Article
Alas the Smiling Homeland
January 18, 2006
like a passing midnight train,
its lights dimmed,
slicing the silence.
I tremble and long for mercy
forgotten on the platform.
‘These Are the Days’, Samekh Haskiyeh
In the heart of Tel Aviv, on an improvised stage at the Alma College for Hebrew Culture, poets take their turns at the microphones, young and not so young, Jews and Arabs. An atmosphere of closeness prevails; private jokes and good fellowship abound. There is little politics and a great deal of poetics. The program for the evening is written in both languages. It is the June, end-of-year celebration of the third Arabic-Hebrew Poetry Class run by Helicon, a nonprofit organization and journal for the advancement of poetry in Israel, directed by founder-poet Amir Or.
After eight years of running poetry programs for beginning poets, two years ago it was decided at Helicon to open a joint class for writers of Hebrew and writers of Arabic. Beginning poets are invited to send in their work to a committee of lectors, and 16 of them are accepted into the poetry class on full scholarship. The funding for these classes is shared by the Culture Administration of the Finance Ministry and the Beracha Foundation, which funds programs that promote Jewish-Arab coexistence.
The activity of the poetry class spreads over six months, and consists of seven different workshops held over long weekends each month at a residential facility in Zikhron Ya’akov. Each of the weekend sessions deals with a different subject in a workshop framework: principles of poetry translation, the fundamentals of poetics, feedback on and editing of texts written by the participants, reading poetry on stage, Arabic poetics, writing exercises and new writing techniques, and ‘inter-translation’ of poetry that requires the writers of Hebrew and of Arabic to translate one another’s poems.
The Arabic-Hebrew poetry class staff this year consisted of poets, theater people and literary scholars: Agi Mishol, Siham Daoud, Irit Sela, Yusuf Abu Warda, Dr. Vivian Eden, Dr. Ariel Hirschfeld, Amir Or, Dr. Basilyus Bawardi, Samir Khir and Elisheva Greenbaum. The recently published volume of Helicon Journal (No. 60), ‘Hebrew & Arabic New Poetry’, documents the recent poetry class in texts and photographs, and contains poems that were written and edited during the course of the workshop, in both languages – Hebrew and Arabic.
With a paintbrush of juicy
perspiration
each of the two of us paints
on the other
shapes
that blend.
This moment
contains the moment to swoop,
the coma between two awakenings.
And this loaded thing –
your beautiful dream –
remains congested
forever.
‘Situation’, Khaled Masalha
At the end of the evening at Alma College, one of the participants in the workshop – Radi Abdeljawad, 50, of Umm al-Fahm, a sculptor and teacher by profession – stands on the stage and invites everyone to a meal at his house. It was not easy for him to arrive at this moment. He came to the poetry class with mixed feelings, accompanied by suspicion and strong resistance.
“I almost dropped out of the class. I even thought they had set a trap for me,” he says. “I was very hurt when I discovered that in the class there were poets who were just starting their careers. I wrote my first poem 34 years ago and I published my first volume of poetry in 1981. I feel that I am a veteran, and then they tell me that I have to learn how to write poems from the beginning. But at the second and third meetings, I had already gotten into the atmosphere and I began to love the people there.”
Abdeljawad has started to write poems in Hebrew, and saw that it was easier than writing poems in Arabic “because of the exemption from the obligation to meter and rhyme,” he explains. He was born and grew up in the Askar refugee camp near Nablus, studied English and education at Amman University and returned to live in Ramallah. After he married, he moved to Umm al-Fahm. At the end-of-year event, he chose to sing Lebanese singer Marcel Khalifa’s song ‘Kite’, accompanied by oud player Eitan Baruch. “It was moving to sing a song that is sung by Khalifa, who is considered the singer of the Palestinian revolution, but to my mind he is a singer of humanity,” he says.
