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Huda Fakhreddine on Hiba Abu Nada ("Pull Yourself Together")
2.9k Plays6 months ago
What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together," a poem that Huda has translated into English and that was written by the Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Abu Nada. Hiba was killed by an Israeli airstrike in her home in the Gaza Strip on October 20, 2023. She was 32 years old.
In the episode, Huda describes watching a clip of Hiba reading the poem. You can find that clip here.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoeisis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). She is also a prolific translator of Arabic poetry: you can find another of her translations of HIba Abu Nada in Protean. Follow Huda on Twitter.
Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. You can also subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the podcast and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction to Huda Fakhradin and Hibba Abu Nada's Poem
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is my real pleasure today to have on Huda Fakhradin. Huda is an associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. So she's just down the road from me. And joining us today from her office on campus, she
00:00:27
Speaker
She has come on to the podcast to talk about a poem called Pull Yourself Together by the poet Hibba Abu Nada, which was published on the website of Words Without Borders in January of this year, 2024.
00:00:46
Speaker
Huddo will have much more to tell us, obviously not just about the poem, which is what we'll talk about for the bulk of today's episode, but about the poet as well who wrote it. Huddo is the translator of that poem.
00:01:03
Speaker
and I will have provided a link to the text of the poem which will allow you both to read the poem in the Arabic for those listeners who can and to read it in the English that Huda has translated it into as well.
Modernist Arabic Poetry and Huda's Contributions
00:01:23
Speaker
Let me tell you more, though, first about our guest. So at Penn, Hoda focuses on modernist movements and trends in Arabic poetry. She's interested in the Arabic Qasida, which is an ancient form, which perhaps we'll talk about today.
00:01:44
Speaker
She's interested in that form as it functions as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, all of these sorts of hallmarks, I think, of not just the poetry that Huda is a scholar of, but of global modernisms more generally, modernism as a literary movement.
00:02:07
Speaker
seems often to be interested in these kinds of questions of ancient or older forms being adapted and revised in a sort of modern context. In Hiro's case in particular, she's interested in this form's relationship to things like the free verse poem and to the prose poem.
00:02:32
Speaker
in Arabic. She's the author of a book called Metapoiesis in the Arabic Tradition, which was published by Brill in 2015, and more recently, a book called The Arabic Prose Poem, Poetic Theory and Practice, which was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. She's also the co-editor of the Rutledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry, which came out in 2023.
00:03:00
Speaker
And Hoda is a prolific translator of Arabic poetry, both in book form and many journal publications as well. I'll provide links and titles to some of these publications in the show notes so that those of you who want to see her work as a translator will be able to look at it closely. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this introduction,
00:03:27
Speaker
among those translations is the translation of the poem that we will be talking about today. So for listeners to this podcast, you may note that we had this long string of poems that were published in English and now have had a couple of poems in translation. I hope to bring more of those kinds of conversations to you.
00:03:50
Speaker
soon.
Poetry in Times of Crisis
00:03:52
Speaker
I first got a chance to see her present her work at the MLA convention in Philadelphia this January, where the genre studies forum on poetry and poetics had convened a roundtable
00:04:10
Speaker
And actually, as a friend of mine and former guest on the podcast as well, Harris Finesod, who had put together this roundtable, the idea, I mean, I was there in the meeting with Harris when he came up with this idea, was to put together a roundtable, the topic of which would be something like, what was a poem in
00:04:33
Speaker
x-place and y-time. So what was a poem in London, 1922? What was a poem in—you get the idea, right? With the idea being, I guess, that
00:04:47
Speaker
what we understand the role of poetry to be or the expectations we have for what counts as a poem are not absolute and trans-historical, unchanging things over time, but instead are contingent on history and politics and geography and linguistic tradition and so forth.
00:05:16
Speaker
Huda's presentation was on what a poem was in Gaza, October of 2023, or Gaza Now, as she was talking in January of 2024.
00:05:36
Speaker
You know, it's been now a few weeks, I think, since I'll have put out an episode of this podcast. And part of the reason for that is that I've been, like many of you, I'm sure, you know,
00:05:52
Speaker
transfixed by the news and unsure in my own case. I'll just speak for myself about what, if anything, this ongoing project of mine.
00:06:07
Speaker
plan to keep it going now as long as I can, what it had to do with what seemed more urgently on my mind and my friends' minds and my colleagues' minds and so on. These are some of, I mean, related to some of the questions that I ought to raise that day in Philadelphia.
00:06:26
Speaker
in January, questions about ancient forms of poetry and their relevance to contemporary life, questions about the efficacy of poetry in times of historical crisis, questions about the relevance of poetry to issues of life and death and of historical injustice.
00:06:52
Speaker
questions of who poems spoke for and to whom poems spoke. And I was just incredibly moved and learned so much about
00:07:09
Speaker
Arabic poetry, about poetry in Palestine, and about those questions that I've just enumerated, these questions about what poems are for. I learned so much from Huda's presentation, and so from that point on, I've been trying to find a way to get her
00:07:30
Speaker
to come onto the podcast and to share some of this work with my listeners. She's been very busy. Huda, you've been a very busy person of late. So I want to thank you for joining the podcast and I want to begin today just by asking you how you're doing today.
Facing Censorship and Student Activism
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, thank you, Kamran, very much for your patience. It's a pleasure to be with you. I am okay.
00:07:56
Speaker
That's all I can say, but I'm grateful for this opportunity to take a moment away from everything that's happening on this campus and in the world and to talk about this poem with you. And I'd like to say that when we met in the MLA conference in January,
00:08:16
Speaker
Yes, it was a panel titled, What was a poem? And our friend, Harris Feinsod knows that my presentation was supposed to be something entirely different. Because we prepare for the MLA months in advance, so before October 2023. The plan was that I go in and talk a little bit about the prose poem. What was a poem in Arabic in 1960?
00:08:39
Speaker
when, you know, there was this theoretical conversation about what could be poetry in Arabic, what are its limits, what is the meaning of meter, what is the meaning of tradition, what do we do with inheritance and memory and language and in poetic form. But by January 2024, Hibba Abuneda answered all of these questions. She made all the points that I was going in to make mute because, and irrelevant,
00:09:09
Speaker
The poem, the Arabic language in that moment in January 2024 could only be about Raza. Poetry in Arabic could only be poetry that is translated and read through the lens of Raza. There was no room for anything else. Not emotionally, not intellectually, not linguistically, not sonically. There was only Raza in the room.
00:09:33
Speaker
And interestingly enough, the poem that I read by Hib Abunada was a poem that does all that. It really recycles poetic form, ancient poetic form. And it writes in a moment that is so urgently present. It says a lot about sound and poetry, about language, about history. So my presentation was the shortest, I think.
00:09:56
Speaker
And the point was that for me to not say much and let Hiba speak in that moment, and I'm still in that state of mind. There is no room for anything but Reza, and I don't know where this is heading, but nothing can be the same after this. Even if ceasefire happens today, this minute, we are going to have to contend with what Reza 2023 means in all dimensions of life.
00:10:28
Speaker
Well, your presentation may have been the shortest, though you're telling me that now is the first time that's registered with me. It made an impression, I'll put it that way, but though I take to heart.
00:10:43
Speaker
what you're saying and why it may have made such an impression on me. Obviously, I do want to get to the poem because it's a very beautiful and powerful and haunting poem that you've chosen. I'm very interested in it for all kinds of reasons.
