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Tal Nizan (editor) Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984-2004
Published 2005 ISBN: 965-7120-47-0 |
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With an Iron Pen | Tal Nizan (editor)
SAMPLES © Copyright for poems and introduction by the editor, the poets and their translators. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be stored, transmitted or published, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen Contents
"Every fear, every doubt, every objection": I. And the Land, Is It Yours To Inherit?
Meir Wieseltier / Move a Little II. The Arrogance of Our Self-Destruction
Maxim Gilan / In Enemy Land III. The Fruit Has Died Before the Tree
Tuvia Ruebner / [This is not what we wanted] IV. And the Hands - They Were the Soldiers' Hands
Rami Saari / Soldiers V. And If the Dead is a Child, Will Someone Gather Him Up?
Aharon Shabtai / To a Pilot VI. He Who Demolishes a Person's Home
Dvora Amir / Retinal Tear VII. Sing for Us from the Songs of Zion Dahlia Ravikovitch / They Required a Song of Us VIII. Things that Have No End
Tuvia Ruebner / [Oh, let the darkness cover our eyes!] IX. Perhaps It Can Still Be Stitched Together
Yehuda Amichai / from Houses Houses and One Love
"Every fear, every doubt, every objection": (English translation and copyright by Rachel Tzvia Back) Ideological or political poetry in a broad context spreads itself out over a range of thematic interests, from straight-forward political subjects to poems wherein the "I" itself is a political statement. In contrast, this anthology - With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984-2004 - seeks to narrow the framework, and to track the trajectory of Hebrew poetry in the last 20 years in its relation to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people and their lands in the West Bank and Gaza. In the 38 years of its duration, this occupation has penetrated and changed every aspect and realm of Israeli life - including, of course, the realm of poetry. The previous wave of Hebrew protest poetry unfolded in the wake of Israel's incursion into Lebanon in 1982, and those poems were collected in two anthologies: No End to the Battles and the Killing (Kibbutz HaMeuchad Press, 1983) and Border Crossing (Sifriat Poalim, 1983). Regarding the unity of stance, the situation of those poets was different and, in a fashion, "simpler" than that of poets protesting the occupation: in those poems the poets focused their protest on one specific war which had at its center a defining trauma - the massacre in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. In contrast, the Israeli occupation is a multi-faceted, multi-front phenomenon that has spanned almost four decades, wherein trauma follows trauma with relentless speed, horror and frequency. Despite the ever-increasing severity of the war crimes of the occupation, the violence and killing of innocents occur on both sides of the Green Line: also the occupied Palestinians murder innocent Israelis through suicide bombs in civilian centers. Indeed, the two-sided - albeit unequal - nature of the horrors in the Middle East complicates the rebuke and protest of Hebrew poets who must address also the violence perpetrated by the oppressed. Aside from a few exceptions, during the twenty years represented in this anthology and until the end of the 1990s, Hebrew poetry all but ignored the occupation. However, in the last five years, the necessary and long-awaited moral and literary awakening has occurred, and the phenomenon of protest poetry has spread. Every year, more and more poets are writing protest poetry, and this genre of poetry no longer belongs to the "political poets" alone. Alongside poets who have devoted entire books or poem series to protest against the occupation (for example Aharon Shabtai, Ramy Ditzanni, Maxim Gilan, Rami Saari), and alongside poets such as Yitzhak Laor and Meir Wieseltier for whom political protest has been a mainstay of their poetic oeuvres, there now stand more and more poets who are unaffiliated politically but who are producing work addressing the political events of this region in general and the injustice of the occupation specifically. This anthology includes 99 poems by 45 poets, with poets ranging from octogenarian Tuvia Ruebner, who is traditionally identified as a Holocaust generation poet, to Gil Engelstein, a high school student; from recipients of the illustrious Israel Prize for Poetry to young poets who have yet to publish their first books; from Salmaan Masalha, an Israeli-Arab poet who writes in Hebrew, to Yosef Ozer and Dotan Arad who are identified with the Jewish religious poetry journal Meishiv HaRuach. The extended silence has at last been broken, and protest against the occupation has become an important, central and generative subject of contemporary Hebrew poetry. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, the poets of this anthology have utilized the obstacles set before them to create a new arsenal of techniques and devices to represent the situation. Thus, the sense of being a minority and of impotence before the omnipotent nature of the occupying structure expresses itself in a wide range of tones: sorrow ("a type of sigh remains because things are falling in on themselves", Arik A.); lament ("No, no, this is not what we wanted, not this," "Oh, let the darkness cover our eyes!", Tuvia Ruebner); doubt ("the protest lines are all seen as the actions of a leftist masturbator/… why bother", Ramy Ditzanni); loathing ("with what cement have they filled your heads", Aharon Shabtai); weariness ("the land / is as heavy and tired as I am / tired to death", Asher Reich); despair ("To where can we still flee from ourselves?" Tuvia Ruebner; "How horrible is this place, our home", Liat Kaplan); and pessimism ("In any case there will be another war", Dalhia Falah; "And no one will be left to collect all the corpses", David Avidan). One type of rigorous poetic protest, which may be defined as the poetics of empathy, expresses itself in this collection in poems of mourning and rage over the Palestinian victims of the occupation - victims who are invisible and nameless to the military forces, the governing structures and to a large part of the public