My encounter with the poetry of Palestinian writer-translator Najwa Juma was made possible by my writer-friend, Asymptote contributor Stefani J Alvarez-Brüggmann—both Najwa and Stefani are alumnae writers-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, an artists’ fellowship at Stuttgart in southwest Germany. For the esteemed and ever-relevant Arab magazine Mizna, Najwa meditates, “There is no salvation but to return / to ask the grandparents chanting / songs of farewell.” Earth, or I daresay a stand-in for the act of coming back to a liberated homeland, malignantly, “is an object of desire and longing in Palestinian poetry,” reflects Sarah Irving in Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2021).
Born three decades after the Nakba in the Gaza Strip, the largest open-air prison in the world according to HumanRightsWatch.org, Najwa is a poet, essayist, fictionist, playwright, translator, and educator whose body of work as an artist-activist chronicle the struggles of the Palestinian woman under settler-colonial occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In the words of Mizna editor George Abraham, Najwa’s poetry arrives “at an impossible music … embody[ing] a resistive spirit of a people who refuse, with the whole of our bodies and voices, to die.”
As of press time, Najwa’s fate is hinged on the disquiet: she is an asylum-seeker in Germany while her family is still in genocide-ravaged Gaza, wishing for a reunification—which you can support via GoFundMe.
In this interview, I spoke with Najwa—confined in a refugee camp in Germany and shivering from the cold of a Covid-19 infection—on the poetry of occupation and exile written from Israeli-occupied Palestine and what it means to write during a time of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
This interviewer, following Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s call to hijack literary spaces, would like to express unconditional support for Palestinian liberation and call on readers of this interview to “get in the way of the death machine”, wherever and whoever you are. For starters, consider donating an e-sim, fasting for Gaza, sharing and translating the words of Gazan writers, and reading and distributing this chapbook of Palestinian poets.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Genocide and ethnic cleansing have been ongoing lived realities in your occupied homeland. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces since October 7th this year—not including the death toll from 2008 to 2020 alone accounting to more than 120,000 Palestinian lives. Leaders of the so-called Free World are either the very perpetrators or are complicitly silent. Much of the world, the equally powerless, can only do the bare minimum: bear witness and never stop speaking against this carnage as it happens right before our eyes. In these times of the unspeakable, what is the role of poetry and what is the task of the poet?
Najwa Juma (NJ): I always loved poetry that expresses emotions, shares ideas, and creates imagery, but at the time I started writing poetry, as a refugee in my own country facing the occupation from childhood, I found myself writing to resist, to make voice for the voiceless, and to feel free under all the restrictions surrounding me. For example my first poem was about a dead Palestinian person who happened to be buried on top of a hill looking at the Gaza sea in an area only Israeli settlers can reach. The poem expressed the fear that this person feel whenever he hears them speaking in Hebrew right next to him.
Whose voices these are I think I know
Strange and fearful sounds though
I miss my mother’s hands and tears
Sitting at my grave vanishing my fears
Throughout my life I have chosen unarticulated feelings and scenes to write about. I think that the deeper you think and see, the deeper you feel and write.
AMMD: I want to talk about the elephant in the room: You are an alumna of an artists’ residency in Germany, a nation-state that has been rigid in their censorship, legislating anything anti-genocide as anti-Semitic. You are seeking asylum in a country whose government remains shameless and unrepentant in their Zionism, never learning from their Nazi past. And with your family still in Palestine, there is a huge possibility that you will be deported to Egypt.
NJ: Being a Palestinian asylum seeker here in Germany, I am not welcomed nor considered, simply because I am stateless. I will not be listed on the federal office list unless I hire a lawyer, and I was obliged to tell a different story to seek asylum, other than being Palestinian, living under occupation all my life, and being under siege for more than 17 years. And even though I had different story to tell the federal officer, who informed me before I started to tell my story that I should not to mention anything about the general situation in Gaza, my asylum was rejected. What I really didn’t understand until now, is how the female federal officer did not feel some understanding or pity for a mother who has four children left behind in an unsafe and besieged place, a poet who struggled to get out of Gaza after receiving an award for writers in conflict areas. Regardless of everything I told her, she rejected my application and rudely asked for my deportation. I would like to be clear that I have been subjected to psychological treatment since I came to Germany, and due to the medication, I have gradually started losing my concentration.
AMMD: I would like to linger on these lines from the poem “The Unknown Road” from your newest collection:
Away from destruction, drones and missiles,
Still, I could hear the warning whistles,
Still, I fear F16’s losses and bereavement
When life died by aerial bombardment
In another poem, “We Want A Normal Death,” you penned:
To be light without weight
To come silently
In its usual colour
…
We don’t want a loud death
Scattered in body parts.
