of Christ and Prophets, too.

Where’re you going, fool?

The Zionist:

I can’t leave it behind,

I must save my forest.

Either I win or I lose.

I won’t leave Palestine.

Palestine must be mine.

The Arab: You must go.

The Zionist: I won’t leave.

The Arab: Why are you still standing here? 

The Zionist: I’m not afraid.

The Arab: Consider how this will end.

The Zionist: Do whatever you want.

The Arab: Bam bam bam bam.

The Zionist:

What a loss! What a disaster!

I lost my money, all that I owned!

I’ve lost all of Palestine!

Source: Nūḥ Ibrāhīm, Majmū‘at qaṣā’id Falasṭīn al-mujāhida (Damascus: Maṭba‘at al-I‘tidāl, N.D. [1939?], 19-20.

"محاورة العربي والصهيوني"

للشاعر نوح إبراهيم

العربي:

أنا العربي يا عيوني

عند الموت ارموني

بمحي اسم الصهيوني

لاحمي بلادي فلسطين

من كيد المستعمرين


الصهيوني:

أنا الصهيوني المعروف

وامري في الدنيا مكشوف

رسمالي مكر وبلوف

ولازم أملك فلسطين

ولازم أملك فلسطين


العربي:

بمتلكها بكرة بكير

لما تشوف هم وتعتير 

وتقابل ناكر ونكير

يوم القيامة يا مسكين

حتى تملك فلسطين


الصهيوني:

بهرب انا ما بحارب

وبناتي عني بتجاوب

فيهم ما برجع خايب 

وبكسب بالمية تسعين

ولازم أملك فلسطين


لعربي:

أخ تفو على هيك رجال

بفتخروا بهالأقوال

خابت منك الآمال

وقعتك قطران وطين

ولازم ترحل يا لعين


الصهيوني:

خبيبي اسمع كلامي

مهما شفت قدامي

الوطن القومي مرامي

علشان صهيون فلسطين

ولازم أملك فلسطين


العربي:

والله عمرك ما بتشوف

ولازم تضلك منتوف

عامل سبع يا خروف

لازم تشوف غراب البين 

إذا بقيت بفلسطين


الصهيوني:

كل الدنيا زهقتني

 ومن بلادها رفضتني

وأنت كمان لاحقني

لتحرمني من فلسطين

بلاد أجدادي من سنين


العربي:

حاجة تخبص بالكلام

كنك غارق في المنام

فلسطين مهد الإسلام 

والمسيح والمرسلين

فين رايح يا مسكين


الصهيوني:

مش ممكن أرحل عنها... 

ولازم غابتي أنقذها

با بكسب يا بخسرها

ما برحل عن فلسطين 

ولازم أكسب فلسطين


العربي: لازم ترحل

الصهيوني: ما برحل

العربي: بعدك واقف

الصهيوني: أنا موش خايف

العربي: وقف شوف آخرتك

الصهيوني: اعمل انت اللي بدك

العربي: بم بم بم بم


الصهيوني:

آه يا خسارتي ويا مصيبتي

ضاع المال والراسمال

وراحت مني الحزيطة فلسطين


Nuh Ibrahim, “The Arab and Englishman Debate”

Nuh Ibrahim (1913-1938) was arguably the leading poet of the 1936 Arab Revolution in British-occupied Palestine. In 1936, Ibrahim joined the Palestinian national liberation movement, joining the same brigades that al-Qassam had organized. It was around this time that Ibrahim published a collection of his nationalist (or militant) poems, which was quickly banned in Palestine. He was imprisoned for five months in 1937 following the publication of his poem, “Commander Dill,” which skewered the top British military commander in Mandate Palestine. In October 1938, Nuh and three other militants were traveling outside the village of Tamra when they were killed by a British patrol who threw their bodies down a well. Later, local residents retrieved and buried the bodies in the local cemetery.

Though Ibrahim was only 25 years old when he was martyred, his poems and songs (almost entirely in the Palestinian Colloquial, rather than Modern Standard Arabic) remain popular, having been long part of nationalist song repertoires, and performed by bands such as Firqat al-Ashiqeen.

The Arab and Englishman Debate

by Nūḥ Ibrāhīm

trans. Ahmed Saidam and Elliott Colla


The Arab:

Hey History—record this, write it down.

Hey Tyrant—crush and torture us!

What goes up must come down.

You shall rejoice, My Palestine

The Englishman:

Write it down or not—whatever!

I’m a stranger to promises and honor.

I fear only force.

That’s how I govern Palestine


The Arab:

Where’s my justice, where’re my rights,

Mr. Clever Englishman?

We thought you were compassionate,

We thought you kept your promises.


The Englishman:

Hey Arab—Talk all you like.

Who will listen to you, poor man?

Shout as much as you want, I won’t hear.

My ears are plugged!


The Arab:

You burned my heart,

With your promise to the Zionists.

Will you doublecross us? 

Are you trying to destroy Palestine?


The Englishman:

There’s no going back on my promise to Balfour

I won’t give up the millions I got in return

Even if I have to escalate things with artillery,

airplanes and rifles!

The Arab:

Woe is me, My Oppressor

Your heart is hard and never softens

You think we’re animals?

Or just a nation of savages?


The Englishman:

Seems you don’t understand

The colonizers’ philosophy.

Wake up, if you’re still asleep:

We are a nation of excellence. 


The Arab:

Mr. Englishman—we fought with you,

When you came out victorious!

What happened to our hopes and demands?

To our independence in Palestine?