00:11:02
Speaker
But I'm conscious also of the fact that you're joining us from Penn, which is one of the many campuses in the United States and elsewhere that have been much in the news of late and for protests led by students. And I get the sense from you, Huda, that you've been, while not
00:11:27
Speaker
I understand our student organized protests that faculty members like you are at best sort of there for support and as witnesses and to help provide whatever to the students that you can.
00:11:46
Speaker
I'm sure that there are people listening to this podcast who would be curious to hear what you have observed in the protests, say at Penn in particular, in the last, I don't know how long it's been now since that protest, since that encampment took form, but the last several days or weeks.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, so this encampment began on April 25th. It was a Thursday. How many days has that been? I've lost track of time. I don't know. And maybe it's worth telling people because, of course, the way these things work, I'll publish this soon, but for the record, we're talking today on Monday, May 6th. May 6th.
00:12:31
Speaker
And, you know, as many as you and many of the listeners probably know, Penn has been in the spotlight since September, since the Palestine Rights Festival and the backlash that and the pushback that began even before the festival happened. And I've been involved in that and I've been, you know, getting a lot of threats and intimidation and and all kinds of
00:13:01
Speaker
subjected to all kinds of censorship because of my involvement in that festival, which was a Palestinian literary festival. It was supposed to be a joyous event, an opportunity for this university and the larger community. We had more than 100 Palestinian artists and writers and translators and poets here on this campus.
00:13:24
Speaker
and we had more than 1,500 attendees from all over the larger Philadelphia area. But I discovered then something that I always knew, but I didn't know it so violently. The knowledge struck me so violently since September that there is the Palestinian exception. We're allowed to
00:13:49
Speaker
were allowed to be humanists, were allowed to be translators, scholars of Arabic literature, but we are not allowed to celebrate a culture that has been excluded from the world, literally. And these institutions are so afraid of the word Palestine.
00:14:06
Speaker
And actually, the culture is even more threatening than the political, the polemics of the conflict or all that talk that we're used to framing Palestine. But when you say, let's look at this culture on its own terms, let's celebrate its history, the roots that stretch way back into geography and history, then that becomes threatening to the oppressive systems.
00:14:35
Speaker
in this country and in this institution. Why is it? I mean, do you have a theory as to why it is that the culture should evidently be more threatening than the polemic? Because, I mean, the way you frame it makes it seem sort of counterintuitive, and I think that it is. Of course, I have my own inklings as to why it might be, but this is something you must have thought about in a more deep way.
00:15:05
Speaker
I mean, there's a genocide unfolding as we speak now, Kamran, and it's so very difficult and distressing and frustrating and absolutely devastating. Did I say that word? I'm lost for words that express how hopeless
00:15:25
Speaker
I am, because it takes so much effort to prove to people that Palestinians are human beings, that their death matters, that their deaths, thousands of them matter. So when you focus on the culture, you are showing that there's a history, there's an identity, there's a culture that stretches back in history, whereas the argument or the system wants you to keep looking at Palestinians as non-human.
00:15:53
Speaker
as dispensable, people whose deaths doesn't matter, it's only numbers in an equation. And so this misrepresentation and systemic dehumanization of Palestinians is something that is so ingrained in the politics of this country and other countries. But the shock to me was that as a scholar of Arabic literature, I was attacked, I was thrown under the bus,
00:16:23
Speaker
for saying that I am going to participate in organizing a Palestinian literary festival. And after that, I was attacked even in Congress. My name came up for teaching a class titled Resistance Literature from Pre-Islamic Arabia to Palestine.
00:16:40
Speaker
and the ignorance and just the level of stupidity with which this class has been described shows you exactly that this is pure racism and dehumanization of not only Palestinians, it extends to the entirety of Arab culture. I mean, teaching poetry at a university has become problematic and dangerous.
00:17:04
Speaker
My class had to be scheduled in an undisclosed room because we were worried about safety. And what we did every week this semester was meet and read poems from priests, Islamic times, Abbasid times, Andalusia, early 20th century, and Palestine today. And that is something that some people find threatening. And I know why, but it continues to shock me.
00:17:36
Speaker
Wow, it's shocking. One thing I wanna do is to say, well, let's talk about one particular human being that will be, that is the poet that we're here today, whose work we're here today to discuss.
00:18:00
Speaker
But before we get there, I mean, you've spoken so movingly now about your experience with the Literary Festival, which I think is so illuminating about the conditions that you work under.
00:18:21
Speaker
and more still, but maybe a word about what you've seen and witnessed on campus in the last few days in terms of the encampment as well. I mean, I just, I've been, I'll speak for myself, you know, I have not been a firsthand witness to any of these high profile kinds of protests on college campuses.
00:18:47
Speaker
But from a distance and reading what I can and following accounts on Twitter or what have you, I've seen so much and I have been blown away by the...
00:19:02
Speaker
courage and the clarity of the students who've organized these protests, I find them amazing. And I've been horrified by the response, both the kinds of responses that we've seen from administrators at the various universities, police responses in certain cases.
00:19:26
Speaker
counter protesters like those I've seen at UCLA in particular, horrified by these kinds of responses to the students. But I'm looking at this from some kind of mediated distance, and at least in the case of Penn, you're there. And so I would hate for the moment to go by without giving you a chance to say what you've seen with yourself, your own eyes.
00:19:50
Speaker
I mean, I started talking about the festival to get to this point, to say that the encampment in solidarity with Reza that's taking place on the Penn campus now should have been taken as an opportunity by the Penn administrators to right the wrongs that they committed since September.
00:20:10
Speaker
their ignorance and their misrepresentation of pro-Palestinian action on campus and just Palestinian culture and learning that has happened. Our students, in the aftermath of Palestine rights, they organized a five-week sit-in here on campus. This is before the encampment started popping up all around the country.
00:20:34
Speaker
and they called it the Freedom School for Palestine. They created a space for learning. They invited lectures, poets, speakers, held workshops. They really took on the mission of the university when the university itself relinquished it.
00:20:52
Speaker
And still they were put through disciplinary processes and punished for speaking up and protesting genocide. I mean, it's absolutely incredible that an institution, a university, is going to punish its students when they do what's right, what's absolutely right, to say no to genocide. And these same students, along with other allies,
00:21:12
Speaker
have started this encampment. And what I see every day, and I visit them every day, this is an extremely diverse and inclusive group of students. They are American, Asian, African-American, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist, LGBTQ+. They are from Philadelphia. They are from other states. They are connected to the community and to other networks of solidarity.
00:21:40
Speaker
They are very deliberate and caring. They think together about next steps. They revise and they interrogate themselves. They know when they commit
00:21:50
Speaker
mistakes, they work as a group, they have been absolutely inspiring and hope-giving. I learn from them every day how to stand firm in the face of an absolutely hypocritical institution. That is, going against its own mission and it's misrepresenting its own students and it's collaborating, whether deliberately or
00:22:15
Speaker
or undeliberately with counter protesters who are violent. I mean, the violence comes from outside of the encampment. I can tell you that firsthand. So the rhetoric that says that this is a security threat, that encampments are themselves security threat is absolutely false.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yes. So I just hope that these students remain steadfast and we can only hope that the administrators with which these students are in constant contact, listen. They've been invited to come to the encampment, see what we do, listen to the types of conversations we make happen. But sadly, that has not happened yet. And I fear that
00:23:08
Speaker
I really fear that we'll see something similar to what happened at UCLA and that would be absolutely devastating and a loss for all of us.
