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)

“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

Zein al-Abdin Fuad: “Could Anyone Ever Hold Egypt in a Cell?”

Zayn al-‘Ābdīn Fu’ād is one of the leading movement poets of his generation. This is of his best-known poems, in no small part because Sheikh Imam turned it into a rousing song. In recent, the band Eskendrella has taken up the song. Fu’ād belongs to the ‘68 generation of radical students, and worked closely with the student movement of the 1970s. During his imprisonment in 1973, Fu’ād wrote a number of short colloquial Egyptian Arabic poems, which can be found in his diwān, al-Ḥulm fi-l-sijn.

“Could Anyone Ever Hold Egypt in a Cell?”

Zayn al-‘Ābidīn Fu’ād

(20 January 1973)

The lovers come together in the Citadel prison

They gather together in Bab al-Khalq jail

The sun is a little song rising from the cells

Egypt, a song streaming from throats

The lovers reunite in their cell

No matter how long they’re imprisoned, no

matter their oppression

No matter how wicked the jailers,

Could anyone ever hold Egypt in a cell?

They meet, their passion fire in the blood

A fire that scorches hunger, tears and distress

A fire that catches with each new arrival

When hands set to work, flesh joins flesh.

While flesh lies scattered in the sands of Sinai.

While falsehoods bind our hands

The enemy’s foot sinks into the flesh of my land,

While the lies post informants at my door.

The informants come out like rabid dogs

Herding the lovers into jail.

No matter how long they’re in prison, no matter their oppression

No matter how shameless their jailers,

Could anyone ever hold Egypt in a cell?

Egypt is the day the sets us free in the public squares

Egypt is weeping, Egypt is song and stone

Egypt is bright stars appearing from prison cells

Rising and planting gardens in our veins.

Egypt is orchards, but who will pluck their fruit?

Egypt is gardens that belong to those that raise its

sword!

No matter how long they’re in prison, no matter their oppression

No matter how immoral their jailors,

Could anyone ever hold Egypt in a cell?

مين اللي يِقْدَر سَاعَه يِحْبس مصر؟

للشاعر زين العابدين فؤاد

(١٩٧٣)

يتجمعوا العُشّاق في سجن القلعه

يتجمعوا العُشّاق في باب الخلق

والشمس غنوه من الزَّنازن طالعه

ومصر غنوه مِفرَّعه م الحلق

يتجمعوا العشّاق بالزَّنْزانه

مهما يطول السجن مهما القهر

مهما يزيد الفُجر بالسَّجَّانه

مين اللي يِقْدَر ساعه يحبس مصر؟

يتجمعوا والعِشْق نار في الدم

نار تِحْرَق الجُوع والدموع والهَم

نار تِشْتِعل لما القَدَم تِنْضَم

لما الأيادي تفُور، تِلم اللحم

واللحم مِتْنَطْوَر في رملة سينا

والكِدب بِيِحْجِز على أيادينا

قَدَم العَدو غارسه في لَحْم ترابي

والكِدب عَشِّش مُخْبِرين على بابي

والمخبرين خارجين كلاب سَعْرَانه

بِيجَمَعُوا العُشَّاق في الزنزانه

مهما يطول السجن مهما القهر

مهما يزيد الفُجر بالسَّجَّانه

مين اللي يِقْدَر ساعه يحبس مصر؟

مصر النهار يِطلقنا في الميادين

مصر البُكا مصر الغُنا والطين

مصر الشمُوس الهالّه م الزنازين

هالّه و طارحه في دمِّنا بسا تين

مصر الجناين طارحه مين يِقطُفْها؟

مصر الجناين للي يِرفَع سيفْها

مهما يطول السجن، مهما القهر

مهما يزيد الفجر بالسجانه

مين اللي يقدر ساعة يحبس مصر؟

Rashid Hussein: "Prison Hospitality"

Prison Hospitality

Rashid Hussein (1936-1977) was a Palestinian poet from Musmus, a village outside Umm al-Fahm. Like his contemporaries Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, Hussein was a ’48 Palestinian (that is, a second-class Palestinian citizen of Israel). Educated in Hebrew and Arabic, Hussein wrote and translated volumes of poetry. He was also a prolific journalist, writing in the Arabic-language periodicals of the Left Zionist Mapam party. This essay comes from the collection of Hussein’s newspaper columns, Kalam mawzun (Haifa: Maktabat Kull shay’).

(March 3, 1960)

1.

My father had gone to pray. My three-year-old sisters didn’t understand what was happening—she cried her eyes out. For my part, I sat in a car between two detectives when another car full of policemen pulled up behind us. Behind this, there is a story that might provoke a smile at one moment, and bitter silence at another. 