The poetry class, say the poets, was “an island of sanity” in the midst of the political crisis. On the backdrop of the Jewish-Arab conflict 16 people met to write and translate poems together. During the workshop, did they talk about the political situation? Yes. Abdeljawad recalls something that one of the poets, Anat Zakaria, told him: I’d rather be on the side that’s getting shot at than on the side that is doing the shooting. “This touched my heart,” he relates. “Suddenly I discovered that she feels the same way I do, and this is what unites us. They say that in art there are no borders. This is apparently true.”
But the dialogues were not always simple. “There were discussions, there were arguments; let us not forget that each side comes with different baggage and with a different mentality,” says Dr. Basilyus Bawardi, who provided the feedback on the Arabic texts and taught Arabic poetics in the workshop. “But in the end, they write about the same life. Poetry is life and they lived it. They met not only the text, but also sat with the person who is behind the text and learned about the conditions of his everyday life. This exposure to people who are different wiped away all the stereotypes, in a social and political way, too.”
I sat with a weapon on a school chair.
The field radio snorted ‘They’re shooting.’
Next to me Uri cocked his weapon.
I wore a surprised expression.
It’s not here, I said. Uri laughed.
It’s here too, he said.
Twelve years old, with a stone in his hand
he looked at us with the eyes of a gazelle
seeing predators for the first time
at contact distance.
There was something familiar about him.
I remembered the film:
A freedom fighter gets hit by a bullet.
He tries to shake the hole off his cheek,
and the hole throws blood.
Then he folds into himself
and sprawls on the rutted asphalt.
The boy threw stones.
We lowered our helmets.
Untitled, Nir Bikeles
Bikeles’ poem, which was also written in the poetry class, was translated into Arabic by the Arab poets. “In Israel there’s no escape from the political discourse,” says workshop director Amir Or, “but suddenly a normal encounter occurs between Jewish people and Arab people who have one thing in common: poetry, creativity. Arab poets translated poems by Nir Bikeles and Eyal Rechter about their military service. Last year, musician Ala Abu Amra decided to translate into Arabic and perform a poem by Tamir Lahav-Radelmesser about a friend who was killed in the Yom Kippur War. Through the poem they can truly get inside the other’s skin. As I see it, this is a political act of the first order, but had we defined it like that to them, it would not have happened. Therefore, this needs to be said quietly, and to begin the work from the bottom up, from cooperation among people.”
Initially Helicon made it a point to have balanced numbers in the class: eight Jews and eight Arabs. “But,” explains Or, “we realized that this was an injustice because the Arabs are 20 percent of the population and we didn’t want to create numerus clausus, but rather to choose the best. In the current class there were five Arabs and eleven Jews.” Or notes the social variance among the Arab participants themselves: “One of the poets we discovered in the first class was Ibrahim Qa’adan, who comes from quite a strict Islamic home. Before that, he was working as a gas station attendant and now he is studying literature at the University of Haifa. There was a young woman from a Druze home, and another from a yuppie Arab home. There are many gaps and kinds of friction among the Arabs themselves, who come from very different backgrounds.”
The graduates of the Helicon poetry class publish their poems in journals, newspapers and books, participate in poetry festivals in Israel and abroad and win prizes.
Alas for the gardens you have abandoned, the ones you have left to another
the death of an era.
Alas for the smiling homeland
that you have left behind you
where there is nothing, fool,
except ruin.
Untitled, Muslim Mahamid
“What all the poets have in common,” says Or, “is that if you let them go about their business quietly then most of the poems that come out of them are personal, not political.” “Young Arab poetry,” says Basilyus Bawardi, “is leaving behind the ‘sanctified’ subjects – lachrymose love poems or poems of cliched symbols, resistance poetry. Even if the poetry deals with these things – it does it in a way that is more intellectual and calculated. Arabic poetry today is more personal, but it still radiates a certain kind of collectivity.”
Unsigned translation.
Poems translated into English by Vivian Eden and Dr. Basilyus Bawardi.
Published in Haaretz, July 16, 2004.