00:23:17
Speaker
Indeed. Indeed. Thank you for telling us a bit about your experience. Obviously, we could go on talking about, in general, the response to Palestine, to Palestinian culture, or to these protests, just as a topic of great interest and urgency for the next hour or so.
Hibba Abu Nada's Legacy and Translation Efforts
00:23:43
Speaker
But I do want for us to get to
00:23:46
Speaker
the poem and to Hibba Abu Nada. Huda, could you tell us first just in a general way about the poet that we're reading today? What should listeners know about her and how is it that you came to be a reader of her work?
00:24:12
Speaker
Yes, so Hiba Abu Nida is a Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator. And she was murdered in an Israeli airstrike on October 20th. She was 32 years old. And I sadly hadn't heard of her before.
00:24:30
Speaker
And it's something that weighs very heavily on me. And it's, I feel very guilty. And I think we all, we, we who are interested in Arabic literature, whether Arabs or non-Arabs bear or carry this guilt, the fact that we do not know or pay attention much to Raza. Raza has been under siege for many, many years, for 17 years. So Hiba Abunada lived most of her life in this open air prison.
00:25:00
Speaker
disconnected from the world, but also from the rest of the Arab world. So this is a poet who before she was murdered, she had one published novel titled Oxygen is Not for the Dead, which won an award in 2017. And she participated in at least three poetry collections, but she doesn't have a published poetry collection of her own.
00:25:26
Speaker
I first heard of her after she passed away, after she was murdered in the airstrike, when videos of her reading this poem, the one that we will discuss today, started popping up on my social media and in messages sent by friends.
00:25:44
Speaker
And it left a very powerful impression on me. This was a video of her reading the poem. Her voice, the way she performed it, the musicality, the ability to perform form and meaning in that little short reading, left an impression on me.
00:26:08
Speaker
But then in early November, I was contacted by friends who also are editors of Protean Magazine, Jay Krom and Dominic Knowles, and they said we're interested in publishing some of Hiba's work, would you be willing or interested in translating her?
00:26:27
Speaker
So I took this to heart. It felt like a calling. She was on my mind. I would play the video over and over. I had memorized this poem and her voice was in my head and here was somebody telling me, engage with her more. So I looked online and I found a poem that she had posted on Facebook, I think on October 10th. She was murdered on October 20th.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I translated it into the, it was titled in translation, I grant you refuge. It was published in Protean magazine. And it got a lot of attention. It circulated on social media. People started sending me videos of it being read at solidarity events and rallies and protests and the translation upon billboards in places like Ireland and all over the world.
00:27:19
Speaker
And that was devastating to me. It scared me a little bit. I felt guilty, and I felt like a parasite. I felt like I had done something wrong, because Hibba should have been getting all of these messages.
00:27:40
Speaker
She should have been getting the feedback. She should have been getting the requests to translate the poem into other languages. And I literally I lost sleep for a week or so and I started contacting people who I suspected would know somebody who knows her.
00:27:59
Speaker
I went on a mission to find her family. And like finally, my friend, the Sudanese poet Muhammad, Abd al-Bari, connected me with a friend of his and Raza, who finally connected me to Sumayya, Buna, her sister. And the family by then was in a UN shelter in Khan Yunus. And Sumayya, Heba's sister, responded to me with such kindness and graciousness and generosity.
00:28:29
Speaker
and I asked her permission in retrospect and then since then we've been in touch and I asked her permission for every other poem I translated and I share with her everything. Sumaya herself is a scholar and a translator. She studies English literature
00:28:49
Speaker
And before all this horror, she was a student at Georgia Southern University. And she tells me when this nightmare ends, she plans to collect all of Hibba's works and publish them and hopefully facilitate translating everything into English. And I really hope that day comes when Sumaya will be able to mourn her sister properly. It won't make up for anything, but it will at least
00:29:19
Speaker
bring the family some consolation. And us, we who have been reading Heba's work will also get to see it in its breadth. We see snippets of it. And Sumaya tells me her laptop, which they saved from under the rubble, they still haven't figured out how to turn it on. So once the laptop is revived, we will have access to more of Heba's work.
00:29:46
Speaker
Well, that is such a moving account. Thank you for sharing it. And I can say that I can make available, again, via a link, the recording that you refer to of Hiba's reading of her own poem.
00:30:08
Speaker
so that people can listen to that on their own. Huda, I wonder if now would be an appropriate time to ask you to read the poem for us, first perhaps in the original Arabic, and then again in your translation, would you be willing to do so? Yes, I would love to. Okay, so this is the Arabic first.
00:30:35
Speaker
And we'll say something after we read it about the title, because... Yes, please. She probably had a different idea. Ya wahdana. Rabih al-Jami al-Hurubahum, wa turikta anta amma ma wahlika aariyan, lasha araiya derwishu saufa yuaiduma khesirallu, wahiduma fakal. Ya wahdana. Hada zamanun jayiliun akharon,
00:31:04
Speaker
luain el-levi fil harbi fer rakhana bihi wa'ala jana zatikat ta'al yaa wahdana al-ardusukun hurratun wa biladuk el-kubra mazadun mu'atamad yaa wahdana hada zamanun jayhiliyun lanyusanidana ahad yaa wahdana
00:31:43
Speaker
Oh, how alone we are! All the others have won their wars, and you were left in your mud barren. Der Ries, don't you know? No poetry will return to the lonely, what was lost, what was stolen.
00:32:00
Speaker
How alone we are. This is another age of ignorance. Cursed are those who divided us in war and marched in your funeral as one. How alone we are. This earth is an open market and your great countries have been auctioned away, gone. How alone we are. This is an age of insolence and no one will stand by our side. Never. Oh, how alone we are.
00:32:30
Speaker
wipe away your poems old and new and all these tears and you, O Palestine, pull yourself together.
00:32:40
Speaker
Thank you so much. So you've just been listening to Ahuda Fafardin read Hibba Abu Nada's poem, which in English has the title, Pull Yourself Together. Ahuda, you said that you wanted to address, perhaps first of all, the title that you've given the poem in English. I see that
00:33:03
Speaker
It is, of course, the last line of your translation, but you suggested perhaps that Hiba might have had something else in mind, so tell us more.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, so because Hiba never published a collection, we don't have these poems in print. At least I do. I don't. Maybe the family does. Maybe they've been published in journals that I have no access to. But in the video where she reads the poem, she opens it or titles it as Ya Wahadana. Oh, how alone we are. And this is the refrain. I mean, the poem is really a devastating statement of how alone we are.
00:33:41
Speaker
And this idea of being alone in the face of calamity is a running thread with which you can connect this poem to many other Palestinian poems, including Mahmoud Darwish, whom she addresses in the poem. The idea of being absolutely alone when in the moment of the massacre, in the moment of the genocide,
00:34:05
Speaker
And it's actually a thread that you can trace all the way back to pre-Islamic poetry's idea of facing time and its horrors on one's own. The cause that is both noble and devastating to know that nobody's going to stand by you. There are moments of that throughout the Arabic poetic tradition.
00:34:30
Speaker
And it's the refrain, I think when she reads it, she says that the poem is titled, Yeah Wahadana. We decided to give it the other title, Pull Yourself Together, because as you mentioned, Kamran, it is the last line and it is really a central line in the poem. It's the poem that she pronounces or reads in the Palestinian dialect.