The Englishman:

No matter how much we offer and promise,

—We might swear a thousand oaths!—

We won’t change this policy

That we follow.


The Arab:

As long as you do not hear my voice,

And have no respect for the law,

I will take care of myself,

As the Lord is my support.


The Arab:

Where have you gone, Good People of Honor,

Good Muslim Kings?

Let me hear your voices thunder,

To save Palestine.


Source: Nūḥ Ibrāhīm, Majmū‘at qaṣā’id Falasṭīn al-mujāhida (Damascus: Maṭba‘at al-I‘tidāl, N.D. [1939?], 42-3.

محاورة العربي والإنجليزي

للشاعر نوح إبراهيم


العربي

يا تاريخ سجل واكتب

يا ظالم اطغى وعذب

لازم الدهر يقلب

وتنفرحي يا فلسطين


الإنجليزي

سجل مجل ما بعرف

ولا بفهم عهد وشرف

غير القوة ما بخاف

وهذا حكمي بفلسطين


العربي

وين العدل والحقوق

يا انجليزي يا فطين

كنا منفتكرك شفوق

وإنك عالعهد أمين


الإنجليزي

يا عربي احكي لتشبع

من يفهملك يا مسكين

مهما تصيح ما بسمع

حيث آداني مسدودين


العربي

قلبي منك صار محروق

بوعدك للصهيونيين

راح تصفينا بخازوق

وبدك تهلك فلسطين؟


الإنجليزي

بوعدي لبلفور ما برجع

ما بترك قبض الملايين

وان كترتها بالمدفع

والطيارة والمرتين


العربي

آه منك يا ظالم

قلبك قاسي ما بلين

بتفتكرنا بهايم

والا أمة متوحشين


الإنجليزي

الظاهر انك مش فاهم

مبادي المستعمرين

اصحى ان كنت نايم

نحنا أمة موصوفين


العربي

يا نكليزي حاربنا معكم

وخرجتو منصورين

فين أملنا ومطاليبنا

واستقلالنا بفلسطين


الإنجليزي

مهما عطينا ووعدنا

وحلفنا ألف يمين

ما منغير سياستنا

هاللي عليها ماشيين


العربي

ما دمت ما تسمع حسي

وما بتراعي القوانين 

أنا بدبر نفسي 

والمولى إلي معين


العربي

فينكم يا أهل النخوة

ويا ملوك المسلمين

سمعوني صوتكم يدوي

لإنقاذ فلسطين


Nuh Ibrahim, “Commander Dill”

Nuh Ibrahim (1913-1938) was arguably the leading poet of the 1936 Arab Revolution in British-occupied Palestine. Born into poverty in Haifa, Ibrahim studied at Haifa’s Islamic School where Izz al-Din al-Qassam, taught. After working with printing presses in Haifa and Jaffa, Ibrahim traveled to Baghdad for more training in the craft. He then moved to Bahrain to help train typesetters and printers. While living in Bahrain, he composed many poems and songs in vernacular Arabic, and developed a following while performing at private functions in Manama and Muharraq. Upon hearing the news of revolt in Palestine in 1936, Ibrahim returned home to join the guerrilla movement, joining the same brigades that al-Qassam had organized. It was around this time that he published a collection of his nationalist (or militant) poems, which was quickly banned in Palestine. He was imprisoned for five months in 1937 following the publication of his poem, “Commander Dill,” which skewered the top British military commander in Mandate Palestine. In October 1938, Nuh and three other militants were traveling outside the village of Tamra when they were killed by a British patrol who threw their bodies down a well. Later, local residents retrieved and buried the bodies in the local cemetery.

Though Ibrahim was only 25 years old when he was martyred, his poems and songs (almost entirely in the Palestinian Colloquial, rather than Modern Standard Arabic) remain popular, having been long part of nationalist song repertoires, and performed by bands such as Firqat al-Ashiqeen.


“Commander Dill”

by Nūḥ Ibrāhīm

trans. Ahmed Saidam and Elliott Colla

 

Hey, Commander Dill

Don’t think the nation’s grown tired

But since you’re following its affairs

Maybe you’ll be the one to fix things?

Since you’re an expert,

And an effective military leader

Who understands our whole cause,

You need no explanation.

Tell London what’s happened

And what is yet to come:

The Arabs are a nation of free men

Whose friendship you badly need.

 

So make it work, Mr. Dill

Perhaps you’ll fix it all…


Mister General—If you want

By force to change the situation

Then you must certainly grasp

That your request is difficult, impossible,

So take it with a bit of wisdom.

Pay us our due, Uncle

And give the nation what it demands

Of freedom and independence.

 

Manage it, Mr. Dill

Maybe you can fix things.


You came to a free Palestine,

To put down the Revolution.

And when you studied the situation,

You discovered how precarious things were.

You ought to make Britain understand,

So we may be spared its harm,

And reconcile with the Arab nation

With a prohibition on land sales and immigration


So get on it, Mr. Dill,

Maybe you’ll be the one to fix things?


As long as you’re in charge,

Then solve this problem and end this crisis.

Reach out your hand and take ours,

Take all your battalions away.

Fulfill your good-faith promises,

So we can erase this mistake.

This would be an honor for your regime

And the best plan of action.


Hop to it, Mr. Dill

Maybe you’re the one to fix it…


Source: Nūḥ Ibrāhīm, Majmū‘at qaṣā’id Falasṭīn al-mujāhida (Damascus: Maṭba‘at al-I‘tidāl, N.D. [1939?], 23.


