My father the protest poet

29 juli 2012 No one talks about Yemenites. If anyone does, it’s usually as the butt of jokes, some of which are actually funny. A woman in one of the groups I run told me a real-life joke which I found very funny indeed. She’s divorced, doesn’t receive alimony, and the Israeli social security office stopped paying her allowance when they discovered she had a boyfriend. She sued them, and at the trial, when they argued that she lives with her boyfriend and so isn’t entitled to an allowance she said, “What boyfriend? He’s Yemenite! Getting money out of a Yemenite is like telling a dead man to breathe!” She won her suit.
 
There are many jokes about Yemenites, but beyond that they’re not really talked about. They were among the first to come here, in 1881; they built great expanses of this country, but still, no one talks about them. Even Mizrahi Jews who talk exclusively about discrimination against Mizrahim don’t talk about the Yemenites.
 
My Dad is Yemenite. He’s also a poet. A wonderful poet. One of the best in the country. He has a unique voice; no one else writes quite like him. And like many other Yemenites he’s a soft-spoken, modest man who rarely asks anything for himself, is grateful for all life has given him, writes wonderful poetry and has done so for many years.
 
Ketzia Alon’s book A Third Option for Poetry: Studies of Mizrahi Poetics taught me something I’d suspected for a long time. She taught me that my Dad is a protest poet. I’d always thought so, from the moment I read his poem ‘Bialik Was Not Yemenite’ but I couldn’t be absolutely sure, because as I said, he’s so undemanding, modest. Alon cites one of my father’s poems, ‘Not Coconut’ in the book:
           
            Neither bran nor cocoa nor coconut
            instead, gentlemen, you should eat fenugreek, and see
            how - hocus pocus - you’ll become angelic and develop
            hidden sensitivities like children
            things you never saw till now will suddenly become
            clear. The hills will become
             mountains. Hidden traces will become apparent and you will be able, as
                    they say to take the bull
            by the horns. Your children will play catch and multiply
            like pomegranates. You will want to kiss even your neighbors
            you’ll be able to sweep the streets as though it were
            child’s play. Your country will thrive. Your bones
            will flower like grass and thistles will
            bring forth roses.

Alon claims that my Dad is addressing a well-fed audience of Ashkenazi poetry readers about the distress of his fellow Yemenites. She goes on to say that underneath a light camouflage of humor, a penetrating protest poem cries out against the Yemenite stereotype “You’ll become angelic” and against their low socio-economic status and work in dead end jobs like street sweeping. She shows how my father aligns himself with the Yemenites, using words like “your country” and not “our country.” She believes that the phrase “your country will thrive” contains hidden anger: your country will thrive because of its outrageous exploitation of the Yemenites.

She goes on to show how in the first two lines, the command “you should eat fenugreek, gentlemen” and in the way the poem goes on to describe what happens to the fenugreek eaters, my father is saying “the Yemenites are a dream come true for you, aren’t they? Nevertheless, I’m sure that they’re not in an enviable position, rather the contrary, they are at the bottom of the heap,” according to Alon.
           
Thanks to Ketzia Alon, I came to understand that what I had always suspected was true: beneath the modest, soft spoken, polite and forgiving exterior, my father is a protest poet.
 
And with what humor, what gentleness he does it. That same gentleness which is the hallmark of the Yemenites, which allows everyone to ignore them, to forget about them.
           
Today there are quite a few young Mizrahi poets – several of whom are mentioned in Alon’s book – who write explicitly and vocally in protest against the discrimination they suffer. This writing is important, but I’m still angry with them. Just as I’m angry with Eli Eliahu, who wrote an article in the Haaretz daily newspaper about Alon’s book without mentioning my father’s name even once. Everyone was mentioned in this article: Mois Benarroch, Matti Shmuelof, Almog Behar, Erez Biton, Sami Shalom Shitrit, Peretz Dror Banai, Vikki Shiran, Shimon Adaf, Roni Somek, Haviva Pedaya, Bracha Seri, Amira Hess, Yaakov Biton.

All of them, all those writing in Mizrahi style or not, only my father, the longest established of all of them, who has published more collections of poetry than all those mentioned, who won the Brenner Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the Prime Minister’s Prize, who celebrated his 80^th birthday this year, only his name did Eli Eliahu see fit to omit. Is it a coincidence that besides Bracha Sari, he is also the only Yemenite among them? Is it a coincidence that all those young Mizrahim publishing anthologies and new poetry collections and constantly going on about discrimination against Mizrahim have never once approached my father to ask him for permission to publish any of his poems?
 
I think it is not. I think that even those Mizrahim who protest and struggle forget about the Yemenites. I grew up amazed at my father’s wonderful talent, but no less at his silence and gentleness, at the fact that he never asked anything for himself, despite being entitled to his just deserts. As a great poet, no less.
           
And the Yemenites are silent. But I, who am only half Yemenite, do not want to remain silent any longer.
 
Yemenites from the transit camp came to my grandfather’s house
sat and kept silent
while one sang the other waited
so I was raised between howling
and silence
now they’ve installed a telephone for my father and he sits
waiting for a ring
for 80 years he was silent and his ancestors kept silent
now he wants someone to hear what he has to say.
  ‘ON THE SILENCE OF THE YEMENITES’

Eliana Almog is a clinical social worker, group leader, therapist and writer who also sings a bit of opera.This article was posted on her blog in November 2011.