In the joint poetry class for writers of Hebrew and writers of Arabic in Tel Aviv, art transcends borders, as this article by Shiri Lev-Ari shows. “What all the poets have in common,” says founder Amir Or, “is that if you let them go about their business quietly then most of the poems that come out of them are personal, not political.”
These are the days that slide over me like a passing midnight train,
its lights dimmed,
slicing the silence.
I tremble and long for mercy
forgotten on the platform.
‘These Are the Days’, Samekh Haskiyeh
In the heart of Tel Aviv, on an improvised stage at the Alma College for Hebrew Culture, poets take their turns at the microphones, young and not so young, Jews and Arabs. An atmosphere of closeness prevails; private jokes and good fellowship abound. There is little politics and a great deal of poetics. The program for the evening is written in both languages. It is the June, end-of-year celebration of the third Arabic-Hebrew Poetry Class run by Helicon, a nonprofit organization and journal for the advancement of poetry in Israel, directed by founder-poet Amir Or.
After eight years of running poetry programs for beginning poets, two years ago it was decided at Helicon to open a joint class for writers of Hebrew and writers of Arabic. Beginning poets are invited to send in their work to a committee of lectors, and 16 of them are accepted into the poetry class on full scholarship. The funding for these classes is shared by the Culture Administration of the Finance Ministry and the Beracha Foundation, which funds programs that promote Jewish-Arab coexistence.
The activity of the poetry class spreads over six months, and consists of seven different workshops held over long weekends each month at a residential facility in Zikhron Ya’akov. Each of the weekend sessions deals with a different subject in a workshop framework: principles of poetry translation, the fundamentals of poetics, feedback on and editing of texts written by the participants, reading poetry on stage, Arabic poetics, writing exercises and new writing techniques, and ‘inter-translation’ of poetry that requires the writers of Hebrew and of Arabic to translate one another’s poems.
The Arabic-Hebrew poetry class staff this year consisted of poets, theater people and literary scholars: Agi Mishol, Siham Daoud, Irit Sela, Yusuf Abu Warda, Dr. Vivian Eden, Dr. Ariel Hirschfeld, Amir Or, Dr. Basilyus Bawardi, Samir Khir and Elisheva Greenbaum. The recently published volume of Helicon Journal (No. 60), ‘Hebrew & Arabic New Poetry’, documents the recent poetry class in texts and photographs, and contains poems that were written and edited during the course of the workshop, in both languages – Hebrew and Arabic.
With a paintbrush of juicy
perspiration
each of the two of us paints
on the other
shapes
that blend.
This moment
contains the moment to swoop,
the coma between two awakenings.
And this loaded thing –
your beautiful dream –
remains congested
forever.
‘Situation’, Khaled Masalha
At the end of the evening at Alma College, one of the participants in the workshop – Radi Abdeljawad, 50, of Umm al-Fahm, a sculptor and teacher by profession – stands on the stage and invites everyone to a meal at his house. It was not easy for him to arrive at this moment. He came to the poetry class with mixed feelings, accompanied by suspicion and strong resistance.
“I almost dropped out of the class. I even thought they had set a trap for me,” he says. “I was very hurt when I discovered that in the class there were poets who were just starting their careers. I wrote my first poem 34 years ago and I published my first volume of poetry in 1981. I feel that I am a veteran, and then they tell me that I have to learn how to write poems from the beginning. But at the second and third meetings, I had already gotten into the atmosphere and I began to love the people there.”
Abdeljawad has started to write poems in Hebrew, and saw that it was easier than writing poems in Arabic “because of the exemption from the obligation to meter and rhyme,” he explains. He was born and grew up in the Askar refugee camp near Nablus, studied English and education at Amman University and returned to live in Ramallah. After he married, he moved to Umm al-Fahm. At the end-of-year event, he chose to sing Lebanese singer Marcel Khalifa’s song ‘Kite’, accompanied by oud player Eitan Baruch. “It was moving to sing a song that is sung by Khalifa, who is considered the singer of the Palestinian revolution, but to my mind he is a singer of humanity,” he says.