            The sun had not yet set. I’d been sitting in my room with two friends and my father. Suddenly, there was a banging on the door. No sooner had I opened it than I found myself greeting five policemen led by an officer. The officer wielded his pistol casually as if he expected to find an armed gang in my room. Without wasting a second he said, “Sit here with your father.” Then he demanded that my friends leave the room. 

            He had orders from the magistrate court in Khudayra to search my house. I didn’t resist. “Go ahead and search, please,” I told him.

            He asked, “Do you have in your possession any published materials from Arab countries?”

            “Yes.” I produced six issues of al-Ahram from my briefcase, one issue of al-Hayat, and two of al-Sayyad magazine.[1] Then I handed him a bundle of recently published books. 

           That didn’t satisfy him, and he ordered his men to search. Within moments, hundreds of books, magazines and booklets were heaped about the middle of the room. Then the four drawers of my wardrobe were emptied and every piece of clothing thrown out.  The eyes of one policeman flashed when he stumbled across a bundle of letters. His officer asked about the name of someone they imagined I corresponded with. But he didn’t find the signature of that person on any of the letters, so he threw them back in their place. The flash of victory had disappeared from his eyes. 

2.

The officer said, “The light’s too weak here. Can’t you get me a brighter light?”

            “Sorry. We still haven’t gotten electricity here yet.”

            He said nothing, then went back to getting his men to hurry up with the search. Eventually he went to a pile of magazines and books, going through them himself. Each time he grabbed one, he asked, “Where was this published?”

            “In Israel.”

            Then he’d turn to one of his men who read Arabic and ask, “Is this true?” He went on and on asking, getting the same answer from me, then turning to ask the man if what I’d said was true or not. I felt a wave of anger pour over me and said, “Listen, sir. You keep asking me, and I keep answering you truthfully. Either believe me when I answer, or don’t bother asking.” 

            He looked me over severely and said, “Fine.” He stopped asking his men about whether what I said was true. 

            The officer left the room, accompanied by the driver. The policemen continued on with their work. While I sat next to my father, calmly smoking. 

            It didn’t bother me that the police were doing their assigned jobs. What did bother me was that they put all the Arabic books published in Arab countries to one side. I protested, since these books had been published many years before the establishment of the state of Israel. But they were always searching for one word in particular: Egypt. Whenever they found it, the book was confiscated. 

            They seized The Epistles of al-Jahiz, The Journal of Juridical Rulings, and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution… and many other books. All of these were born long before I! Their one sin was that they’d been published in Egypt. 

            The search lasted three solid hours. 

            The officer returned. I served coffee, and all the policemen drank some. He refused with the excuse that he does not drink or eat in any house he searches. I heard my father tell him, while speaking about me, “Is he a criminal that you can’t drink coffee in his house?”

            Once again, he tried to find an excuse. I saw the sergeant biting his lips, trying to explain to him that to refuse coffee is an insult to the master of the home. When I brought out coffee the second time, he drank it without saying a word. 

3.

I left the room. The policemen went to the second room. I dreaded to see the courtyard of our house, filled with relatives and friends. I understood from them that when the officer went out with the driver, they took the car to the top of the hill in order to use their walkie-talkies. This was enough to spark suspicions and turn the matter into a big deal. 

            They found nothing in the second room. We went back to the first room and were surprised to find another car suddenly pull up. Two plainclothes detectives got out, along with the chief inspector of the Khudayra prefecture.

            There were now nine policemen. The number frightened the bystanders in the courtyard. People thought my end had drawn near, or that I drew near the end! 

            The chief spoke, directing his words to the sergeant, “Do they read al-Ahram in your jurisdiction?” 

            I answered, “They read with legal permission.”

            He looked at me without saying anything. I noticed that the two detectives had brought a large flashlight and had begun to look over the confiscated books. 

4.

The investigation began, “Do you know so and so?”

            “Yes.”

            “Did you give him a book on Sa‘d Zaghloul?”[2]

            “No.”

            “Did you give him a copy of Ruz al-Yusuf?”

            “No.”

            “Where did you come to possess these recently published magazines and books?”

“From the Arab Book Society.[3] It receives them from abroad by post, all through a legal license.”

            Suddenly he studied the policeman who was taking notes. Pointing at the magazine with the profile on Sa‘d Zaghloul, he asked, “How is it that you claim ignorance about Sa‘d Zaghloul?”

            “I don’t know anything about your book entitled Sa‘d Zaghloul. As for knowing something about the man, it goes without saying: everyone who lives in this part of the world knows something about him, probably even you.”

            He was silent and didn’t respond, and the investigation was over. Almost four hours had gone by since they first arrived. The chief turned toward me and said, “Come with us, please.”

