Editorial: 20 January, 2003

January 18, 2006 In recent poetry, as in the rest of the world, the threat of war has become a major theme. British poet laureate Andrew Motion published a brief but scathing and much-discussed condemnation of the warmongering in The Guardian, {id="290" title="‘Causa Belli’"}. In only four lines ‘Causa Belli’ calls into question Bush’s high-minded motives for going to war, and instead suggests that “elections, money, empire, oil and Dad” might have more to do with the impending attack on Iraq.

Also engaged in a public polemic touching on Middle Eastern issues is Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin. Paulin, who was {id="273" title="accused of antisemitism"} last November, answered his critics the only real way a poet can, in verse. In the January 2 issue of The London Review of Books he has published a lengthy poem as a reply to the accusations, ‘On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card’, (reprinted in The Guardian). In it, he talks about guilt (“historic guilt/ is and must be always with us”), yet maintains:

the programme though
of saying Israel's critics
are tout court anti-semitic
is designed daily by some schmuck
to make you shut the fuck up

Paulin challenges other writers to take sides in the debate, as they did during the Spanish Civil War. While in all likelihood not many will dare to commit themselves to one party in this immensely complicated conflict, few will probably disagree with his bottom line: “so I say the same/ and say that peace it must be talked/ re Palestine and re Iraq”.

Another light entirely is shed on the Palestinian-Israeli situation by the poems in the latest issue of Banipal, which is devoted to Palestinian literature. In our {id="392" title="piece"} on the magazine, reviewer Maurits Berger notes that the heroic and nationalistic Palestinian literature of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by personalised miniatures. And, perhaps offering a ray of hope, while the poems mainly deal with feelings of loss and being lost, grand, emotionally charged terms like ‘homeland’ or ‘Palestine’ – cause of many a war – are conspicuously absent.