often we called him Brazil-Japan, an engaging name we gave him because he was always wont to begin an argument, in that systemic logic of his, by saying: “Hey listen brothers, if you want to know what’s happening in Brazil you have to know what’s happening in Japan”—what happens in one place is related to what happens everywhere else.
Unlike many of us, Brazil-Japan, or Bee-Jay, never made it through high school. He had to drop out when he was fifteen because his father died and there was no one to support the family. So he bought himself a cart and sold peanuts, kaak—a crispy bread—and roasted corn around the Corniche. We often went there, his old friends from the streets, to chat with him, talk politics, and, above all, recite poetry. Poetry is not the exclusive idiom of the educated elite among Palestinians. Rather, the opposite is true. Poetry to us is a currency of everyday exchange, a vital starting point to meaning. A child recites poetry. A politician quotes a line of poetry, to prove a point. A personal letter contains, always, at least one line of poetry. Moments of despair in everyday life, moments of joy, are celebrated or defined in poetry. There is so much poetry in the air, poetry from pre-Islamic times, poetry composed by countless poets at the height of Arab civilization, poetry during that civilization’s decline, modern poetry, obscure poetry. People define themselves and their environment in verse. Palestinians take all of this for granted—until they live elsewhere in the world.
The poet’s craft has so shaped, organized, reordered, and revitalized the tenor of our society’s life and mythology that it has become ingrained in our existential habits of spirit, our manners of ceremonial life. That is why Palestinians forget, outside their own milieu, how affected they seem, how rhetorical; and how hard it is for outsiders to understand that a people’s national anguish, or personal grief, can be best articulated in poetry—that poetry, in fact, is every Palestinian’s idiom.
At the Corniche, we would sit by Bee-Jay’s cart and recite poetry incessantly. We had memorized so much of it, even before we had gone to school, that we played a well-known game with it. One of us would recite a line, and the fellow next to him would be challenged to recite another beginning with the letter with which the previous one ended. We went on for a long while before someone got stuck.
Palestinian poetry, whether oral or written, is so rich, and poets so ubiquitous, that no aspect of Palestinian culture and no introspection of the Palestinian national psyche is irrelevant to it.
All the poetry that was then being composed, or at least that we were then committing to memory, would have been considered subversive by the Arab governments and their police. Our poets were forever exhorting the masses to struggle for freedom, for Palestine, for the Return. The struggle for freedom, whether against indigenous oppressors or foreign ones, the theme went, is a unified statement that needs no explanation. It is encompassed in forces that transcend us. Ordinary people should plunge into the tumultuous stream of history, so that articulate self-determination and political experience are not the prerogatives of princes and presidents and statesmen alone.
Despite its somber theme, the poetry we grew up with also had a kind of innocence to it, a roundedness, a celebration of the impulse to be free, a moral optimism, and an aboriginal reduction of history so that it became everybody’s concern.
The ideal of a poem whose meaning “remains hidden” is alien to us; not only because our language leans more, in its drift and form, to verse than to prose, but because it is in the craft of the poet, rather than of the theoretician or polemicist or analyst, that people seek a reflection of their mass sentiment. For centuries, in a development originating in the overlap of infinite social adaptations whose exact origins are beyond recall, our poets have appropriated the role of speaking the language of the people, of drawing on the universality of their struggle rather than on the particularity of a personal malaise.
The poet in Palestinian society, hence, has been a hero. The hero of the poet, however, has always been the fighter, the man or woman who dies in the struggle of the masses. The myth of the fighter, “the blood of our fallen patriots,” has always pressed to the core of our historical meaning.
God will free us, Palestinians used to say in the old days, at moments of crisis before our struggle began. Then soon after the turn of the century, the fighter became a sort of God himself, supplanting the real God here on earth, as His agent in the now, while He sat back to deal with issues of the hereafter.
Three successive generations of Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine, have immersed themselves in struggle, conducting their own dialogue with history. Our children have never had occasion, a respite, to adulate or emulate Davy Crocketts and Robin Hoods and football stars. Their heroes are the same as their elders’—individuals whose sacrifice for the cause of Palestine had already entered into legend, the kind of legend necessary to any society created, shaped, and organized to be responsive to situational and psychological needs such as ours.
The spell of martyred Palestinian fighters does not lie wholly in their willingness to give their lives for the people. To us, to those Palestinians who knew these fighters, lived alongside them in the villages in Palestine or with them as sons or brothers, and to those of us growing up in the refugee camps on their exploits, these fighters have signified an uninterrupted continuity in a tradition of struggle, a tradition of life, that stretched back to the turn of the century.
To us, the tradition of the mojahedeen of the 1920s (literally, those in holy struggle for the people), like the fedayeen of the 1960s (literally, those who sacrifice their lives for the people), means that every moment in our present establishes intimate links with our past, thus making our future not only tolerable to contemplate but a vital center in our historical experience. In this context, Palestinians do not have to throw furtive glances behind them; they are, rather, forced to proceed afresh every morning, leaving failed history behind.
The poet, then, simply appropriates the enormity of this collective sentiment, internalizes it, endows it with poetic form, and gives it back to the people, from whom it came. And of course the people respond.
So we, the children from Awlad Falasteen, strolled around the Corniche, or more often congregated around Bee-Jay’s cart, and recited poetry—poetry whose subtlety and richness were actually structured by, as much as it was now structuring, our own self-definitions.
Bee-Jay never felt insecure because he was possibly the only kid among us who was not going to school. He just took it for granted that since his father had died he would, as the eldest son, support the family. Luckily, his family was rather small by Palestinian standards, with only six of them around.
Still, the death of Bee-Jay’s father had come as a surprise to everybody, since he had seemed so healthy. So massive and strong. He had a thick mop of hair and keen, piercing eyes, in addition to an incredibly resonant voice, which he often used effectively to recite mawal and awf peasant songs.
Back in Palestine, Bee-Jay’s father, Abu Samir, had spent his life almost entirely on the land, with the land. He knew what was and what was not coherent with his world—which for him was the only world around—without knowing the history and the politics of Palestine. When people around him, at the refugee camp, discussed the Balfour Declaration or the White Paper or the role of Arab reaction in the nakbi of 1948 he was lost. But he had a cogently aboriginal sense of our historical life. Once, the men were arguing at one of the sidestreet cafés at the camp about how strong the Palestinians would have to be in order to defeat Zionism and return to their land. Abu Samir interjected: “Brothers, the answer is simple. Ask yourselves how many enemies we have and that is how strong we have to be. We have to have as much strength as the Zionists, the Arab governments, and America combined.”
Abu Samir would have no truck with the political banter and heated discussions around the camp’s cafés. Peasants have no business discussing intellectual issues. Is not everything they need clearly defined, with every question