            I watched the policemen go up to shake my father’s hand as if they were apologizing. I watched as my father went out to perform his evening prayers. I watched my sister in the courtyard, bawling as much as her three years would allow. 

            I left with the policemen.

5.

I had no prior conception about the detention jail. I imagined at least that I’d find a dilapidated bunk. I found nothing but a filthy blanket thrown on the floor of a filthy cell. The walls may have been clean, but the floor was rank and stank of a rotten smell. 

            Before I entered my cell, the policeman told me, “There’s no toilet in there, so if you want to go to the bathroom, go now.”

            I thanked him and went in. As soon as he shut the door, I thought I would suffocate. My body shivered from the rotten smell. One a few minutes passed before I banged on the door. 

            The policeman came and asked, “What do you want?”

            “You told me there was no toilet inside the cell. But I would like to inform you that, in reality, there’s no cell inside this big toilet. 

            I thought he’d be angry, but instead he smiled. He only said, “No matter. Don’t pay any attention to it!”

            “Allow me to sit in the hall until morning, if it’s any better there.”

            He said, “It’s forbidden,” and closed the door again. 

6.

During my short visit to the holding jail, I learned many things. I learned how to wait patiently, sitting for hours without smoking. (And me, who smokes forty cigarettes a day!) They’d bought me cigarettes, but took away my box of matches, saying they’d light my cigarettes whenever I wanted. But whenever I asked, they refused, saying, “We don’t have any instructions that say you can smoke.” As if smoking were also a danger to state security!

            I learned something else—that it’s forbidden to detain watches, neckties and pens along with the prisoner. 

            When I told the policeman, “Don’t worry—I won’t kill myself,” he said, “I don’t get what goes on inside your head.”

            I also learned how to kill time on the road to morning by reading a single newspaper over and over. 

            I sat on the filthy blanket, leaning my back against the wall, trying to doze, all the while expecting the bedbugs and fleas to launch a surprise attack. 

            I began to think, not about prison, but about what I would write since, along with 50 other “documents,” they’d seized two articles I was preparing to publish in al-Mirsad. As compensation, they’d brought me here, to a place where inspiration descends upon the imprisoned writer at least one hundred times a day! 

            The two bright lights that illuminated the cell were left on throughout the night. It seems that their lights ruined the fleas’ plan of attack, since they didn’t launch one. 

            In the locked door, I saw my mother and father and my sister, crying her three-year-old eyes out. Then two sad eyes appeared, asking me, “Why did you go? Didn’t I tell you this would happen?”

            The hours went by, one after the other. The two eyes sat up with me until the sun came up. 

7.

The sun’s rays crept through the window at the top of the wall. I knocked on the door in the hopes that the policeman might light a cigarette for me. But he refused, saying that he didn’t have any matches on him. A Yemeni man was passing by us just then and heard our conversation and stopped to light my cigarette. The policeman told him sternly, “Get out of here!” 

            He shut the door again. I knocked on it again, demanding to see the chief inspector. I was told that he hadn’t arrived yet. Then I asked for a light and was told, “It’s against the rules.”

            I banged on the door more and they told me the same thing. I kept banging and they kept telling me. Finally, my patience ran out and I kicked on the door with force. Suddenly, three men appeared led by the station officer. He began to scream at me while I calmly asked him to inform me why they’d detained me and why they refused to allow me to smoke. He told me that he also didn’t know. 

            After a few minutes, they brought me a piece of bread, a cup of tea, and some food prepared to make your whole body gag. Though I was hungry, I spared the bread, the food and the tea, or perhaps I spared my stomach when I refused entry to this food! Who knows? Perhaps this same serving awaits the next guest?

8.

Around 10 AM, the door opened. One of the interrogators took me to the chief inspector’s office. On the way, he lit a cigarette for me. As soon as I entered the room, I registered my complaint about how well I’d been treated. I insisted that I did not deserve such humane treatment nor all the politeness. The inspector and interrogator showed their surprise that I had not been allowed to smoke. They promised to rescind that rule. I understood, from “rescind that rule” that I would be returned to that cell, but I didn’t care, as long as I was permitted to read and smoke.

            Before he began the interrogation, the chief inspector watched me smoke and asked if I’d eaten. I replied in the negative, and explained my reasons for sparing the food. He asked, “Would you drink a cup of coffee with me?”

            I gratefully accepted the invitation. The interrogation began to resemble the previous one. I was asked to say the name of the person from whom I’d purchased or acquired this or that book that had been seized. My apologies go out to those friends from whom I’d borrowed books and whose names I mentioned!