and the media. This type of poetry is dominant in the work of Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of the first Israeli poets who resisted any hierarchy of suffering or distinction between victims, and who consistently and vigorously protested the usage of "our" dead as a justification for war and the glorification of death as holy and heroic. It is important to emphasize the degree of resistance apparent in this type of poetry, which goes beyond compassion and identification with the victims: the oppression of another people necessitates a denial of their humanity. Thus, empathy toward that same people is dangerous and forbidden, for it might undermine the certainty of the finger on the trigger or the foot on the bulldozer's pedal. Indeed, the subversion of these poems expresses itself in their insistence on foregrounding the humanity and humanness of "the enemy". Beside its literary and documentary value, protest poetry grants its reader a guide toward resistance in a time and place where resistance is rare, pushed to the margins, deemed unacceptable. Before a ruling authority whose "horrible self-righteous scream" increases the more it tramples others "with a steel leg" (in Natan Zach's words), before a conformist media that, by and large, dismisses "every fear, every doubt, every objection" from its reports (in Aharon Shabtai's phrase), poetry becomes a rebellious act that unsettles axioms, generates question-marks, and asserts the right of readers and writers as one to doubt, protest and rise up. Therefore, the importance of protest poetry in general and this collection of Hebrew protest poetry specifically cannot be measured in quantitative or practical terms. Often the footprints that this poetry makes in the minds and hearts of the public can be seen only from the distance of time. The ethical stand taken by the poets and poems of this anthology represents today the minority position - a minority that is seen as "self-hating" and desecrating sacred ideals by the majority of the Jewish Israeli public. And still, throughout history, literary creations have preceded - have, in fact, precipitated - changes in attitudes and societal norms. The day will come when the poems collected in With an Iron Pen will be read as the voice of common-sense and of honest hearts in dark times. Poems [Palestinian souls] / Dotan Arad
1.
salaam aleichum
Palestinian souls are standing behind the wall
2.
3.
The souls of Palestinians are growing thicker
woven in secret
I take them for a walk through the garden. Lest you bear the blame of exile. Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
Torn / Tal Nitzan
At night he comes to me,
Translated by Tal Nitzan, with Vivian Eden
Ballad for an Old Palestinian / Dvora Amir
The soul is a black forest
By day a downy cloud seals the roof of his house. By night
Today it is told among the hills - his grandson was shot.
The soul is a black forest
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
Soldiers / Rami Saari
What's left behind us, what do we leave behind?
Translated by Lisa Katz
Poem for Mohammed / Admiel Kosman
Mohammed, oh Mohammed, are you still awake?
Something like that.
Strange: can a blind man be a watchman?
The wind blows Something like that.
Ridiculous. After all I've been duly appointed as a representative
The wind blows Something like that. Who knows? Listen
and you'll hear me:
The wind blows Something like that.
Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz
A Mother is Walking / Dahlia Ravikovitch
A mother is walking with a dead child in her belly
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
They Required a Song of Us / Dahlia Ravikovitch
"How shall we sing a song of Zion
Sing for us from the songs of Zion
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back Note: The title of the poem and its first line - like the epigraph from Lea Goldberg - are all taken from Psalm 137, which opens with the famous phrase "By the rivers of Babylon…". The lines "we have hung your lyres / far away / on the willows" are a revision of verse 2 from this same psalm.
[Oh, let the darkness cover] / Tuvia Ruebner
Oh, let the darkness cover our eyes!
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
[The heart is parched] / Tuvia Ruebner
The heart is parched. The dirty blood is shining.
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
One from Here / Salman Masalha
It changes so fast,
And at times like these, it's dangerous
Translated by Vivian Eden
The Love of Truth / Yitzhak Laor Out of the love of truth, the source of all memory, I'm saving for you, my son, your first toy, and the first tooth that fell, a shining diamond your excitement over the wobbly tooth, out of the love of truth, the name of the midwife, Zamira, who showed you to me for the first time, and the name of the neonatal specialist, Dr. Boaz, who saved your premature life and watched over it (and over the lives of thousands of Jewish and Arab babies) like a blue blue flower, and the video clip from the news on which the boy Muhammed al-Durra from Gaza is begging for his life, before he is shot in his father's arms, the father begging for his son's life and the soldiers can't restrain themselves, because at home they aren't allowed to kill children in their fathers' arms, not in the doctor's waiting room, or on the bus traveling at dusk from the market back to their neighborhood, I'm saving it for you my son, so you can watch it again and again, as part of your childhood memories, for the sake of truth, which is the source of memory, the place to distinguish good from bad, to know whom to fear and whom to forgive, and to whom to extend a soft hand, keep your hands soft my son (and I've destroyed the photos of me in uniform, so you should know)
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back Note: Twelve-year-old Muhammed al-Durra was shot at the Al Shuhada Junction, while trying to return home with his father. Video footage of Muhammed trying to hide from IDF sniper fire in his father's arms was aired the world round. Muhammad died in his father's arms, as ambulances were not allowed into the area to evacuate him for medical care. 
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 Tal Nizan (editor) 
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