Tahrir Hamdi

Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically English literature departments at Arab universities. Many thinkers have documented the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism on the one hand (Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, 1989 and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, 1993) and literature, culture, and resistance on the other hand (Fanon, Kanafani, Cabral, Said, and others who wrote about zero point epistemology). While there have been some decolonization efforts in different parts of the world, even at Ivy League institutions (Cornell University, for example), Arab universities ironically maintain a very rigid, government accredited English and American literary curriculum with no attempt or intention at decolo...

The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef urgently asks, “Why are the poets silent?/Where have they gone?” These questions underscore the compelling need for the guiding voices of Arab intellectuals at this deeply divided present moment in the Arab world that has effectively seen the destruction of seemingly stable nations and identities. It is important to understand why and how easily “things fell apart” for Arab nations and peoples under the destructive influence and direct intervention of imperialist and Zionist agendas and forces. What does it mean to speak truth to power in the current Arab and global context where the destruction of Arab nations, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen has become the all too familiar, convenient, and accepted status quo, which is marked by destructive and exclusionary discourses? It has become incumbent upon the Arab intellectual/writer/poet to lead the self-examination process in order to provide an understanding of the current Arab situation within its gr...

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine's most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti's words, even if only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but "please make it alqam [bitter]," he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry, religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim and Mourid Barghouti's late wife and Tamim's mother, the novelist and academic Radwa Ashour.Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet(TH): W. B. Yeats says "Poetry makes nothing happen," but he probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is not a political slogan. In your long poem, "Midnight," you say:The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a crime.What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet W. B. Yeats-that he invented a country and called it Ireland.Mourid Barghouti I'll start by endorsing Auden's statement. Poetry(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is the following illusion-an audience expects that a poet writes a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of the receiver. It doesn't have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person to another, from one country to another, from one language to another, from one generation to another. That's why we could find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his "If the people one day will to live/then destiny must respond." The line travelled through ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.TH: So the poem survives ...MB: The poem survives, that's why we are still reading poems that have been written thousands of years ago.TH: But it can't have an immediate effect.MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and military music. Military music is not music. Military music can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name, should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should have the power to influence another audience in another age, in another place, with another background. For instance, when Yeats wrote "Easter 1916" in Ireland-"a terrible beauty is born," I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two conditions of being influential outside its sphere and outside its generation, its time, time and place. …

Postcolonialism, profoundly influenced by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, has until recently been oddly silent on Palestine, a topic that not only preoccupied Said's thinking and writing, but also inspired his theoretical ideas on imperialism, anti-colonial struggle and the worldliness and affiliations of the text and the critic. This theoretical silence on Palestine was, in fact, preceded by a historical, political, geographical, social and cultural contestation of all forms of Palestinian spaces that include not only dispossessing Palestinians of their land, but also building apartheid walls, destroying hundreds of thousands of olive trees, appropriating/stealing traditional Palestinian dishes and clothes, silencing Palestinian narratives and the Muslim call to prayer. This paper will argue that these contested spaces necessarily become sites of Palestinian cultural production, struggle and sumud.

William Butler Yeats's and Mahmoud Darwish's poetic oeuvres can safely be said to have contributed significantly to building distinct national consciousnesses for their respective nations of Ireland and Palestine. These poets have equipped themselves with unique repertoires, which include the personal, the mystical, and the mythological, not to escape into a more ideal or abstract world, but to create anew their homelands, which have been placed under political, social, cultural, and in Darwish's case, geographical erasure by oppressive imperialist/Zionist invaders and occupiers. Both poets take on their roles as politician/artist/magician seriously by using hypnotic and other magical techniques in order to focus their people's psyches on the idea of cultural and national liberation. The poetry of both Yeats and Darwish shows poignantly how a poet can embody the nation and how poetry can indeed make something happen.

Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in a metaphorical landscape. For a poet who saw coffee as geography, it is difficult to imagine how one can separate Darwish, the individual, from the very idea of Palestine, which he sought to keep alive in almost every line he wrote, regardless of how personal the situation was that occasioned the writing of the poem as witnessed by his epic masterpiece, Mural. For Darwish, negotiating a Palestinian space, place and identity represents a lifelong project that he saw as an ongoing process or ‘under construction’ to use the poet's words from his long prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness. This essay shows how Darwish's poems become the ‘imagined geography’ of Palestine, to use Edward Said's term, to which the poet returns in Mural, reuniting the Palestinian with the land from which he was violently and unnaturally separated and returning the poet to his word. In addition to Said's ideas on geography, I use Benedict Anderson's idea of an imagined community and Edward Soja's concept of the thirdspace to help decipher Darwish's poetics of space, which combine the political, social, spatial and historical.