            There were new questions: for which newspapers have I written? For which paper did I write for nowadays? Did a receive a salary from the Ministry of Education?[4] How much did I earn per article? I answered every question. I could have refused, though there would have been no point in rendering secret what was not.

            I hereby swear that the chief inspector and his assistant were polite toward me, as were the policemen who brought me back home. But I cannot say the same for any of those from whom I asked for a light or to meet the inspector. 

            Eventually, I was released. When I reached the souk in Khudayra, I bought a bouquet of lilies and got a shave. 

            I was fortunate to have stayed one night as a guest at the detention prison. I can still recall the disgusting odor, the filthy blanket, the food that makes you cringe. I say all this to communicate to the authorities at the prison that this state of affairs does not encourage guests to return for other visits unless, like me, they were searching for something to write about that might entertain readers. 

            But Sirs: not all people are writers or journalists. Most of them are human beings, plain and simple. It’s my wish that at least the health of the guests and tenants would be cared for. For by these guests, you earn your wages. Despite everything they are the source of your livelihood, so take care of that source, and God will take care of you. 

            Finally, thanks are in order. Thanks go out to all those who gave me this opportunity. Thanks to them, I learned things I had not known before. Thanks to them for giving me the material for this piece!

————

[1]           In the wake of the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian daily al-Ahram became the semi-official mouthpiece of the Nasserist state. al-Hayat is a Lebanese daily, and al-Sayyad, a Lebanese political weekly. Ruz al-Yusuf, mentioned below, is a popular political, social and cultural weekly published in Cairo.

[2]           Egyptian jurist, politician and hero of Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. As leader of the Wafd party, Zaghloul dominated Parliament from 1923 until his death in 1927.

[3]           Founded by Mapam to provide Arabic-language books to Palestinian citizens of Israel. See Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, 127. 

[4]           Hussein wrote for the two Arabic-language organs of the Mapam Party, the monthly literary and political journal al-Fajr, and the weekly al-Mirsad. He also published, under pseudonyms (such as Abu Iyas) in the Communist Party publications, such as the literary magazine al-Jadid (edited by Samih al-Qasim) and the newspaper, al-Ittihad. His first job was as teacher in the Arab school of a neighboring village.

Rashid Hussein: 5 Poems

Rashid Hussein (1936-1977) was a Palestinian poet from Musmus, a village outside Umm al-Fahm. Like his contemporaries Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, Hussein was a ’48 Palestinian (that is, a second-class citizen of Israel). Educated in Hebrew and Arabic, Hussein wrote and translated volumes of poetry, including these poems, taken from his Collected Poems (al-A‘mal al-shi‘riyya; Haifa: Maktabat Kull Shay’, 2004).

Unlike most of his peers, Hussein wrote regularly in the Arabic-language periodicals of the leftist Histadrut labor union and Mapam party. Liberal Israeli literary critics praised Hussein for translating their national poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik. If any figure ever exemplified the possibility of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence during the 1950s, it was Hussein.

Yet, Hussein was an angry poet and his ire was righteous. In his columns and verse, Hussein was unrelenting in his criticism of the violence and corruption of neighboring Arab regimes as well as Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. As Hussein’s political activism grew, however, the contradictions of working as a Palestinian within Zionist organizations intensified until he was finally expelled from Mapam. Prevented from finding employment as a schoolteacher, he left Israel in 1965. Subsequently, he worked as a Hebrew-Arabic translator for the PLO and Syrian broadcasting. He died tragically in an apartment fire in New York City in February 1977.

Refugees

The stars in the night shine like refugee camps

Like some dismal humanitarian organization, the miserable moon heaves off

A load of cheddar cheese, or flour.

This is what the moon has donated to my sad people.

On Poetry

Sing what you like, but…

Let everybody understand.

You have become ink and words.

So why do you talk?

Poet, produce!

But let the worker and the peasant understand.

Let the murdered understand.

And let the fighter understand.

Refugee God

God has become a refugee, Sir

So:

Seize the prayer rugs from the mosque

Sell the church, which now belongs to someone else.

Sell the muezzin on the black market

Light the wicks of stars so they

Might light the way for wanderers

Even the father of our orphans can’t be found

Take them all away as well, sir!

Don’t apologize—who ever said you’re an oppressor?

Don’t get upset—who ever said you’re an aggressor?

You are a liberator! You freed the grazing livestock in the morning when

You gave Muhammad’s field to Abraham.

The horses on the hilltops run free—

Perhaps you, most civilized master, should go near them so that they too can become your property?

The land extends her greetings to you and its wheat,

Thanks gathered in a field of gold!

Did you not liberate her neck from the plower

While the bull takes his rest at the manger?