قصيدة القائد دل

للشاعر نوح أبراهيم

 

يا حضرة القائد دل

لا تظن الأمة بتمل

لكن انت سايرها

يمكن على يدك بتحل

ما دمت رجل خبير

وقائد عسكري خطير

وقضيتنا كلها فهمتها

ما بلزم الك تفسير

فهِم لندن باللي صار

واللي وبعدوا راح يصير

العرب أمة أحرار

صداقتها لازمتكم كثير

 

ودبرها يا مستر دل

يمكن على يدك بتحل


إن كنت عاوز يا جنرال

بالقوة تغير هالحال

لازم تعتقد أكيد

طلبك صعب من المحال

لكن خدها بالحكمة

واعطينا الثمن يا خال

ونفذ شروط الأمة

من حرية واستقلال

 

ودبرها يا مستر دل

يمكن على يدك بتحل


جيت فلسطين الحرة

حتى تقمع الثورة

ولما درست الحالة

لقيت المسألة خطرة

بدك تفهم بريطانيا

حتى تكفينا شرها

وتصافي الامة العربية

بمنع البيع والهجرة


ودبرها يا مستر دل

يمكن على يدك بتنحل


ما دمت صاحب السلطة

حل هالمشكلة وهالورطة

ومد يدك وصافحنا

وما تخلي ولا أورطة

ونفذ وعود الشرف

حتى نمحي هالغلطة

للدولة هادا شرف

وأحسن مشروع وخطة


ودبرها يا مستر دل

يمكن على يدك بتحل



Tell Me What's going On

I have good news about your blood work

Your cholesterol looks good,

But your sugar is 5.9,

That isn’t pre-diabetic

But it’s heading there

Looks like you lost some weight since the last time you were here

Does that concern you

How are things at home

Any concerns with your sex life

How often

How long has it been

Are you eating well

Are you sleeping well

Do you ever feel sad

Do you ever feel despondent

So tell me what’s going on

 

I don’t know how to get through this

It is there when I wake up

And it is there when I go to sleep

Every day, a hundred or so

Sometimes more,

Here, there, young, old

Men, women, children, infants

In tents, basements, hospitals, and schools

On the beach and in the road

So many

You know

They stopped counting in February

 

He blinks and makes a note

I’m sorry to hear that

 

People are posting

They are posting videos

They are posting recordings,

Phone calls, clips, snippets of

Beheadings, immolations, mass graves

Girls are posting their final poems

Boys send last messages to mothers and sisters

To the rubble of their homes, their city, their land

An old man points to a crater,

            Or a missing limb

An orphan points at the sky

            Or a tattered kite

            Or a story

And then they are gone forever

No surviving family

Disappeared in broad daylight

Captured, recorded

But gone forever

 

This forever is still going,

You know,

They stopped counting in February

There’s a long pause

As he finishes his notes

Are you ready for your flu shot today?

I pay the co-pay and leave

 

Later, my shoulder starts to ache

Where the injection was

At dinner, a pretend-real fever

And actual symptoms of mock fatigue

I rub the sore muscle

And listen to the celebrations outside

 

My neighbors are dancing

My neighbors are singing

They have won

And now they are choosing

Their next Amalek.

(November 2024)

Sugar Maple

The man knocked on the door

And gave me his business card.

He wanted to tell me he would

Cut it down

For only $250

If we wanted.

 

And I had been thinking the whole time

That the maple

Was just being slow this year.

It is youngish, and healthy.

But suddenly, I was standing next to that man

Talking about that maple,

As if I always had known it had died.

 

Just like that, know-it-all words coming out

Pronouncing a death sentence.

And then it did.

It died abruptly, just then,

As we stood in front of it

Discussing its evident death,

And me, “No, thanks,”

Thinking to myself that man just killed a maple.

That man just murdered the beautiful tree.

And he touching the card in my fingers, “In case you change your mind.

You gotta remove it, you know.”

“Of course, I know,”

I spoke as if I did.

 

Days went by, then weeks.

By June, no one could deny it was dead.

Sloughing off its bark

Like an unneeded parka,

Withholding red-tinged buds,

And lime-dyed keys

Strangling on unborn leaves.

One afternoon, I pulled a muscle in my neck sawing off

The most obvious branches.

 

Weeks went by, and we

Began to notice the other

Dead trees by the creek.

Maples? We checked, but it turned out

They were tulip poplars

And catalpa.

It was happening all around now,

Beneath the green canopy

Ash, chestnut, oak, holly

Beech, elder, sycamore

So many dead sentinels,

Flagless poles

Was this part of the cycle

Of life

The dying and

Rotting and

Feeding so that others might live

Or the site of a massacre?

 

Months went by. Winter came,

Slowly, but it did.

And now the barren maple

Didn’t stick out

So much

Against the leafless willow oak

 

The city crew, who comes each January

To inspect the last elms

Stranded in the neighborhood,

A century after the blight or more.

They came with their bucket and experts

And I pretending to know,

“I’ll give you $100 cash if you take down that little thing over there.”

The man looked at me,

Then at his boss,

Then at me again, “Can’t right now. We’re on city time.”

His boss nodded.

“But I can come back on Saturday.”

 

He did, climbing up that dead tree,

Chain saw dangling

five feet behind by rope.

He lopped it off,

Head to stump.

We paid 250 in the end, because he pruned the mountain laurel too.

 

We split it and stacked it and waited.

 

When the first real snow finally came a month later,

We threw a piece on the grate,

Mostly out of curiosity.

It blazed hot, quick lighting, slow burning,

Not a pop,

And none of the smoke

You’d expect from maple,

Young or old.

 

That tree was seasoned.