00:34:50
Speaker
So this is a poem written in Fusah, in standard Arabic. This is the Arabic of reading and writing, the Arabic that connects a poet living today to a poet living 1,500 years ago. It's the same. Sorry, I just want to stop you there. Just excuse the interruption just for a moment because this maybe distinguishes Arabic poetry from many other kinds of poetry that listeners will be familiar with. So
00:35:17
Speaker
You can't go a thousand years back in past and have an English language poem, for instance, that's in the same English now as was then, but Arabic poets are writing in a poetry that would have been legible a thousand years ago.
Themes of Loneliness and Resilience in Hibba's Poem
00:35:32
Speaker
Yes, aside from some words that fall out of use, some diction, the language has been alive and evolving. It's probably the oldest living language we have today. So the pre-Islamic poetry that has survived is written in the Arabic that Tiba writes in. But in daily life Arabs use different dialects.
00:35:57
Speaker
So, Palestinian is part of the Levantine dialect. I'm from Lebanon. We are one big branch of dialect. There might be accent differences.
00:36:06
Speaker
So she pronounces pull yourself together addressing Palestine. She reads it or pronounces it in her reading in the dialect, which, you know, it creates a shift in tone. And as you're reading the poem or you're listening to it, but it strikes as very immediate, almost intimate address to Palestine in the Palestinian dialect to pull herself together.
00:36:34
Speaker
I see. Again, it's a response or a comment on how alone Palestine is. There's only hope in Palestine, for Palestine, and just a reconciliation with the fact that nobody's going to save us. We have to do this ourselves.
00:36:53
Speaker
That's fascinating, and I would love it if we could set as a goal for ourselves in this conversation to come back to that final line and to take full measure of it, or to try to anyway by the end of the conversation.
00:37:07
Speaker
But let's begin perhaps, well, two things, and I think they're related. One with that line that I guess she offered as a title which you thought might not work best as the title for the translation, which is the refrain line in the poem. But that might also just, even before we say more about that line in particular,
00:37:29
Speaker
I find it often useful, you know, before getting into a reading of a poem to make some observations just about its kind of organization. And, you know, this poem I see is in your translation in any case, which is all I have access to. I certainly can't read Arabic. It is in quatrains.
00:37:52
Speaker
all but one of them begin with some version, and there are sort of two versions of that refrain line. The first line of the poem is, oh, how alone we are. We get that again at the very end of the poem. The second stanza doesn't begin with that refrain line in your translation, but
00:38:19
Speaker
I guess with knowledge in mind of your interest in ancient forms and their remediation, if that's the right word in contemporary or modern practice,
00:38:35
Speaker
Are these stanzas that I'm seeing here, are they related to some older sense of poetic form? Or is this an ad hoc kind of form that Hibba is constructing? Can you say more just about the way the poem is organized?
00:38:51
Speaker
Yes, of course. So these quatrains are my decision as a translator. This is my rewriting of the form in English. And if you notice, I tried to recreate rhyme, maybe failed, maybe succeeded. So there's the barren, stolen, and then at the end, never and together. But the original poem has a mono rhyme. It ends every verse. So the quatrains are
00:39:20
Speaker
supposed to be equivalents or representations of verses. I haven't seen this poem written down, so I don't know how she would have organized it on the page. And we have contemporary poets who write classical Arabic poetry, meaning following the classical meter and rules of rhyme the way Heba did, but who would disguise the verse, the two-hemistic verse, by rearranging it into a stanza.
00:39:50
Speaker
But it doesn't matter because the sound is so dominant. When you read it out loud, you know exactly where the verse begins and where it ends. So, Hibba's poem can be arranged in Arabic on the page to look like a pre-Islamic poem. It is made up of verses. Each verse is made up of two hemostics. It follows a rigid meter. In this case, it's al-qamil. You can scan it. It's all in meter. And each verse ends with the verb
00:40:18
Speaker
with the sound دطهد مأطمد أحد سيلكا. So this is a classical Arabic poem in terms of prosody. It's not a qasida because it's not the full form with all its transitions and its sections. It can be considered a fragment or a qata, but in terms of meter and rhyme, it is a qasida.
00:40:45
Speaker
So just to understand, each of the stanzas that you've created, each of those quadrains is one verse, which has the two parts. So in Arabic, they're also very... it's the same number of...
00:41:00
Speaker
of sounds, an alternation between silent and vocalized, you know, that meter in Arabic is different from meter in English, for example. It's much more strict, it's really quantitative, you can scan it as if it's very mathematical almost. And so the stanzas in Arabic are
00:41:24
Speaker
are the same units of sound. They're parallel, they are measured, and they are all on the same meter, as I said. Is it common or even required for the meter in which she's writing here that the verse begins with a refrain? No, that's her intervention.
00:41:48
Speaker
So she is repeating the Yahweh Adana, how alone we are, just variations on this sense of absolute devastating loneliness. That's her choice, of course. So let's say more about that choice. I mean, you said a moment ago that that idea has a very long history in Arabic poetry. I think you said long enough, even a pre-Islamic history.
00:42:24
Speaker
context in which, I mean, I can imagine, for instance, suffering a kind of personal tragedy in life and responding to it by thinking, I mean, I wonder actually sometimes if this isn't just a feature of what trauma feels like or what loss feels like, that even if you have the comfort of friends and family and so on,
00:42:45
Speaker
What are some of the
00:42:52
Speaker
to suffer a particular kind of loss is to feel alone with it. But I wonder, when you refer to this long history of that idea or theme, that topos is the, could you say more about some of the context in which that such a line might have been uttered over the long history of Arabic poetry?
00:43:17
Speaker
So the long history, I mean the Qasida, the Arabic, the archetypal poetic form, the Qasida almost always begins with some variation on the theme of time.
00:43:29
Speaker
It opens with nostalgia. The word naseeb means standing upon ruins of time and meditating or reflecting on one's mortality. And most Hasidas, and I also never want to generalize or reduce all of Arabic poetry to one thing, but there is a prevalent pattern that has allowed scholars to come to theorize a little bit about the structure of the Hasidah.
00:43:57
Speaker
often begins with meditations on time and with the calamities or the vicissitudes of time to borrow from the scholarly and the person the poet the voice the eye standing alone reflecting on their mortality the people they have lost the places they miss and had to move away from of course this is all coming out of the Bedouin landscape of
00:44:22
Speaker
pre-Islamic Arabia, where people lived on the go, they had to leave places and people often. So this is becoming ingrained in the very structure of the poetic form. I have to leave. I'm leaving people behind. I am ultimately alone, or I feel alone, as you said, in the face of time and the changes of time. So some of the key poems in the Arabic poetic tradition open with this sentiment.
00:44:50
Speaker
I am going through an experience that is so intense and I feel so utterly alone. There are many lines that one can cite here, some of them key poems, poems that, you know, have long legacies by some of the key poets, Mutanabe, Shamfara, Abu Tammam, some of the big names in the Arabic poetic tradition. You can instantly think of a verse or an opening that has the scent
00:45:20
Speaker
So she's tapping into that. And as you said in your introduction, this interests me very much. This is a young contemporary poet who has chosen to write in classical form. This is a very deliberate choice. I mean, people her age write free verse poetry or prose poetry. They don't worry.
00:45:39
Speaker
about, not all of them, some of them do. This is a very specific trend of young poets in Arabic deciding to commit to meter and rhyme so diligently, you know, not even, you know, variation. Whereas the modernist movement in Arabic poetry since the late 40s has allowed, has opened the doors for many variations on the classical meter. But here she is committing to it.