This article examines the theoretical/critical and literary silence on Palestine as represented by Caryl Phillips’s novel, The Nature of Blood. It is argued that the silence on Palestine is simultaneously political, historical, geographical and imaginative. In his novel, Phillips provides a framework of Jewish suffering and persecution in an anti-Semitic Europe which culminates in the Holocaust in order to justify the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The criticism Phillips directs at Israel has to do with Israel’s racism against black Jews. Phillips, who is ironically identified as a postcolonial writer, ignores the fact that Israel is also a colonial entity, which was established based on the belief that Israel would be an ethnically pure homeland for the Jewish people. Phillips’s inability or unwillingness to understand this basic given leads to his intentional erasure of a whole people, the Palestinians and their cause, a criticism that can also be leveled against trauma and p...

... Their 'return' to Haifa is very painful for the couple because they will have to unearth what has been silently buried in their new life in Ramallah, not only an abandoned land but also an abandoned child, Khaldoun, who was only five months old when Safiyya, in hysteria, forgot ...

ABSTRACT There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's thesis of the "affiliation of knowledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature, Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "rich symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).

This chapter critically engages with Edward W. Said’s conceptualization of ‘Late Style’ in light of continued catastrophic occurrences in Palestine. It argues that a ‘lateness of beginnings’ represents the Palestinian intellectual’s deepest resistance against catastrophe, impending death, dispossession, and colonization. In the face of continued catastrophe, resistance in post-millennial Palestine is currently being reinvigorated by the creativity of new Palestinian generations, who have attained a metaphorical lateness by the very means of the repetition of the catastrophic. The chapter explores the reconfiguration of Late Style resistance in the works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, arguing that these intellectuals’ works are important in foregrounding an oppositional criticism in the face of divisionist agendas at this most critical moment in the continuation of the Palestinian struggle.

Abstract: William Butler Yeats’s and Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic oeuvres can safely be said to
have contributed significantly to building distinct national consciousnesses for their respective
nations of Ireland and Palestine. These poets have equipped themselves with unique repertoires,
which include the personal, the mystical, and the mythological, not to escape into a more ideal
or abstract world, but to create anew their homelands, which have been placed under political,
social, cultural, and in Darwish’s case, geographical erasure by oppressive imperialist/Zionist
invaders and occupiers. Both poets take on their roles as politician/artist/magician seriously by
using hypnotic and other magical techniques in order to focus their people’s psyches on the idea
of cultural and national liberation. The poetry of both Yeats and Darwish shows poignantly how
a poet can embody the nation and how poetry can indeed make something happen.

Abstract: There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's tbesis of tbe
"affiliation of knov>/ledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship
represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim
that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any
power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart
when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature. Orientalist scholarship and politics.
After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's
voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words,
which as Said believed, is "richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).

In the hands of Palestinian artists, the concept of bearing witness not only serves as a means of recording a past tragedy but also involves a complex repertoire of strategies, including interrogating the past, recreating it and, most importantly, forging resistance against the assassination of liberation itself. This article examines how artists of resistance, such as Naji Al Ali, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, use the concept of bearing witness to tragedy as a tool of resistance and to guard against the idea of liberation itself dying. It is argued that the state of Israel has used assassination as a means of extinguishing the will of the Palestinian people to resist, targeting both political leaders of resistance movements as well as cultural and literary figures.
Keywords: assassination policy, ethnic cleansing, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji Al Ali, Nakba, Palestine
‘One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.’
Arthur Koestler1
‘The dual injustice of exile and occupation could not break the will of a people bent on achieving freedom, dignity and redemption of history.’
Mahmoud

... But how non-Western readers could relate to Camus' Meursault, Hemingway's indifferent characters, the postmodernism of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is a question that is not worthy of consideration because these Western concerns are “uni-versal ... Arthur M. Eastman, et al. ...