Must have been dead for a good long while.

A lot longer than we ever knew.

Spitting out leaves and keys and buds

For at least a season

Somehow, though it was already dead

In root and trunk.

 

And we huddled around it,

Snow drifting into the house

From the unfixed old gap

Under the front door

As we fed this tree

Limb by limb

Into the fire

And became warm again.

(January 2016)

Autumn

It seems late this year

The yellowing of these leaves

This carpet of foliage composted

The fogging of my breath

Under the low white sunlight

 

He turns off the path to sniff and snort

Rifling at sycamore roots

Curling through the pawpaws

Grazing among elm volunteers

Stripping twigs bare

Munching last green leaves

Same botanical breakfast he had yesterday

 

He tears off after deer

Gone for 15 minutes or so

For him, the world is alive

With smells, sounds, and vibes

He finds patterns and reads signs

Identifies friend, foe, and prey,

He comes back to greet a Lab

Gets chased by a Visla

Hunts for the fox that left the scat

And ignores the rest

 

We follow the creek up

Towards the library gardens

We pass two elderly walkers,

Wielding four poles between them

People are friendly out here

Nodding or saying hello or nothing

Careful to never interrupt

Each other’s private idyll

 

A middle-aged white guy

Shlubby, but decent like me

Like most of us, probably

Comes up the path

Followed by his well-behaved Doodle

We nod to each other, dogman to dogman

We complement the hounds

Stepping past each other

And on our ways forever

 

Only then do I notice his IDF baseball cap

It reminds me of the hospital yesterday

And my colleague who cheered it on

And the other who wrings his hands

But says nothing

 

I continue walking up the path,

Heart thumping,

Breaths cut

By the climb

Or the sight of a hat

 

I cross the bridge and continue up

I think of all the things I could have said

But didn’t

And suddenly, for the first time

I notice how alone I am

Where’d he go?

 

I think he was up there all along,

But I couldn’t see him for the tears

He was kneeling, snout in muck

Then rolling in it,

A pile of scat, an old carcass, or both

Get out of there, you filthy…!

Even from this distance

You can smell the stench of shit and death on him

(October 2024)

Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Baghouti (1944-2021) was a poet from Deir Ghassana, a village outside of Ramallah in Occupied Palestine. After studying at Cairo University, he remained in Egypt and became a leading figure in literary circles there. He is best known to English readers through his 1997 memoir, I Saw Ramallah, which reflected on memory, return, and daily life in the Occupied West Bank. Throughout his years in Cairo, Barghouti remained a steadfast advocate of Palestinian liberation and leader within radical Egyptian movements. He was married to the Egyptian scholar, novelist and activist, Radwa Ashour, with whom he had one son, the poet and activist, Tamim Al-Barghouthi. These short poems are from his 1987 collection, Ṭāl al-shatāt (The Diaspora Has Gone On for a Long Time).


Interpretation

A poet sits in a cafe, writing.

The old lady thinks he’s writing a letter to his mother

The teenager supposes he’s writing to his beloved

The child imagines he’s doodling

The businessman assumes he’s drawing up a contract

The tourist guesses he’s writing a postcard

The bureaucrat believes he’s counting his debts

The secret policeman approaches him very slowly


Essential Components

Coca Cola. Chase Manhattan. General Motors.

Christian Dior. McDonald’s. Shell.  

Dynasty. Hilton International. Saint James.

Kentucky Fried Chicken. Tear Gas.

Billy Clubs. Secret Police.

As Ibn Khaldun said, “Among the Arabs, these are the essential components of the State.”


Two Women

One knows all the silver shops of Paris and complains.

One cries every Thursday over five graves and thinks nothing of it.

Imperfect Reunions: A Belated Appreciation of Emile Habiby’s Six-Day Sextet

[This first appeared as part of UCLA’s 2017 symposium, “The Naksa at 50”]

Abstract: Despite its small size, Emile Habiby’s 1968 work, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Six-Day Sextet) is arguably the most compelling literary reflection on the moment of the 1967 Naksa and its immediate aftermath. Building on the topos of reunions, Habiby explores the ironies and ambiguities of defeat, and the imperfect new possibilities that came with Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, possibilities that have been eclipsed many times over by subsequent developments. This essay offers a short appreciation of Habiby’s work, arguing for conceptualizing the work not as a collection of short stories, but rather a form situated between the short story and the novel. This formal ambiguity it not only true to the theme of imperfect reunions explored in Habiby’s work, but more critically, to the experiences of previously separated Palestinian communities joined against their will by Israeli military force.

Reunions Amidst Shock

For Arab poets and writers, the June War was a shock, an occasion for weeping, self-critique and even self-flagellation.[1] To hear the urgency of the moment, we only have to recall the opening lines of Nizar Qabbani’s well-known poem “Margin Notes on the Dossier of the Setback”:

My friends—behold the death of the old language,

And the ancient books,

To you, I bring news of the passing

Of our words worn out like old shoes,

And the death of whorish vocabulary, sarcasm and curses

I announce for you, for you,

The end of the thinking that led to the defeat.[2]

While there may have been a consensus about the existential nature of the military defeat, Arab intellectuals differed on the nature of its causes. For some, it was due to betrayal and treason: a failure to properly modernize, or to fully commit to Marxist, Nasserist, or Baathist models of revolution. For others, the defeat was the direct consequence of a poverty of thought and language, or a blind adherence to authority and tradition. For the Syrian poet Adonis it was all of these things at once. Writing in al-Adab in 1968, he said:

Our masses are not up to the level of the revolution. When the revolution surrenders to them, it betrays itself, when it abandons them it dies.… We must realize that the societies that modernized did so only after they rebelled against their history, tradition and values… We must ask our religious heritage what it can do for us in our present and future… If it cannot do much for us we must abandon it.[3]

In light of this body of writing, it is remarkable how differently the event was absorbed by those Palestinian poets and intellectuals who lived inside Israel. While they appreciated the enormous impact of the war on the Arab regimes, they did not necessarily talk about it in terms of defeat (hazima) and setback (naksa). As Mahmoud Darwish put it in a 1969 interview:

As a writer, the war had no sudden effect on me. It didn’t turn my thoughts upside down. It didn’t crush my ideals as it so thankfully did to those of the Arab poets outside my country. I wasn’t sitting up in a pigeon tower, needing to be convinced of the necessity of going down to the street. But the war was a painful truth-teller [and forced some writers to discover core realities]. Fedwa Tuqan’s poetry [for instance] took a sharp turn immediately after Nablus was occupied. During our first meeting in Haifa, I said to her, “Not a month has passed since the occupation, your occupation. What do you think about all these long discussions about poetry?” Then couldn’t help but add, “I hope there’s some benefit from all that’s happened. Let Nizar Qabbani come visit us in Haifa!”[4]

Qabbani never did visit Haifa, but others did. Similarly, the poets and writers of Haifa and Nazareth used the occasion to tour the West Bank to meet with writers and poets they’d never met, and family and friends they hadn’t seen in decades. The exchanges and conversations that developed out of these meetings were as transformative as they were unexpected. Within weeks or months, it was clear to Palestinian intellectuals that one of the most paradoxical consequences of the June War was that it managed to put an end to the twenty-year siege on Palestinian life inside Israel.

As welcome as this outcome was, the fact that it came about through military defeat rather than victory only accentuated the abject state of Palestinian politics, whether living as third-class citizens in the Jewish state or living under the new military occupation. In this context, it is not surprising that Palestinian citizens of Israel spoke about the war and its aftermath in terms of meetings that were as sad as they were happy, and reunions that, on the one hand, reaffirmed Palestinian connections, and on the other, reminded Palestinians of the divisions that continued to separate them. The post-1967 literature is dominated by the motif of reunion.[5] Importantly, the motif is fraught, incomplete and even troubling, as evidenced in the ambiguity inherent within some of the post-1967 reunions cited in Maha Nassar’s recent study, Brothers Apart.

In one instance, Nassar recounts the story of the Haifa intellectual, Hanna Abu Hanna, who took a car trip through the West Bank in the months following the war. Abu Hanna and his wife visit her sister in Ramallah—it is the first time they have seen each other in twenty years. Then Abu Hanna drops in an old friend, who asked, “Shall we thank the occupation, in whose shadows this meeting occurs? Yet it is the reason for our separation in the first place.”[6]

In a second instance, a young intellectual, Salman Natur, writes of his first trip to East Jerusalem in 1967 as a journey of self-discovery:

Upon seeing a copy of the [Egyptian] newspapers al-Ahram and al-Jumhuriyya, or the [Lebanese] journals al-Adab or al-Adib, I felt at that time as if I was embracing the Arab world.… [Along Salah al-Din Street] you don’t hear anything around you except Arabic, and everything you see is written in Arabic, and the people are calling out in the [open air] market [selling] Arab goods… It was as if I stepped through a large portal and entered the Arab world.[7]

Israeli officials correctly understood that these meetings between West Bank and ’48 Palestinians were transformative and that they would undermine the fragile system of control which had, for almost twenty years, relied on a policy of isolating and separating Palestinian communities inside the Jewish state.[8] In a third example, Nassar recounts the story of how the poet Samih al-Qasim was detained by the Israeli police in early 1969. After questioning the poet about contacts al-Qasim had made while taking a tour of the occupied territories, they detain him for weeks on charges of conspiracy. There, in Damun prison, al-Qasim meets prisoners who had been brought in from all over the occupied territories—from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. As Nassar puts it, “After years of writing about the need for Arab unity and lamenting the barriers that kept Palestinians in Israel from having contact with other Arabs, it was in prison… that they were finally carrying out a unique type of Arab unity.”[9]

Emile Habiby and the Six-Day Sextet

Arguably, the most important literary statement on these post-war reunions was Emile Habiby’s 1968 work, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (The Six-Day Sextet). There is little doubt that motif of imperfect, incomplete and troubling meetings were on Habiby’s mind at the time he wrote it. As Habiby put it many years later:

I wrote the Six-Day Sextet during the first year of the occupation. If they’d called it the Seven Days War, I would have written it as a septet instead. I wanted to flip the word on its back to see the other face of this war’s tragedy. A prisoner, separated from his family for twenty years, wakes up one day to loud noises in the prison courtyard. Suddenly, he finds his entire family gathered there with him. After all the rupture and isolation, how is he supposed to feel about such a reunion? Can we even call that a ‘reunion’?”[10]

The Sextet first appeared in the pages of al-Jadid, the legendary Arabic-language monthly of politics and culture established in 1953 as an organ of the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI).[11] Like other literary publications in Beirut and Cairo, al-Jadid translated poetry and essays from a wide range of languages, and engaged actively in questions of modernism, literary commitment, and cultural critique. Unlike those other journals, the circulation of al-Jadid was confined to one city and a handful of towns and villages in the Galilee and Triangle. It is difficult to exaggerate the accomplishments of this little journal, which at various times employed Hana Abu Hana, Tawfiq Zayyad, Emile Touma, Samih al-Qasim and Darwish as editors, and which formed, despite the perennial, double-edged embargo[12] of Palestinian literature inside Israel, one of the most vibrant journals of the entire Arab world until its demise in 1991.