00:46:04
Speaker
to a T. And so she's tapping into that, this idea of what does a young poet do with tradition.
00:46:13
Speaker
She is writing in this tradition. She's not rebelling against it formally or structurally, but she is saying something that sounds very new, that the music is familiar, but the way she's organized and built every verse and the verses together is new. It is contemporary. There's nothing archaic or traditional about it.
00:46:36
Speaker
So she's definitely in conversation with this long history. This shows us that this is a well-read poet. This is a poet who, again, the voices of her dead ancestors are in her head. But there is somebody that she is in direct conversation with, and this is Mahmoud Darwish. And every young Palestinian poet has to have some kind of relationship with Mahmoud Darwish, whether
00:47:00
Speaker
friendly or not. I mean, this is something, a figure to contend with for sure. And here she is, you know, putting him on the spot, telling him, you know, don't you know, poetry is not going to bring back what has been lost. But she has built her poem and chosen the Raphrania Wahadana. This is a direct quotation from Mahmoud Darwish. In 1982, when the Israeli army invaded
00:47:27
Speaker
Lebanon and committed the horrific massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Mahmoud Darish was in Beirut then and witnessed this huge aggression and his friends and journalists and poets who knew him back then quote him. They say he in the aftermath of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila said
00:47:52
Speaker
Yeah. It's not from a poem. It's something he said. We are so alone. And, you know, in the aftermath of the 1982 invasion, the PLO and Mahmoud Al-Rish was with them, then were kicked out of Lebanon and sent to exile into Tunisia, to Tunis.
00:48:11
Speaker
And the phrase is very unusual, even grammatically. Yeah is an address. You say, yeah, Kamran, meaning, oh, Kamran, I'm drawing your attention. I'm addressing you. Usually what comes after the yeah is a noun.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yahudah, Yahkamran, Yahmahmud, Yahustad, a noun, whether proper or not. What comes after Yahwahdana in Darwish's phrase is an adverbial clause. Yeah, addressing our state of loneliness. So even grammatically, it's unusual, the phrase. She borrows it from him and makes it the refrain on her poem.
00:48:52
Speaker
questions him on the use of poetry in a moment like this. What is the point of writing a poem when everything that's lost cannot be retrieved, lives that are lost cannot be retrieved? So she is interested, and this is what intrigues me most, she's interested in creating a place for her in this practice and tradition of writing poetry, both as a Palestinian poet,
00:49:18
Speaker
with her argument or conversation with Darwish here, but through him with a long line of poets in Arabic who have stood in this moment of utter devastating loneliness in the face of the injustices of time.
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, I have a few questions that follow from that fascinating analysis you've given us already. One is, at least in English, I mean in that sort of long history of the poet who speaks and
00:49:55
Speaker
comments on the passage of time or the vicissitudes of time, as you've said, and in that situation feels as an individual alone. Clearly that seems relevant to this, but in your translation in any case,
00:50:12
Speaker
The first person here is a plural. It's how alone we are. Which, you know, if I were to be trying to be clever about it, I might say there's a kind of contradiction, internal contradiction in even that utterance. Because if we are a we, then...
00:50:31
Speaker
We are made up of eyes who are together and not alone. So there's something interesting to me about the kind of transposition of the we's loneliness into what is perhaps traditionally, if I'm hearing you right.
00:50:47
Speaker
the loneliness of an eye instead. So that seems fascinating to me. And then, of course, this whole question of the relationship with Mahmoud Darwish and the, as you put it, either it's a kind of friendly relation or an antagonistic one where I wanted to add perhaps both at the same time because there are friendly antagonisms and antagonistic friendships.
00:51:16
Speaker
It is really interesting to me. And so sort of two questions, one about the context of the poem and then one about a particular moment in the poem. So the first is, do you know, do we know when it was exactly that she wrote this poem?
00:51:38
Speaker
I don't, but this was an earlier poem. This is probably, so as I mentioned, Hiba lived through many wars on Raza. No, this is not, I don't think this is from 2023. This is from before.
00:51:55
Speaker
Well, that in itself is interesting, the idea of a kind of ongoing or replicable historical moment, which might on the one hand feel singular. As I think you said earlier in this conversation though, forgive me if it was in our pre-recording conversation, nothing will be the same after this, nothing can be. On the other hand, it seems like this keeps happening.
00:52:23
Speaker
Well, the this keeps happening in the lives of Gazans and Palestinians. The exceptional, incredible, unbelievable moment has been all of life for the past 75 years. But when I say after Reza 2023, nothing can be the same because now nobody has the excuse or any reason to say, I didn't know. We all know, we're all witnesses to this.
00:52:47
Speaker
impossible life that Palestinians have been leading since the Nakba. And I think this relates to your very good point about the we in the eye. Yes,
00:52:57
Speaker
I am utterly alone as a Palestinian, or the eye of the poet, the pre-Islamic poet facing time, feels utterly individual and utterly alone. But the conflation of the we and the lonely I in the Palestinian voice makes sense, because when Darwish in 1982 said, yeah, wahdana, oh how alone we,
00:53:19
Speaker
as Palestinians are, because, you know, every time a Palestinian is massacred, we are all massacred as a group. This is an injury and an aggression against us all. Nobody survives when there's an ongoing genocide. Even if you are a survivor, you haven't really survived. Even if you're Darvish in Lebanon. Even if you're Darvish living your life in Paris, I mean, what kind of survival is this? When your people, you are labeled as
00:53:50
Speaker
potentially labeled for extermination, you as your very identity is target and continuously subjected to horrific aggressions and genocide, then your eye that survives is the same eye that dies every day under the rubble and razza. So it's a very unique singular we that is alone, is still alone, very alone.
00:54:20
Speaker
Yes.
00:54:26
Speaker
then I'm noticing as well. And you please tell me if this corresponds in a kind of one-to-one way with the original text of the poem. And I was moved to, by the way, to hear you say, well, you don't have, strictly speaking, a text of the poem. You have a recorded reading of the poem, out of which you've made a text.
00:54:54
Speaker
The second stanza, or what I take must have been the second verse in the original, is the only one that doesn't begin with a version of that refrain line. And instead, in its place now, I see comes...
00:55:12
Speaker
the name of the author of that refrain line. So I guess I'd be interested in hearing you comment on that moment, what in your translation is the fifth line of the poem or the first line of the second stanza, Darish, don't you know, where as readers of the poem
00:55:32
Speaker
or looking over the poem even on the page, we might say, oh, that's in place of the refrain in that moment. So what do you make of that substitution there of his name and the direct address to him in that moment in place of the exclamation that is the refrain?
00:55:56
Speaker
Yeah, so it's actually a smart way of crediting him. You know, he is the author, he is the one who said this. And in Arabic, the phrase, the Awahdana is so well, it's recognisable. And a reader, she has the right to expect that readers will know the connection between Der Rish and the refrain. And it's interesting, and this is something lost in translation, completely my fault, is that the, that stanza or that line in Arabic begins no poetry.
00:56:28
Speaker
So it negates poetry as well. So, oh, how alone we are. But it opens less shadow. Yeah, that we should know poetry. Because I am interested in metapoetics, I like to think of her very deliberately.