For you are justice itself, and every tyrant craves that the

Morning of your justice comes with no tomorrow.

You, who murdered Spring and killed my threshing floor:

You are an anger that destroys all, an unextinguished revolution.

Your hands sowed landmines throughout my gardens,

And exploded the rosy season of my almond orchards.

You banished men from their homes so that it might be said, “Most honorable ruler!”

You imprisoned men so that it might be said, “Most just master!”

You fashioned “delegates” so we might obey them,

They are but slaves who weep for other slaves

You wanted me a slave so that I might be bought and sold

You wanted me desperate, so that I might live without diversion

You call out: “You are nothing but the scraps of a nation

Living scattered among caves. Stay put there!”

But you forget that untended coals

Are enough to start a fire… Enough tolight a path for others to follow!

Don’t get upset, these are words with no mouth to speak them,

Don’t be alarmed, these are words with no hand to throw them,

And where did this land come? Why does its soil burn with fire?

How, Sir, do you stand the flame of its furnace?

And where did this wheat come from? How did you steal it…

This grain made from our congealed tears?

When I squeeze your bread in my fists

It is my own blood that flows!

Revolt against Travel (Revolution on the Fly)

Nothing remains of the revolutions, of my most beautiful old dreams

But the traces of a banquet

And the stars on the epaulets of those who profess to dissect defeat.

Nothing remains save an army of articles pregnant

With bank accounts

And explanations excusing crime.

Nothing remains but a chanteuse who

Laments Haifa and Jaffa

While the bank squeezes dinars from ancient Jerusalem.

Nothing remains but for the revolution to begin its alphabet

Nothing remains but for crime to be murdered.

Revolution is born in eyes that have no homeland

Revolution is born as a landless peasant,

As a landowning cop,

A land where all has been imprisoned.

Revolution is born when the illiterate, the writer and the blind know the truth.

Then the letter comes to have no value,

And sincerity loses its worth.

For this reason, Comrades,

I am tired of being stupified by the narcotic speeches of the Arab slave rulers,

And tired of Our Lord who resides in His seven-storied Heaven

But left us nothing but His prohibition of pork

And His tolerance of gold.

I am sick of Our Lord whom my grandfather turned into a merchant of paradises and virgins,

And Who, to burn me, will spend His life gathering wood.

For this reason, Arabs,

Patience has become tiresome,

They have angered me, enraged me, they have infuriated…

Revolution craves moments of rage…

Then what?

A child gave birth to me in the market,

In front of all the high priests,

Then they dragged her to the souk where she remains, a humiliated girl.

Because of this, whenever I write poetry, I am torn apart

As the blood of my mother’s womb pours down my face

At that moment, my poetry goes mad seeking

The faces of traitors.

For this reason, I will spend my life as a peasant

And a poet

Wherever I walk, you will see

The birth of a revolutionary.

Without a Passport

With no passport

I was born

I grew up

And watched my country become prisons.

Without a passport

I raised an entire country in a house, in a line of verse

And a sun

And wheat

And grew within each a tree.

I learned to write poetry

To give joy to the people of my village

Without a passport.

I learned that he whose land has been stolen loves not the rain.

And that if he were to return,

He’d come without a passport.

But I have grown tired of minds that have become hotels

For wishes that give never give birth

Except with a passport.

Without a passport

I’ve come to you

I’ve revolted against you

Stand up, and slaughter me!

So that I might feel what it is like to die without a passport.

Saturday Morning, Kalorama Park

It was 1130 or so

We were sipping $6 lattes outside a cafe on Columbia

And staring at an embroidered RBG bag in a shop window

When a man appeared on a fifth floor balcony

Shouting, “It’s over!” and “They called it!”

We smiled beneath our masks and laughed

All of us, because in an instant we were community

And we all felt it

The dead orange weight evaporating.

As the cars started honking

The pots and pans clacking, clanging

And suddenly, women floated across the grass with flutes of champagne

There were billows of joy,

You could see it,

Like the steam on our $6 lattes

And all the smiles, behind the masks, and laughter,

All of us on the street, and from apartment windows,

Nah nah nah nah, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.

And: No time for losing cause we are the champions!

And the texts, from LA and Cairo, congratulations, mabruk, yay!

That turned into singing, hundreds, thousands of gleeful voices

And drums, and go-go, and dancing

You could hear it from miles,

All of us

And later, back at home, washing the dishes,

Scrubbing at the burnt bits of butternut squash and garlic

Scrubbing the stove, wiping down the granite counters,

I scrubbed so hard I could finally see

Beneath all the singing and dancing and honking

I went on scrubbing, until in the gleaming stone

I could see the reflection

Of another America, unconvinced, uncelebratory

And unmoved, still there

Still talking about fraud and stolen votes

And Clinton and Epstein’s child slaves

Cowering in the basement of the neighborhood pizza parlor

That has no basement.

