Ayat Abou Shmeiss

“I wish I could cry fire/ and every time I cried/ you’d burn” writes Palestinian-Israeli poet Ayat Abou Shmeiss in her second book of poetry in Hebrew, perhaps about love or perhaps about society.

In a recent article in the Tel Aviv Review of Books, interviewer Jnan Bsoul notes that Abou Shmeiss, “an observant Muslim from Jaffa, writes in Hebrew without disavowing her Palestinian identity. Gentle and unobtrusive, her writing nonetheless challenges her religious and socially conservative background”.  And the larger community in which she lives.

The opening poem in Abou Shmeiss's first book, A basket of mute tongues, has been described by poetry critic Ilan Berkowitz as a successsful “cry of protest from the standpoint of silence":
 
I drag the words
I haven’t learned yet
my language drowns
two storms
like the sea in winter
I can’t snare
a single word with my palate
raise my voice like a fishing rod
and bear a basket
filled with tongues mute as fish
that I place
on the counter
in your kitchen
                                                                    [tr. LK]