The poetry class, say the poets, was “an island of sanity” in the midst of the political crisis. On the backdrop of the Jewish-Arab conflict 16 people met to write and translate poems together. During the workshop, did they talk about the political situation? Yes. Abdeljawad recalls something that one of the poets, Anat Zakaria, told him: I’d rather be on the side that’s getting shot at than on the side that is doing the shooting. “This touched my heart,” he relates. “Suddenly I discovered that she feels the same way I do, and this is what unites us. They say that in art there are no borders. This is apparently true.”
But the dialogues were not always simple. “There were discussions, there were arguments; let us not forget that each side comes with different baggage and with a different mentality,” says Dr. Basilyus Bawardi, who provided the feedback on the Arabic texts and taught Arabic poetics in the workshop. “But in the end, they write about the same life. Poetry is life and they lived it. They met not only the text, but also sat with the person who is behind the text and learned about the conditions of his everyday life. This exposure to people who are different wiped away all the stereotypes, in a social and political way, too.”
I sat with a weapon on a school chair.
The field radio snorted ‘They’re shooting.’
Next to me Uri cocked his weapon.
I wore a surprised expression.
It’s not here, I said. Uri laughed.
It’s here too, he said.
Twelve years old, with a stone in his hand
he looked at us with the eyes of a gazelle
seeing predators for the first time
at contact distance.
There was something familiar about him.
I remembered the film:
A freedom fighter gets hit by a bullet.
He tries to shake the hole off his cheek,
and the hole throws blood.
Then he folds into himself
and sprawls on the rutted asphalt.
The boy threw stones.
We lowered our helmets.
Untitled, Nir Bikeles
Bikeles’ poem, which was also written in the poetry class, was translated into Arabic by the Arab poets. “In Israel there’s no escape from the political discourse,” says workshop director Amir Or, “but suddenly a normal encounter occurs between Jewish people and Arab people who have one thing in common: poetry, creativity. Arab poets translated poems by Nir Bikeles and Eyal Rechter about their military service. Last year, musician Ala Abu Amra decided to translate into Arabic and perform a poem by Tamir Lahav-Radelmesser about a friend who was killed in the Yom Kippur War. Through the poem they can truly get inside the other’s skin. As I see it, this is a political act of the first order, but had we defined it like that to them, it would not have happened. Therefore, this needs to be said quietly, and to begin the work from the bottom up, from cooperation among people.”
Initially Helicon made it a point to have balanced numbers in the class: eight Jews and eight Arabs. “But,” explains Or, “we realized that this was an injustice because the Arabs are 20 percent of the population and we didn’t want to create numerus clausus, but rather to choose the best. In the current class there were five Arabs and eleven Jews.” Or notes the social variance among the Arab participants themselves: “One of the poets we discovered in the first class was Ibrahim Qa’adan, who comes from quite a strict Islamic home. Before that, he was working as a gas station attendant and now he is studying literature at the University of Haifa. There was a young woman from a Druze home, and another from a yuppie Arab home. There are many gaps and kinds of friction among the Arabs themselves, who come from very different backgrounds.”
The graduates of the Helicon poetry class publish their poems in journals, newspapers and books, participate in poetry festivals in Israel and abroad and win prizes.
Alas for the gardens you have abandoned, the ones you have left to another
the death of an era.
Alas for the smiling homeland
that you have left behind you
where there is nothing, fool,
except ruin.
Untitled, Muslim Mahamid
“What all the poets have in common,” says Or, “is that if you let them go about their business quietly then most of the poems that come out of them are personal, not political.” “Young Arab poetry,” says Basilyus Bawardi, “is leaving behind the ‘sanctified’ subjects – lachrymose love poems or poems of cliched symbols, resistance poetry. Even if the poetry deals with these things – it does it in a way that is more intellectual and calculated. Arabic poetry today is more personal, but it still radiates a certain kind of collectivity.”
Unsigned translation.
Poems translated into English by Vivian Eden and Dr. Basilyus Bawardi.
Published in Haaretz, July 16, 2004.
© Shiri Lev-Ari
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