Tuesday's Protests in D.C.

Arriving

It’s Tuesday afternoon and National Guard units occupy every intersection in downtown Washington, DC. I ride my bicycle up to a Humvee and ask some of the soldiers where they’re from. They look at me and then at each other. One of them finally speaks up, “South Carolina.” They wear surgical masks and latex gloves and stand apart from one another, signs that they are operating under a protocol for the coronavirus. They look at me askance, like they’re anxious for me to go away. Then I understand they’re not looking at me at all. They’ve only just arrived in the city and they’re trying to take it in. For some of them, this is their first visit to the imperial capital.

I’m heading toward Lafayette Park. It has been the epicenter of protest here because it abuts the White House. It is also where some of the most riotous police are quartered.

As I approach, I see ranks of police from various federal agencies: the Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs and Border Protection, the US Park Police, the Secret Service, and others that hide their identity. Other groups carry plexiglass riot shields that simply say, “Military Police.” Clusters of Homeland Security agents swagger in front of an upscale hotel. A couple wear kuffiyyehs around their necks, nostalgically recreating their days as adventurers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most look at us through the mirrored Oakley glasses favored by soldiers.

I will see thousands of policemen that day. They have all been imported from somewhere else. Our local policemen—DC’s Metropolitan Police Department—have distanced themselves from this action. Some cops in fancy body armor lounge on the grass, like cosplayers at a Marvel comics convention. Others stand shoulder to shoulder in tight battle formations under the hot afternoon sun.

Unlike the soldiers in the street, and unlike the thousands of protesters who are converging on the place, the policemen do not wear face masks. Not one. It’s almost as they had been given an order by commanders who believe that masks are for weaklings. It reminds me of what happened here yesterday, when Trump’s office ordered these same federal police to attack the crowd with tear gas and billy clubs. It was the mildly-named Park Police who viciously cleared the street so that Trump could march over to a local church and stand briefly, upside-down Bible in hand, for a photo opportunity. The point of that exercise was to demonstrate “dominance” over protesters, as Trump put it on a phone call with governors earlier in the day. Gassing peaceful citizens is one way to show dominance. Not wearing a mask is another. The unmasked police appear to be on board every step of the way.

Demonstrating means to show.

It is the middle of a work day but already more than a thousand people have gathered along H Street, which runs parallel to the park. The crowd is Black and White and Brown. It is young and old. It is poor and it is middle class. In a deeply segregated city like this one, this is the most integrated place you can find. Besides the numbers, what you notice is the voices. They are loud and angry, but also full of life and joy. They’ve been singing for a long time already, but they are not tired of it. I lock up my bicycle, find my friends, and join in. We all do:

No Justice, No Peace

No Racist Police

It goes on for a minute, then a young man with a bullhorn calls out:

Show me what democracy looks like!

And we answer:

This is what democracy looks like!

This chant eventually dwindles, at which point the man with the bullhorn pivots:

Say his name!

And we answer:

George Floyd!

He shouts:

Say her name!

And we answer:

Breonna Taylor!

There is power in calling out the names of one’s murdered brothers and sisters. This ritual is one of the most original innovations that organizers from Black Lives Matter have given to American protest culture. It adds a funereal air to the event, and reminds us of the brutal fact that what brings us together is the loss of life.

We declaim the names of victims for minutes on end, but it doesn’t get old. For many of us, this is how the names come to be part of our active consciousness. We say their names and picture them, not as death statistics, but as individuals who lived and were loved. We shout their names and sing them—angry about what has been taken away from us, but also joyfully insistent that their lives are remembered. There is magic in the ritual: to affirm that a life matters even after it has been taken is also an affirmation about our own lives. If we believe Black lives matter, then we can say all lives matter.

Finally, the man with the bull horn calls out, I can’t breathe! We fall in beside him and shout those words over and over, remembering not only that George Floyd said these words as he was being killed, but so did Eric Garner, when he was choked to death by New York Policemen in July 2014. And then, the man calls out again: Say his name!

Saying their names is an occasion to acknowledge what we have lost and to mourn that loss. It is an occasion to reaffirm our love of life as well as an occasion to focus our anger on the system that makes Black life in this country so precarious and expendable. The names are a salve and a weapon. It feels right to say them over and over again. If they remain remembered, maybe we will too.

And then, everyone takes a knee. Heads down, eyes on the ground, we sit in mournful silence for a minute. Then another. The only sounds are helicopters chopping the air in the distance and a far off siren. The silence goes on for a couple more minutes, everyone lost in their own meditative state. The silence is as powerful as any slogan I’ve ever heard, and the imagination fills the void with more words than could ever be said.