00:56:44
Speaker
entering into this conversation with Darwish, but also asking herself and her readers questions about the, as you said, the efficacy of poetry. What is the point of poetry in general, but also especially in the moment of the massacre? This takes us back to, you know,
00:57:04
Speaker
poetry after Auschwitz, poetry after Gaza, how barbaric is it? Or is it not? Is it possible? Is it not? But all that aside, not to impose any other voices on Hiba Abuneda's voice, she's sincerely asking this question. What do we retrieve through poetry? And she's saying we don't, but we do. I mean, she's left us this. She's left us this.
00:57:29
Speaker
And so, first of all, a question. That's the word for poetry. It's like in Persian, too, right? Yeah. Persian, I think, borrows it from Arabic, but we won't argue about that. No doubt. I'm sure you're right. I just wanted to make sure I was hearing that correctly. And then the other thing I'm noticing is that
00:57:54
Speaker
Right, on the one hand it seems like at least the point of that second stanza, which I will read again, Darwish, don't you know, no poetry will return to the lonely what was lost, what was stolen, you know, sounds like
00:58:09
Speaker
a kind of claim about the limitations of the efficacy of poetry, the sort of insufficiencies of
The Poem's Role in Palestinian Collective Memory
00:58:19
Speaker
poetry, as though it were a kind of argument with someone who credited poetry with more power than it actually has. And yet on the other hand,
00:58:32
Speaker
I mean, one might infer from that, if one didn't know anything more than that, that the line of Darvish that she's quoting was a line in a poem. But in fact, as you tell us it wasn't, it was something he said in conversation. She's the one who's put it into a poem. Well, variations on it do come up in poems he wrote after 1982.
00:58:56
Speaker
I see. Especially the very famous in praise of the high shadow, this is again a very famous poem he wrote after he and the PLO were expelled from Lebanon. He reads it in a big conference in Algeria. It's also available on YouTube. It's like an hour long reading and there is a refrain there and he does go back to the idea of being alone. Oh how alone you were, he says, addressing himself.
00:59:26
Speaker
So there's this contradiction or paradox where she's saying or arguing with Darish that poetry cannot really save or retrieve or bring back what is lost, but in fact it is poetry that has
00:59:42
Speaker
stored her thinking and her voice for us. And it's this phrase that is allowing from Darwish, the poet, whether in conversation or in a poem, that's allowing her not only to record the moment, whatever moment she wrote this poem in,
00:59:59
Speaker
or the moment of Reza 2023, but also to store it in the long memory of the Arabic language. It's poetic memory. So yes. And that's what a poem has the right to do that, to play those tricks on us, to say, well, this is nothing. This is not going to change the world or redirect the course of history. But I, as a reader of poetry, think that, yes, poems can do that. They can transform the world and they can, they can
01:00:28
Speaker
hold history accountable. They can contend with it in ways no other form of knowledge can. And I think this is a good example of this. Maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when we look back at Reza 2023, what this poem stores for us or holds for us is something unlike anything else we'll find in an analysis or in a history book. There is something here that is
01:00:57
Speaker
stored and retrieved and preserved in the face of time.
01:01:06
Speaker
One thing I find myself thinking of is that rhetorically, at least this moment seems related to me to a moment that came up in an earlier episode of the podcast. The poem in question was W.H. Auden's In Memory of W.B. Yates, a poem written at the beginning of World War II, which contains the famous line from Auden, poetry makes nothing happen.
01:01:30
Speaker
rhetorically feels like this moment to me, no poetry will do this or that because on the one hand it's rejecting the claims for a kind of efficacy that poetry might have, but it's doing so in poetry and it's complicating its own claim by virtue of its articulation somehow.
01:01:56
Speaker
Another thing that interests me about this poem, Huda, is the, I mean we've talked about the we, but immediately from the first stanza and then throughout the poem there is also a you. All the others have won their wars and you were left in the mud, Baron. That you comes back, for instance in the fourth stanza, this earth is an open market and your great countries have been auctioned away.
01:02:24
Speaker
I don't know if that's the same you, but certainly very powerfully at the end of the poem, a you returns and the you there is Palestine. So, you know, tell me perhaps as a translator or just as a reader of the poem here and now, what work the you is doing for you here, the second person pronoun.
01:02:51
Speaker
as you know, come on very well in Arabic, the you is exposed because there's feminine and masculine, it's easy to know that the distinguish between the masculine and the feminine and throughout until the very, very last line, all the you is in the masculine. So it's easy to assume that she's addressing that we should telling him something like where's the translation when she says, um,
01:03:21
Speaker
there's an us divided us in war and marched in your funeral as one. That you is Darwish. He's the celebrated Palestinian, maybe the tokenized Palestinian, the Palestinian that people find more palatable. He's the one most widely translated and recognizable name. It's interesting that she pokes at him that way,
01:03:46
Speaker
you know people have have unite around you but they turn around and dispossess your people and they the in the auction the the countries are auctioned away but all and all up until the last nine when she says and as i said this is in the dialect but the you in that phrase is feminine and it refers to palestine
01:04:10
Speaker
And would that be a conventional gendering of Palestine? Palestine is feminine. So that's why you're right to say the you is also just as interesting as the we in this
01:04:30
Speaker
in this poem and the relationship with the rishis complex, then he is the poet, but he also stands for much more in this poem. Well, yeah, let's talk about that form of address, which feels complicated to me then, because yes, on the one hand, the poem is addressing
01:04:49
Speaker
a historically specific person with a name, but on the other hand, at least in the literal sense, it's of course doing anything but that after all that person is dead and can't hear the poem, can't receive it or read it.
01:05:05
Speaker
So, you know, I think about, for instance, the kind of complicated rhetorical structure of, let's say, a very different kind of poem, perhaps a love poem that somebody publishes, you know, you address it to a particular beloved, but the idea, of course, is that everyone else overhears it or something and you have two audiences or in the conventional structure of an ode, you know, in which you're addressing some object or some, you know, bird or whatever it is.
01:05:31
Speaker
but there is another readership meant to overhear it. In this particular case, all of those complex feelings that you just referred to that might attach to Darwish as a figure, the tokenized Palestinian or the palatable Palestinian,
01:05:51
Speaker
creates, I think, an interesting kind of version of the general phenomenon I've just described. I guess my question for you is, if in the first place, the you is Darwish, what is your best understanding of what that more general you, or the, you know, I guess the simple way of asking this question is, who does Hibba understand her audience to be?
01:06:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, at least in this poem, I think she is taking a cue from someone like a Senk and a Fanny who insisted in all of his writings, creative and essays and lectures, that the real conversation that the Palestinian intellectuals
01:06:38
Speaker
should primarily, or poet or artist, primarily address Palestinians. This is a conversation amongst ourselves. We have to figure it out. We have to pull ourselves together. So if she's addressing the recognizable Palestinian der Riesch, but she's also assuming that whoever is also being addressed indirectly or directly through this convention of the you,
01:07:02
Speaker
are all other Palestinians who ultimately are alone and nobody will come to their aid and they have to pull themselves together. So it's Palestine and every herself included and she's also addressing herself and that's another convention to create a you that's really
01:07:20
Speaker
the eye, speaking to itself, regardless of gender. That's another convention in Arabic poetry, even if the poet is a woman, the you can be masculine, but still refer back to her. So this is a conversation between a poet and another poet, a poet and the entirety of her people, a poet and her, the idea of a homeland,
01:07:44
Speaker
the idea of home that is so difficult and complicated for her as a Palestinian. But there's also in this you space for an outsider as well. It's a very spacious you that she's addressing.