Could you tell us about the settler-colonial milieu that Palestinian poets like you have been living under across generations—from the colonialist British Mandate to the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 War up to this day—and the atrocities that you write about and write against?
NJ: I was born as a refugee, with a refugee father who was displaced from Htta Village in occupied Palestine in 1948, when he was 7. I spent all my life trying to get my father to tell me about the Nakba. He preferred to keep silent, on the grounds that we were suffering from on-going Nakba ourselves and he did not want to add more miseries to the ones we already had growing up. I grew up surrounded by 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. When I was young I noticed how beautiful and civilized the houses and streets that leads to the settlements were, while our houses were moderate and simple and my way to school was sandy. When the first Intifada broke out in 1987, I was in grade 4, and the resistance started. All the children used to carry onions in their bags instead of apples; we would smell the onions every day when the Israeli soldiers fired tear gas bombs at us. Then we started carrying stones in our bags to resist. At that time they used to close the schools so we would stay home and stop resisting, but we found many places to learn and places to resist. During the first Intifada, our house was attacked every single day because it happened to be on the street where resistance fighters were setting car tires on fire and hanging the Palestinian flag on the electricity wires. My father’s daily task was to put out the burning fire and lower the flags and I used to accompany him and wait for hours with him afterwards until he got his ID back, since it was confiscated every night. There are still tons of storied and poems about that time still in my mind to be written. All I need is some peace to recall them.
In 2000, the second Intifada broke out. At that time many Israeli check points separated the street that links the south of Gaza with the north, so people had to be stopped on five or more check points every day on their way to and from the south of Gaza. I have written many poems and short stories on the checkpoints, for instance:
My professor does not read the check points
He has never stopped on one
He will never teach me their tragedies,
I will never teach him one
When Israel withdrew from Gaza, I was the most to celebrate, because everything I suffered on the checkpoints could fill folders of writing. In the last 16 years, we lived through so many wars and attacks, and the latest is the most horrible for all of us. I have lost seven friends and 60 relatives in the Israeli attacks on Gaza. I also lost my house due to Israeli bombardment, and my father’s house too. My family has been displaced six times since the beginning of the genocide and now they are living in tents in Rafah, waiting for the arrangements to be evacuated out of the dragon’s mouth. In some wars I did not write at all. Through the on-going genocide I have found myself writing only poetry, I don’t know why.
AMMD: In Silencing the Sea (Stanford University Press, 2012), Khaled Furani writes,
To speak of Palestinian poetry is to speak of a dispersion and dismemberment that befell the land and its peoples, including the poets. Poets of a particular literary site sought to stay on the land and live with the remainder of their people under an assortment of shock, shame, confusion, fear, acquiescence, hope, humiliation, persistence, and defiance.
Furani further historicises, “From the 1960s onwards, Palestinian poetry became synonymous with resistance in the Arab world.” In what ways have the thematics of occupation, resistance, exile, and liberation evolved in the new terrain of Palestinian poetry? And given the genocide that has been continually ongoing since the Nakba in 1948, where do you think is Palestinian poetry heading?
NJ: Palestinian poetry has always been the stage on which the Palestinian tragedy was performed. It has been a strong and effective means of resistance and that is why many poets were targeted by Israel and killed. Israel always believed in the power of the word and of art in general. That is why they target it in the hearts of poets, the bookshops, the universities, and the theatres.
It is noticeable that the poets of the last two decades are trying to write about different topics rather than the gloomy and tragic ones, and they justify this by arguing that there is only so much a person can bear. But in following the poetry of the younger generation, many of whom I used to train at schools or cultural centres, I noticed how gloomy and tragic their poems are and despite the criticism they received for focusing on such topics, I always said that they need to keep expressing this grief until they find relief, and then they will write about different topics.
AMMD: I had an Asymptote interview with Ugandan poet Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek whose award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016) pivoted around the 1994 Rwanda genocide. When I asked her on writing about genocide, Otoniya Juliane’s response was something that has never left me: “A more appropriate way to write about war and genocide begins with the hope that we can work towards life without war and genocide.” Can you speak further about writing about genocide, particularly in your context?
NJ: Since the beginning of this genocide, I have written out of the burnt helpless heart of a mother who is 3000 km away from her children, unable to go back to them or to get them out of Gaza. Following up the photos through social media drove me crazy many times and provoked me to write:
How can a mother be so helpless
As she does not have a magic stick
To turn a pumpkin into a cart that
Takes her through magical paths
To the pale faces and terrified eyes
of her children to lull them
or die together
AMMD: You were one of the translators to 48 Palestinian Short Stories (ed. Husam Issa Ramadan, Pennsylvania: Inner Child Press, 2023), an anthology which features short fiction by, among others, Sheikha Hussein Hlewi, Abd Essalam Atari, Yusra Elkhatib, Khairi Hamdan. I want us to talk about the anthology as well as your translation process for the short stories you have rendered from Arabic into English.