            The Sextet appeared over the course of six issues of al-Jadid, between April and September of 1968.[13] Although the stories were published under the pen-name of Abu Salam, readers would have recognized the author immediately: over the years, Habiby had published many pieces in al-Jadid (and its sister newspaper, al-Ittihad), sometimes under his own name, sometimes anonymously, sometimes under various pen-names.[14] In any case, the light touch of his prose and its biting sense of humor were as good as any signature.

Each story in the work sketches a meeting that is troubled and incomplete. In most cases the reunions are between people—old friends, old loves, people who might have met earlier were it not for the Partition. But the encounters always also involve other things—places, things, stories, memories, songs, and poems.

In the first story, “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” a young boy inside Israel—from the only family without relatives in the village—meets his uncle and cousin for the first time. As joyful as the encounter is, tensions break out between the West Bank cousin and the other kids in the neighborhood. By story’s end, the protagonist grasps the precarity of their attachment and wonders what will happen when Israel withdraws from the West Bank. A question mark hangs over this reunion.

In the second story, “Akhiran, nawwara al-luz,” a friend from his town approaches the narrator for the first time in twenty years and asks him about another childhood friend of theirs. Thus the story of this other friend is recounted and how, in 1947, he had loved a girl from the West Bank and had promised to marry her the following year. When the Nakba occurs, the two lovers are separated, never to meet again. The narrator tells us how this man had gone on a quest to find out what happened to the lovers after all these years, and how, while visiting the West Bank after the June War, he had actually found the same girl now married but who’d nonetheless held onto the same almond blossoms that were a token of her engagement to the other young man, their mutual friend. The narrator’s old friend is desperate to remember the name of the young man in this love story, but the narrator is unable to help him. The man goes away, still trying to remember the identity of the protagonist of the story. At the end, the narrator reveals that the young man of the love story was this same confused man from his village, and that the protagonist he was trying to remember was himself. The man had indeed met his old love, but his repression was so total that he never recognized her. In the shadow of this lost memory, their meeting both happened and did not.

In another story, “Umm al-Rubabika,” we meet an old rag and bone seller. In her junk shop, property looted from Haifa homes in 1948 mingles with property looted from the Golan Heights in 1967. Another, “al-‘Awda,” tells the love story of activists from opposite sides of the Green Line who meet in a series of joint protests both inside Israel and in the West Bank, only to be separated again in Israeli prisons. The details of the various stories begin to accumulate and get tangled up in one another. Motifs repeat. Situations, characters and phrases repeat so often that it sometimes becomes difficult to remember which story we are in.

This confusion, it seems, is precisely the point. While each story is self-contained, they are also in conversation with one another through an aesthetics of repetition and doubling. While critics have tended to discuss the work as a collection of stories, this is mistaken: from the moment it first appeared in April 1968, The Sextet was published and named as single work, not as a collection of separate stories. Thus, in terms of literary form, The Sextet exists somewhere between story and novel. And in this regard it is crucial to remember that this work itself marks a turning point in the author’s career: before The Sextet, Habiby wrote only short stories; after, mostly longer experiments within the novel form.

In this light, we might consider how the final story of the Sextet, “al-Hubb fi-qalbi,” folds back onto other narratives. To frame this, it needs to be pointed out that Habiby begins each of the six stories with an epigram taken from a song—such as “Raji‘una” or “Zahrat al-mida’in”—sung by the Lebanese singer Fairouz. While the meaning of these lines is never made clear, they tie the stories together in a ligamental, lyrical way. Not accidently, they suggest something like radio broadcasts drifting across otherwise closed borders.

However, “al-Hubb fi-qalbi” breaks the pattern of the first five stories by quoting lines from a pre-Islamic poem which, we are told, “was never sung by Fairouz.” This last story then begins by reflecting on the fact that while Fairouz sings with warmth and feeling, her songs were composed by others. In the same way, Habiby’s unnamed narrator explains that the story we are reading was not written by him but by others. The figure holds: as a fiction writer—who is really a journalist—the narrator recounts narratives composed by others, just as a chanteuse sings songs written by others. This sense of collective, disparate authorship resonates, as we shall see, with the very form of Habiby’s text, which gathers together many narratives into a single account characterized by multivocality and resonance.

The narrator then mentions that on a recent visit to Leningrad he was taken by his hosts to see the national monument to the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, one of the most horrific episodes of the 20th century. Overwhelmed, the narrator and the others wander through the grounds, silent and sullen. In a small building next to the monument, they see the possessions and relics of victims of the siege, including a small diary of Tanya Savicheva, a young Russian girl of eleven or twelve at the time of the Siege.[15] The narrator quotes directly from the diary on display there: “Today grandmother died. This morning, my little brother didn’t wake up… Today they took away my mother. She was sleeping the whole time. She hasn’t come back” (80).

The narrator’s Russian hosts tell him that the diary was found in the rubble of the city, and the girl Tanya died soon after the siege was lifted. The narrator, devastated by the story promises his hosts, “I will write about what I have seen.” But after leaving them, he wonders whether he is up to the task: he is just a journalist whose usual material is quotidian, even banal.