01:07:56
Speaker
My question was going to be if in that sense of the Palestinian, that this proper audience being other Palestinians, if there's a distinction there made between kind of diasporic Palestinians and Palestinians in Palestine or in Gaza. But I think what I'm hearing you say is that there's something more inclusive about this kind of address, which includes also
01:08:25
Speaker
you and me, neither of whom, for instance, is Palestinian. Yeah, and I don't want to read too much between the lines here and assume that Hiba meant things that I have no way of proving she did, but inclusivity is definitely something you see in at least the other poems that I've translated. Not just passing is another poem that we translated and was published in Arab Lit,
01:08:54
Speaker
She always ends the poem with this sense of invitation. Come in. Don't lose hope. Remember that love is the strongest superpower. And you sense that the you that she addresses and tries to lift up and console is you, is me. I am not Palestinian.
01:09:15
Speaker
But I am a witness to this, to the horrors. And when I read or listen to Hiba Abu Nida, it feels like she is telling me it's okay to feel that way. And she's creating a space, a Palestinian space for me, the non-Palestinian, to contend with the
01:09:34
Speaker
the unbearable pain that I am witness to in Palestine, you and I, all of us. So there is this sense of inclusivity, this kindness that you don't expect to come from somebody who is a victim of such horrors and lived their entire life in circumstances that would justify at least
01:09:55
Speaker
at least anger, at least frustration. There's always this sense of something larger that holds us all together. And the other poems make that even clearer, especially the one that's titled, Not Just Passing, Lesne, Murarada Habiri. And she's always also interested in the longer view of time. I mean, here she mentions
01:10:19
Speaker
the age of ignorance, the age of insolence, I've chosen to translate the phrase in two different ways. In Arabic, it's as zamanun jahiliyun. And the word jahili, to describe time, means pre-Islamic. You know, the convention, the term, means before Islam. And the word for, in Arabic, for the era before Islam is derived from the word jahl, which can mean two things, impetuosity and power.
01:10:48
Speaker
but also ignorance, depending on how ideologically you're going to frame time before Islam. She uses the term and hints at the connotation that means insolence, ignorance, injustice, because we are now alone and we've gone back to a time where nothing makes sense. But you see this in other poems as well. She just looks at the long view
01:11:17
Speaker
of history and also of language. There are other moments, other poems where she does refer to how ancient the Arabic language is and how its history is really a history of love and nostalgia. Going back to what I said about the opening of the Hasidah, she plays on that and says, regardless of what happens to us and how cruel our situation is now, remember, we speak a language that launches from longing and love.
01:11:46
Speaker
And those are things that I find fascinating about, you know, the few poems that I've, you know, studied from this poet, this idea, this ability to reframe history in a way that's inclusive and based on love and is just in a time like this is fascinating. I don't know where I was going with that, but it had something to do with the phrase that comes up more than once.
01:12:16
Speaker
And just to be clear again for our listeners that one time you've translated it as age of ignorance and the next time as age of insolence. So it's the same phrase in Arabic and what you're doing is drawing out a kind of ambiguity in the phrase by giving it both ways.
01:12:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it sometimes shows up in English as Jehili. I mean, we see the word in transliteration, but Jehili means so much, and depending on context as well. So I've made some assumptions about what she means in the context of these two verses.
01:12:49
Speaker
They make sense to me. But you talk also about how she's sort of borrowing from whether consciously or just by working in a form that has a tradition, borrowing from these tropes of longing, I think you said, and love, that how alone we are, refrain, would it, I mean, is it, am I being too kind of,
01:13:19
Speaker
innocent or naive or looking through rose-tinted glasses at precisely the moment when I shouldn't be if I say that there's some idea there that by articulating that phrase again and again,
01:13:36
Speaker
whatever it's expressing and declaring, it has a kind of countervailing force, which is to make us feel less alone by saying it again and again together. That in other words, though the poem is describing a kind of state of isolation, it's performing a kind of act of solidarity or of being together.
01:14:02
Speaker
I would agree with that because I've written a short piece in Arabic that was published in al-Quds al-Arabi based on this very idea that yes, she is reiterating a devastating, utter feeling of loneliness, but what she's really doing is creating a community of other
01:14:22
Speaker
people who are absolutely alone throughout the Arabic poetic tradition. I mean, she places herself in that club, in that community of poets who stood in that same position and felt the Yah of Wahdana.
01:14:36
Speaker
And in the aftermath of that, if you thread them together, then no, you're not alone. Others have stood here before you. And what holds you together is this memory and this language and its poetic memory, the sound, even the sound of the word, wahdana, becomes a bond.
01:14:58
Speaker
Well, it's a literally kind of moving sound to hear, even as you repeat it now. I'm curious about a couple of lines that come very near the end of the poem right before that last sentence from which you draw your title. So the line I'm thinking of is, again, after we get the refrain that, oh, how alone we are,
01:15:25
Speaker
And maybe just to note again here that how alone we are, which is the phrase that you've repeated for us in the Arabic, that it comes in the first stanza and in the last with an O in your translation that precedes it. But the lines I wanted in my long-winded way trying to get our attention on here are, wipe away your poems, old and new, and all these tears.
01:15:51
Speaker
So let me just play straight man for a minute and then you can say something more interesting than what I'm about to say, which is that this seems to be a poet who is tremendously invested in
01:16:06
Speaker
old poems and in writing her new poems, so that sort of consciousness of and the hearing, as you put it earlier, of her ancestors' echoes in her ears and all of this as she sets down to write a poem herself in ways that maybe some of her poetic contemporaries wouldn't be burdened by or care about in the same ways.
01:16:28
Speaker
She is interested in tradition and attached to it in that way, and yet she's telling us to wipe away your poem. So how do we account for that apparent contradiction? Again, I think in poetry it's not a contradiction. That's how a poet really is invested in a tradition. You're invested in a tradition by learning it,
01:16:58
Speaker
digesting it, internalizing it, and then forgetting it. There's a very famous anecdote that poets like to tell and retell. It concerns the great Abbasid poet Abu Tamman, who's one of the greats of Arabic poetry. And the story goes that a young poet came to Abu Tamman and asked him, how does one become a poet?
01:17:21
Speaker
What should I do to become a poet? And Abu Tamam tells him, and of course the number varies from one account to another, memorize a thousand verses of ancient poetry and then forget them and then start writing. That's how you become a poet. There's some intimate, strong investment you have to have in a tradition, but your purpose should not be to imitate it or reproduce it. You should write against it.
01:17:50
Speaker
So there's some of that here, but again, to take it back to the moment of Raza and the fact that nothing can be the same after this, after this, the horrifying genocide
01:18:03
Speaker
Not even language and poetry can go on as usual. There's something that needs to be wiped away, as she said, and that you in this phrase, one can assume it's Deruish, but then it could be any other poet listening in or any reader even.
01:18:21
Speaker
something else has to happen. Palestine will pull itself together, will pull herself together, and then this is going to reset all of history. Or at least that's what I want to hear in this last note of this poem. The idea that language, poetry, and time are going to be reset once Palestine pulls itself together. Yeah, I'm not sure if that's
01:18:52
Speaker
that makes sense, but I want it to make sense. And here we are reading into this text because it allows us to do that. I mean, we need to see, as I've been saying for the past few months, these are poems
01:19:07
Speaker
The translations that I've been doing from Palestinian poets, especially from Reza, are translations that I need. These poems don't need me. I need them. I need to sit with them and allow and use them to make sense of so much that's unbearable and incomprehensible.