NJ: In 2019, Husam Ramadan contacted me to get one of my Arabic stories to translate and put in his book. At that time I was working on translating one of my short story collections, and after knowing about this national project, I decided to delay my personal project and join in Hussam’s work. It took us more than three years to finish the work. I translated 14 stories for the book and worked with Husam to edit all of them. The stories in the book focus on different topics, but most of them were talking about Palestinian suffering.
Some of the Arabic stories needed to be edited before translation; for others I had to go back to the Arabic version after translation to edit some mistakes that affected the translation.
“Getting Out Of The Dragon’s Mouth” by Manal Daragmeh talks about the horrible journey of a woman living in Ramallah who had to go through the military checkpoints between Ramallah and Jerusalem to visit her father in the hospital. For me, it was important to translate this aspect of suffering that Palestinians living in the West Bank are exposed to daily.
“And the Bell Rang” by Yusra Al Khatib was one of the important stories in the book for me. It talks about the bombardment of schools, as Yusra was a teacher and really lived this story. Being a teacher myself, it was important for me to show the world part of the challenges teachers and schools face during war or times of attack.
“The Sickle” by Hedaya Shamun was a real challenge for me. It had a great theme, talking about a real story of the torture and violence a Palestinian woman was exposed to in the Israeli prisons, but the challenge was in editing the Arabic version to clarify the details the writer wanted to convey. It is often not easy to convince a writer that his text needs much editing, but the writer was so cooperative and and I consider this story one of the most incredible prison stories. I also have to mention my story, “45 Minutes.” This story is a real story I lived through in the 2008 war. I wrote the exact details as I experienced them, with tens of displaced people in one room and the horror we felt for 45 minutes, waiting for the F16 missile that we expected to follow the warning, until we learned that the truce was announced. All that time waiting was just a new aspect of the violence we are exposed to.
AMMD: Are there Palestinian poets from the homeland and in the diaspora, modern or from antiquity, whom you wish to see translated—or translated more?
NJ: Mahir Raja, Khalid Juma, and Abdel Salam Atari are magnificent poets and I wish to see their poetry translated or translate for them myself. Raja lived most of his life as a Palestinian refugee in Syria, and now he is living in Germany. In his poetry you can see the suffering of the displaced Palestinian in Arab countries and in diaspora. Juma is a Palestinian poet from Gaza who is interested in folk songs, and most of his poetry talks about the Palestinian child. Atari is a Palestinian poet from the West Bank. In his poetry you will find depictions of the different aspects of suffering and resistance in the West Bank under current invasions.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Palestinian Poetry of Liberation, what books and works (in or translated into English, Arabic, or other languages) would you wish to include as key texts? Who are the figures, classic and contemporary, that you would be inclined to incorporate into its syllabus?
NJ: I would include the poets Abdel Kareem Mahmoud, Abdel Kareem Al Karmi, and Kamal Nasir. These poets are considered the first resistance poets. Mahmoud was martyred in 1948, while Nasir was assassinated by Israel in Beirut in 1973. As for Al Karmi, he was the first to write about the catastrophe of refugee camps and called for resistance.
I would also include selected poems talking about the Palestinian tragedy from 1948 up to now and the right to resist.
This piece is appearing as a part of the ongoing series, All Eyes on Palestine, in which we present writings and dialogues with insight on Palestinian literature and voices, and their singular value. We hear the Palestinian peoples, and we condemn the violation and deprivation of their human rights.
Photograph credit: Brahim Guedich
Najwa Juma is a Palestinian poet, prose writer, translator, activist, playwright, and educator born in 1978 in the Gaza Strip of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in English literature before continuing her studies in the field of education, subsequently working as a teacher for more than a decade. She has published two short story collections Shut Off (2019) and Wings of Fear (2022), and several essays for the periodical Women Voice since 2005 on the lives of Palestinian women. She is one of the translators of the anthology 48 Palestinian Short Stories (ed. Husam Issa Ramadan, Pennsylvania: Inner Child Press, 2023). In 2022, she was selected as the Jean-Jacques Rosseau Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She is a member of the General Union for Palestinian Writers and of the board of directors of the International Palestinian Creativity Foundation. An edition of her selected works, To All of You Who Are Trying to Escape from the Wings of Fear and Fly without Boundaries or Restrictions (2023), was published in Germany. To help Najwa reunite with her family in Gaza, support this GoFundMe page.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: forthcoming), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, France to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, they’ve appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize. (Website: https://linktr.ee/samdapanas)
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