The narrator’s block comes to an end when he happens upon the letters of a young woman from Jerusalem, now in Ramleh prison. The narrator decides to change the name of the author of the letters—not to Tanya, but to Fairouz, because that is a name which “moves us” (82). Fairouz, the girl who wrote these letters to her mother was one of three girls accused of plotting against the Israeli state. The story then goes on to quote the letters at length: in the first, the girl presents a wish list of items (magazine, hairbrushes, toothpaste, a watermelon, chicken) she wants her mother to send to them in the jail; in the second letter, the girl tells her mother, who appears to be a 1948 refugee from Haifa, about her cellmate, the girl from Haifa—and how much they have in common: how they both listen to Fairouz, Abdel Wahhab, and so on. Throughout the letters, the girl tells her mother not to worry (la taqlaqi, la khafi) so often, that we begin to see the real desperation behind her words. The narrator never presents the third letter, whose contents, he tells us, we have already encountered in false newspaper accounts of the trial of the Israeli policewoman who helped smuggle the letters out. The story—and the Sextet—end with the narrator reminding us that the reality here is of a friendship between characters “from a single people who have reunited, after a long separation, under a single roof, the roof of a prison cell” (92).

Every element in the final story resonates with situations, themes and characters from the other stories: here, as elsewhere, the tension between separation and reunion (or in the Arabic: al-qati‘a wa-l-liqa’) is only resolved the most fleeting ways; the doubling of a far-away story—Tanya’s story—with a local one repeats many such instances of narrative mixing in the Sextet, where small everyday stories of Palestinian life get tangled up in the plots of The Tale of Two Cities, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the folktale of “Jubaineh and the Blue Necklace.” The same is true of the prison narrative, which resonates with another prison narrative in the fourth story. There are other instances of repetition worth mentioning, such as Habiby’s sly habit of misquoting, in this particular case, taking the words “weapon in hand” from Abdel Wahhab’s 1967 song, “Hayy ‘ala falah” and making them into “love in the heart.”[16]

With such an untrustworthy quoter of well-known poems and songs, what are we to make of the narrator? Indeed, this is one of the most fascinating elements of the work itself. The narrator in the final story seems to be the same narrator who appears in the others, even though we can never be sure: in some stories, the narrator is from Nazareth, in others, from Haifa or a village somewhere in the Galilee. He could be a Palestinian everyman—observing and recording, always in the same wry tone. But there is also evidence to think of him as even more ambivalent, reluctant than that. This hesitation comes through in the last lines of the third story, when the old rag and bones dealer, Umm Rubabika, hands him a stack of letters, which are perhaps the same prison letters that appear in the sixth story?

The gift of these letters reminds the narrator of how his own grandmother used to tell stories about Hassan the Clever—only she told the stories out of order, without beginning, without a proper ending. Or as he puts it, amputated stories (qisas butra’). After leading us on about the letters, the narrator decides not to tell us what they contained: “let’s leave this story amputated, let’s finish writing it together” (49).

This ambiguous gesture—between silence and authorship, between beginning and end, between separation and reunion—seems especially fitting for thinking about how the June War appeared to Habiby (and perhaps others) in the months that followed. Its meanings were unclear, even if its implications were not. But as Habiby’s stories make exceeding clear: while fiction could raise questions, the answers would be have to be found outside the text.

 Notes

[1] On the literature of post-67 self-critique, see: Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24-75.

[2] Nizar Qabbani, Hawamish ‘ala daftar al-naksa (Beirut: n.p, 1969).

[3] Adonis, as qtd. in Ajami, 29.

[4] “Ma‘ al-sha‘ir Mahmud Darwish,” al-Jadid (1969: 3), 24. Translation mine.

[5] On shifting responses with the Palestinian literary field inside Israel, see essays by the Palestinian literary critic from Haifa, Emile Touma: “Madha ba‘d Haziran 1967?,” al-Jadid (1972: 6), 7-12, 43; “Ta’thir harb 1967 ‘ala al-adab al-filastini fi-Isra’il,” al-Jadid (1976: 1), 51-65.

[6] Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017),156.

[7] Nassar, Brothers Apart, 156.

[8] See Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of the Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

[9] Nassar, Brothers Apart, 176.

[10] Emile Habiby, Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta wa-qisas ukhra (Haifa: Arabesque Publishing House, 2006), 8-9. All subsequent quotations from the text are from this edition. All translations mine.

[11] On the history of the journal, see: Mahmud Ghanayim, Al-Jadid fi-nisf qarn: musarrid bibiliyughrafi (Kafr Qar‘: Dar al-Huda, 2004); and Maha Nassar, “The Marginal as Central: Al-Jadid and the Development of a Palestinian Public Sphere 1953-1970),” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3 (2010), 333-351. On literary culture in Palestinian society within Israel, see also: Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[12] See: Seraje Assi, “Memory, Myth and the Military Government: Emile Habibi’s Collective Autobiography,” Jerusalem Quarterly 52(Winter 2013), 87-97.

[13] Emile Habiby (Abu Salam): Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (1): “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” al-Jadid (1968: 4), 7-8, 35; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (2): “Akhiran, nawwara al-luz,” al-Jadid (1968: 5), 5-7, 38; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (3): “Umm al-Rubabika.” al-Jadid (1968: 6), 11-13; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (4): “al-‘Awda,” al-Jadid (1968: 7), 8-10; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (5): “al-Khurza li-zurqa’ aw ‘awda Jabina.” al-Jadid (1968: 8), 6-7; Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (6): “al-Hubb fi-qalbi.” al-Jadid (1968: 9), 11-15.