01:19:26
Speaker
And Hiba especially gives me hope because her poems always end on a note where, you know, something is coming. Something is going to be rearranged or reformulated. She does it in terms of form and sound and also the meaning of the poem. And this is definitely a striking moment of that. Your account of what's behind that
01:19:56
Speaker
injunction to wipe away your poems. As in the anecdote you gave us, to learn a thousand poems and then forget them, it makes me think of there's a line in the mid-century American poet James Schuyler's poem, Him to Life, that's something like, after learning all the names of the most impressive roses, and then he names some of them, he says, it is important to forget them.
01:20:25
Speaker
This sort of same idea. But more importantly, perhaps, this helps for me as a reader sort of cinch in the work that's being done by the switch, the modulation in the last sentence, which immediately follows that moment in the poem.
01:20:43
Speaker
into the dialect, because I guess one way to read that is that the classical form, which has been inhabited to this point, is now, at least for the time being, being set aside in favor of the language, if she's addressing Palestinians, her contemporaries.
Translation Nuances and Cultural Interpretation
01:21:09
Speaker
she might be thinking, you and I speak here and now, not in poems, you know, but in life. So the idea that the poems are sort of, I think, to use a word that you used earlier in this conversation, these poems have been metabolized and now are simply part of our daily life.
01:21:32
Speaker
pull yourself together is such an interesting phrase in English. I mean, if I think about the senses in which we use it, you know, in ordinary talk, right? Like if I'm having a day where I'm at my, you know, in an ordinary sense of where I'm at my wit's end that I'm messing up and I'm saying the wrong thing and I'm having a bad day in the classroom or something, I might tell myself in a private moment, come around, pull yourself together,
01:21:59
Speaker
You're coming apart, become coherent again. Does the phrase in the Arabic dialect that she uses, how literal a translation are you doing there? Does the same idiom basically exist in Arabic? It is an idiom. And people use it to say, pull yourself together. If somebody's feeling down, you want to
01:22:27
Speaker
prep them up, you say, or things will be okay. If somebody is sick, for example, and you're consoling them, things will be okay. It's not the best translation. I mean, there could have been other options. Remember, I was thinking about rhyme as well, and I did Never and the Together.
01:22:47
Speaker
So I allowed myself some liberties here in order to just try to recreate or find something equivalent to sound because sound and Heba's work is very important.
01:22:57
Speaker
But does the sense of the idiom have some sense of coming apart versus getting pulled in? Bring yourself in. Compose yourself. You're disintegrating. Pull yourself together. Sorry, there's clearly such a much more urgent sense of that when the question is like a nation.
01:23:21
Speaker
that isn't being, you know, what we take for granted as being within a nation's kind of sense of itself as being coherent is under threat and constant sort of threat, perpetual threat.
01:23:42
Speaker
Yeah. Sorry, go on, please. In the classroom, we read this poem and I asked my students to critique the translation and come up with their own. And they had amazing suggestions. And we paused at this last line and discussed it for a long time. And one of the points that were brought up was tone. When she says pull yourself together or should the hella ke abaled at the end,
01:24:10
Speaker
What is the tone of that line? Is she being kind and consoling or is she being a little pushy? Pull yourself, stop complaining, just pull yourself together. Right, like a parent who's scolding a child or something. Or impatiently saying, just stop these poems, wipe them all away, and the tears, there's no room for that, just pull yourself together. Or is it a different tone that's more encouraging and a little bit
01:24:40
Speaker
romanticizing the country that will eventually come out of this victorious. So we discussed it for a long time and based on that, on how we as readers are understanding the tone, there were different suggestions for the translation.
01:24:58
Speaker
But I'm content with pull yourself together because, as I said, the rhyme, but also shiddie and pull, they bring in or hold up or gather together. They work for now. What do you think of the tone? I mean, do you have a hard time deciding? Yeah. Yeah. I think the tone of the entire poem is a little defiant. There's nothing, um, uh,
01:25:27
Speaker
It's not, it's a defiant tone in the way she addresses Darwish, the way she addresses the country, even at the end, might not necessarily be mean or pushy, but there's something defiant about it, that there's no time at this moment. It seems as if there's no time for poetry. There's no time for tears. There's no time. And this, yeah, wahdana begins as something that's lamentable,
01:25:52
Speaker
It brings sorrow, but at the end, it becomes a source of power. We are alone, so we'll figure this out on our own as well. The idea, again, this comes from other poetry that one can think of from Arabic. The idea that despair is liberating. Despair is free. When you've given up hope in others, then that's it. You're not waiting for anything anymore. You're free. Hope is what sometimes holds you back or makes you
01:26:24
Speaker
Expectations, if not hope, expectations are what sometimes weigh one down. So this idea that liberate yourself from expectations and realize that the saving or the power or the way out comes from within us, the we that's the individual lonely I. I like to think that there is some edge to the final line.
01:26:47
Speaker
I hear it. I mean, I hear it in your translation, but I'm convinced that you've done a good job as a translator. As I was saying, no translation is final. For now, this works. We'll come back to it. Okay. Okay. You know, and of course, I'm reminded again of just how kind of poignant and devastating it is to think that this is a poem which
01:27:17
Speaker
if you didn't know better, you might have thought was written in October or November of 2023, but that she didn't make it, that she wrote it before and didn't survive October of 2023. She was killed by this Israeli airstrike before we could read this poem.
01:27:48
Speaker
That's just a heartbreaking thing to hold in mind as we think about it. And I feel so grateful to you for sharing the poem with me and with our listeners. Hoda, I wonder as a way to conclude if you might be willing to read the poem again, perhaps again in Arabic and then in English one more time. Yes, let's do that. Thank you. Thank you.
01:28:17
Speaker
Ya wahdana. Rabih al-Jami al-Rubahum wa turikta anta amma ma wahlika aariyan. Le shayra yadiru ishu sofa yuaiduma khasiral wahiduma faqad. Ya wahdana. Hatha zamanun jaihileon akharon. Luayna lavi fil harbi fa rakhana bihi wa alajana zatikat tahad.
01:28:43
Speaker
Ya wahdana, al-ardusukun hurratun, wa bilaydukal kubra mazaydun mu'atamat. Ya wahdana, hada zamanun jayhiliun lanyusanidana ahad. Ya wahdana, fem sahqat qasa'idakal kadimataw al-jadiadataw al-bukkah, wushudi halik, ya balad.
01:29:12
Speaker
Oh, how alone we are! All the others have won their wars, and you are left in your mud barren. Darwish, don't you know? No poetry will return to the lonely, what was lost, what was stolen. How alone we are! This is another age of ignorance. Cursed are those who divided us in war and marched in your funeral as one. How alone we are!
01:29:41
Speaker
This earth is an open market and your great countries have been auctioned away, gone. How alone we are. This is an age of insolence and no one will stand by our side. Never. Oh, how alone we are. Wipe away your poems old and new and all these tears and you, oh, Palestine, pull yourself together.
01:30:08
Speaker
So that's Huda Thakruddin reading Hiba Abunadas, Pull Yourself Together. Huda, I want to thank you again for this conversation. I've learned so much from you, and I really appreciate your making the time. Thank you, Kamra. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Of course, be well, everyone, and we'll have more episodes for you soon. Thank you for listening.