Suddenly, we’re putting our hands in the air and chanting again, Hands up, Don’t Shoot! And now we’re walking, east on H Street, then north on 14th Street. By now, our ranks have swelled into the thousands. Everyone is wearing a mask. Everyone is doing their best to maintain a foot or more distance from their neighbors. Lots of people are carrying signs. Most contain direct messages:

Justice for Floyd

Black Lives Matter.

Defund the police.

Abolish the Police.

Silence is Violence.

Some are playful:

Roses are red / Doritos are savory / The US prison system / Is organized slavery.

Many are blunt, but no less effective:

ACAB

Fuck 12

Organizers walk through the crowd, handing out bottles of water, snack bars, and hand sanitizer. People are wearing shirts with logos, faces and names: BLM, Palestine, Tupac, Standing Rock. The leaders of the action are way off in the front, leading songs with their bullhorns. But in the back, groups are launching their own songs. There’s news that the Minnesota Attorney General has finally placed charges against Floyd’s murderer. No word about the other three policemen who abetted the crime. Behind us, a group of boisterous teenage Black girls starts up:

Three more to go!

And some of them answer:

Convict all four!

After a few minutes, there’s hundreds of us singing the new chant. We turn west on U Street, and eventually south on 16th Street.

Every so often, we pause to take a knee. We hold that position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the amount of time Officer Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck. Sitting there, in silence, we begin to appreciate that amount of time. How much intention it takes to hold it for that long. As we do this, the whole city turns silent with us, as if this march had its fingers on the city’s volume control. An hour and a half later, we’re back where we started at Lafayette Park. Just before the 7PM curfew, older people like me and my friends begin to leave. We say goodbye and plan to meet again in the same spot. Hundreds, mostly teens, will stay for the more violent confrontations that start after sunset. When I leave, the kids are still going strong: painting signs and smoking joints, singing and talking, laughing and dancing. One girl flashes a peace sign at me.

“Stay safe,” I tell her.

“I am safe,” she answers.

Leaving

I am happy to find my bicycle still in one piece. I unlock it and ride home. I’m on my guard—I always am. Leaving a demonstration can be dangerous. It can mean parting from your friends, which makes you more vulnerable. Sometimes, it means crossing through police lines. For Black men and women, this is the most dangerous moment of the day, and when police often launch savage attacks against isolated individuals.

But it’s not just the cops you need to worry about. In 1992, during the so-called Rodney King Riots, two of my ribs were broken while I was on my way home from a protest that had started out peaceful. It hurt and I have never forgotten the experience.

At the backside of the White House, at the place they call the Ellipse, I pass hundreds of policemen in full riot gear. More are massing in the shade of trees along the north side of the National Mall. When I stop to ask a group where they’re from, they stare at me but say nothing, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. In the reflection of their mirrored wrap-around glasses, I look like a stick figure. For some of them, this place may as well be Anbar or Helmand.

Leaving a demonstration also means looking at things again from another view. From the outside, protests appear to many like odd, pointless ceremonies. Odd, like when you can see people dancing, but cannot hear the music that makes them dance. And they are exactly as pointless as dancing, which is to say — exactly as meaningful and important. But if you don’t like dance, you won’t understand.

I think of all this and am struck by how much conceptual work we were doing in that protest, and how much we’d accomplished. We were restating long-standing demands: end police violence, end White supremacy, end Anti-Blackness. We were articulating brand-new ones—defund the police, put crooked and violent cops on trial, end Trump’s misrule now. These demands go from the local to the global and back again. We were creating a narrative that, until now, has not yet been co-opted or tamed by the many forces of the neoliberal status quo. The media still hasn’t enveloped the events with prefab story. Nor has the Democratic Party leadership. Local officials are still reeling, and waking up to the fact that they’d better start running harder if they want to catch up. There is a movement. At present, it is unled and inchoate, but it is moving and there is so much talent and anger and life here that it won’t disappear today.

So the demonstration was good for crystalizing things. The bulk of our work on Tuesday was connective in nature. In remembering the names of victims, we were connecting far-off moments and places—Ferguson, Minneapolis, North Dakota, Palestine—and people we might not know personally—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and others. We were claiming these people as comrades, friends, and family. We were also naming our enemies—Trump, Pence, Barr, McConnell, Chauvin and so many others. We were noticing who was present—Jose Andres, Elizabeth Warren—and who was not. We were connecting all this together into one coherent narrative thread, and a single ongoing struggle. And were connecting all those pasts and presents to us, marching here, now, in Washington, DC. And to think: we did all that merely by dancing in formation.