[14] Emile Habiby (Abu Salam), Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta (1): “Hayna sa‘ada Mas‘ud bi-bn ‘ammuh,” al-Jadid (1968: 4), 7-8, 35. Subsequently, the Sextet was republished many more times: once, at the end of 1968, in the pages of the Lebanese journal, al-Tariq; in 1969 the Cairene publisher, Dar al-Hilal, brought out a mass market paperback. Other early editions include: Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta: riwaya min al-ard al-muhtalla (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1969); Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta wa-qisas ukhra (Haifa: Matba‘at al-Ittihad al-Ta‘awuniyya, 1970); Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta; al-Waqa’i‘ al-ghariba fi-khtifa’ Sa‘id Abi al-Nahs al-Mutasha’il wa-qisas ukhra (Beirut: Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, Da’irat al-I‘lam wa-l-Thaqafa, 1980). Most recently, it was republished in 2006, as part of the definitive edition of Habiby’s collected works, edited by Siham Daoud and published by Dar Arabesque in Haifa. During the 1970s, parts of the work were produced in Cairo as a radio play, and Habiby himself adapted one of the most famous stories, Umm Rubabika, as a play by the same name.

[15] For information on Savicheva, see: Patricia Heberer, Children During the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 52-54.

[16] “As long as I have my hope, my hope, and in my hands my weapon,” (Tul-i ma amali ma‘yya ma‘yya wa fi-idayya silah…). Credit to Fuad Saleh for this observation.

Zein al-Abdin Fuad: “Song for ‘Abd al-Hakam al-Garrahi”

Zayn al-‘Ābdīn Fu’ād is one of the leading poets of the generation of 1968 and the protest movements of the 1970s. The poem invokes the memory of Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hakam al-Gerrahi (1915-35), and was composed in the immediate wake of the 1967 Arab defeat (al-Naksa) at the hands of Israel.

Gerrahi was a student at King Fuad University, a poet and translator of Baudelaire. Students like Gerrahi were leaders within during the 1935 mass protests against British rule. In a confrontation that took place on November 15, activists attempted to cross the Nile to reach Abdin Palace. They were met by armed police at Abbas Bridge. When one flag-bearing student was shot down, Gerrahi picked up the flag and continued, leading the procession toward the ranks of police. Gerrahi was shot 13 times, but continued onward. Doctors managed to remove eight bullets from his body. He remained in hospital for five days before succumbing to his injuries. He was given a state burial which was attended by government ministers and university deans. His name is prominent on two official monuments, one at Cairo University, and a second at the Opera House.

In the decades that followed, students at Cairo University formed groups to honor Gerrahi’s name. One such group went on to lead the student protests of the 1970s. At the outset of the student occupation of Cairo University in January 1972, the poet Zein al-Abdin Fuad recited his poem to a packed audience. His electric performance helped set the defiant tone of that student occupation.

Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hakam al-Gerrahi (1915-35)

Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hakam al-Gerrahi (1915-35)

“Song for ‘Abd al-Ḥakam al-Garrāḥī”

Zayn al-‘Ābidīn Fu’ād

(20 June 1967)

1)

I’m writing to you

To erase the trembling and shame of fear from my heart

To wash from my feet the indignity of standing motionless

I write to you

To escape the death inside me

With mine, your hands lift the banner

You wipe your hands off on my roots, make me bring forth green leaves

You clean your hands off on my heart and drown me in seas of blood.

I write to you

Come out, come out from death’s shell

Come out from the black tower of forgetfulness

Shout at the top of your lungs

Let the whips tear me to shreds

They have stomped on my face with their boots

But I didn’t call out.

They stood in your face

And you responded in kind

They raised their rifles at your chest

You crossed the bridge, you reached forward

They fired. Your wounds tore open, your wounds wrote.

While I sit here in this dark room, writing back to you

In order to flee from everything, even myself.

2.)

You weren’t the first

Nor the last

My dear—you’re a small bead on a long string of martyrs

I write to you, and I feel my wounds reopen

Here in this room

Rather than on the bridge, in the sunlight

(Rather than amid bullets of officers and soldiers)

I am in this room

Struggling to breathe, running, spilling out

Raise your flag

I can no longer hold this pen

Raise your flag

You were not the first

Nor the last

To raise my flag.

أغنية إلى عبد الحكم الجراحي

زين العابدين فؤاد

(٢٠ يونيو ١٩٦٧)

١ 

باكتب لك

لجل لامسح عن قلبي عار الخوف والرجفة

أمسح عن رجلي ذُل الوقفة

باكتب لك

لأجل أهرب م الموت جوايا

ترفع إيدك ويايا، بالرايه

تمسح إيدك على جدري، وتورَّقني

تمسح إيدك على قلبي، في بحور الدم تغرّقني

باكتب لك

إطلع، إطلع، من جلد الموت

من برج النسيان الأسود، إزعق بالصوت

يطلع كرابيج بتمزقني.

داسوا بجزمهم على وشّي

ولاصرّختش

وقفوا في وشك

رديت

رفعوا بنادقهم على صدرك

عدّيت، مدّيت

ضربوا، مزّقت جروحك وكتبت

وأنا في الأوده الضلمه باكتب لك

علشان أهرب حتى من نفسي

  

٢ 

ما انتش أول واحد 

ولا آخر واحد 
يا حبيبى يا حباية عنقود شُهدا 
باكتب لك وباحس بروحى بتتاخد 
وانا فى الأودة 
مش تحت الشمس على الكوبرى 
(مش وسط رصاص الظابط والعسكر) 
أنا فى الأودة 

بانهج باجرى ..
إرفعْ علمك
أنا مش قادر أمسك قلمى 
مانتش أول واحد 
ولا آخر واحد 
يرفع علمى