On the sidewalk in front of my home, my neighbor accosts me. He’s been extremely upset by a rash of nearby store robberies that took place a few days ago, but I’ve never seen him troubled by the killing of Black Americans. When he sees me pulling up on my bike, he asks, “Where’ve you been?”

I tell him. And then, for the next half hour, he tells me stories about the threats to our safety. He’d seen a sign warning people in our neighborhood that we would be targeted. “They’re going to come here next.”

“Who are they?” I finally asked.

“You want me to say it?” He didn’t like the question.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

He squinted and shook his head, like I was a child who understood nothing. Adults had no business going to these things.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d seen his younger son at the protests.

The Markets Have Never Been Wetter

Unemployment’s gone way up.

Thirteen, maybe twenty.

Crude was minus ten a barrel

For a couple days there.

Now they’re closing

Down the wet markets

Except for Wall Street.

End times, my friend,

But they won’t be dry times.

Dirty Harry’s Daytona

Still held that contest

Just as advertised.

And nothing gets wetter

Than a t-shirt

In a beer bar.

The Spam Never Stops

At last, go cashless for Corona

And for a short time, free shipping

Make it easy, refer a friend

Online availability now means

New opportunities

Book with confidence,

Stimulus, Kickstarter, Gofundme,

Means-tested grants

For hard-hit sectors,

A supply-chain response,

During these challenging times,

This curve, this surge,

This peak,

We are here to help you

To edge higher, impact, empower

To assist with your needs.

Have we turned the corner?

[Composed entirely of phrases taken from promotional emails I’ve received in the last 3 days.]

A New Song for February - أغنية جديدة إلى فبراير

Zayn al-‘Ābdīn Fu’ād is one of the leading movement poets of his generation, and some of his best-known poems were part of Sheikh Imam’s repertoire. Fu’ād belongs to the ‘68 generation of radical students, and he is one of the students who occupied Cairo University’s campus during the massive January-February protests against the corruption and ineptitude of the Nasser regime. During his imprisonment, Fu’ād wrote a number of short colloquial Egyptian Arabic poems, which can be found in his diwān, al-Ḥulm fi-l-sijn.

A New Song for February

(2 February 1972)

We are as ever, February!

Called before our time

If you come to see us without an appointment

You’ll find ranks gathered together

Our flags are, as ever,

On our shoulders.

Our voices, as always,

Are rifles,

Are swords.

We wear the blue prison stamps on our shoulders.

We, this year, arrived early.

Our brothers having died on the bridges,

While we, children of the alleys,

Found the alleys running to us.

We’re still as ever, February!

Opening our hearts, embracing life.

We’re singing for war, for our country

For trees, green living things, and homes.

We’re singing for songs, filling the eye

We’re opening our hearts

While the prisons open their doors to us

We are as we always were, February

Waiting for you, for you to come visit

For you to draw our pictures in blood on stone

For you to bring with you all the months, your friends,

Who will see our blood on your soil

And see our freshly planted

As vining hyacinth above your door,

As a new cover on your book.

February—so short, so long,

A piece of us, a page from the book of the Nile!

We are still here, as ever, February…

——

أغنية جديدة إلى فبراير

للشاعر زين العابدين فؤاد

(٢ فبراير ١٩٧٢)

احنا ، زي ما احنا، يا فبراير

قبل الميعاد ، ندهنا،

لو تشوفنا

من غير ميعاد ، اتجمعت صفوفنا

اعلامنا : زي ماهي،

فوق كتوفنا

اصواتنا ، زي ماهي:

بنادقنا

سيوفنا

ختم السجون ، ازرق، علي كتوفنا

احنا السنه دي ، جينا بدري

اخواتنا ماتوا علي الكباري

واحنا ولاد كل الحواري

كل الحواري ، جاتنا بتجري

واحنا ، زي ما احنا يافبراير

نفتح قلوبنا ، نحضن الحياه

نغني، لجل الحرب ، والوطن

لجل الشجر، والخضرة، والسكن

لجل الاغاني، تنفرد علي العيون

نفتح قلوبنا

تنفتح لينا السجون

احنا، زي ما احنا ، يا فبراير

نستنظرك، تجينا في الزياره

ترسم صورتنا ، بالدما ، علي الحجاره

تجيب معاك، كل الشهور، صحابك

يشوفوا دمنا ، علي ترابك

يشوفوا زرعنا الجديد

لبلابه فوق ابوابك

جلاده، فوق كتابك

فبراير ، القصير ، الطويل

ياحته مننا، ومن كتاب النيل

احنا زي ما احنا يا فبراير

...

...

1972 فبراير

سجن الاستئناف/ باب الخلق