From our Winter 2024 issue, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People”, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, was voted the number one piece by our internal team. It’s easy to understand why—not only is the poem a stunning work that aligns its vivid, rhythmic language with the devastations and violences of our present moment, it is also translated with great sensitivity and emotionality into an English that corresponds with a tremendous inherited archive, and all the individuals who are keeping it—and the landscape—alive. In the following interview, Fakhreddine speaks to us about how this poem moves from hopelessness to resistance, from the great wound of war to the intimate determinations of the Palestinian people.
Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Reading your translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” is striking, as one gets the sense that this is the closest we might get to putting into words the unspeakable horror that is occurring currently in Gaza. What led you to decide to translate this poem in particular? What was your relationship with Hawwash’s work before you decided to translate “My People”?
Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): I have been unable to do anything other than follow the news from Gaza and try my best to stay afloat in these dark times, especially when I, and others like me in American institutions, are facing pressures and intimidation for merely protesting this ongoing genocide. Since last fall, we have been threatened and exposed to vicious campaigns for merely celebrating Palestinian literature and studying Arabic culture with integrity. If we accept the fact that we are expected to be silent when more than 30,000 Palestinians are genocidally murdered, and accept the false claim that this does not necessarily fall within the purview of our intellectual interests, we are nothing but hypocrites and opportunists.
I find a selfish consolation amid all this in translating poems from and about Gaza. I need these poems. They don’t need me. Samer shared this poem with me before he published it in Arabic, and it arrested me. It so simply and directly contends with the unspeakable, with the horrifying facts of the Palestinian experience. Samer confronts the unspeakable head on and spells it out as a matter of fact. This paradox of a reality that is at once unimaginable and a matter of fact is what makes this poem. Samer achieves poetry with a simple, unpretentious language like a clear pane of glass that frames a scene, arranges it, and transparently lets it speak for itself.
I have been following Samer’s work for many years. We connected four years ago while I was working on my book The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice. I translated a few poems of his for a chapter in that book; in fact, a couple of them were published on the Asymptote blog. We have since become friends, and in these dark times, we connect often. He sends me new poems that speak to our collective sense of rage, helplessness, and horror. His calm, composed language always attends to the horror without drama. This is sometimes more devastating than rage or lament.
SS: As our previous interview with you demonstrated, you have a deftly erudite grasp on the role of form and meter in Arabic poetry. Could you tell us about some of the poetic devices that Hawwash uses in his poem, and how have you translated these into English? What was on the formal level the greatest challenge in translating this poem?
HJF: “My People” is a prose poem in the Arabic sense of the term. It does not employ meter or a regular rhyme pattern. It is, however, lineated, and the poet capitalizes on the silences and pauses to make meaning. And as I have said elsewhere, a successful prose poem is not formless but invents its own form, and that is more difficult to achieve successfully. A key word here is structure. The poet creates tension in the poem and builds its arc through his use of negation. The poem launches from the phrase “on a land, we were told, was not our land.” The poem then accumulates negations: “We don’t know how we got here”; “In a garden—not the most beautiful garden”; “We did not come from a place or a direction”; “We remember nothing . . .”; “We have no color”; “No god promised us anything . . .”
The rare moments of affirmation are jolting, such as “when we die, we die a lot.” And the poem culminates in the last stanza with a shattering affirmation: “My people write the names of their children / on arms and legs, so they can find them / later in the massacres.” In an undeniable genocide “my people” write, gaze, touch, and hope. The string of negations which makes up a Palestinian life ends with preparations for reunion somewhere “in the same darkness,” beyond this horror. It is not cliché hope that ends this poem. It is a resilience and a perseverance that extends beyond realities and the boundaries of life and death. It is, in fact, a hopelessness that translates into resistance and perseverance, which coheres the matters-of-fact of life to a cause, as is the case for Palestine and its people.
SS: Given your expertise on twentieth century developments in Arabic literature, I was wondering whether you could tell us more about the role of Palestine and Palestinian poets in modern Arabic poetry. In the Anglophone world, we only know of those figures who were translated and achieved prominence, such as Mahmoud Darwish, but this barely scratches the surface.
HJF: Tawfiq al-Sayegh, Ibrahim Tuqan, Fadwa Tuqan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Samih al-Qasim, Salma Khadra al-Jayyusi, Mueen Bssieso, Hussein al-Barghouti, Mourid al-Barghouti, Zakaria Mohammad, and Mohammad al-Asad are only a few Palestinian poets who are no longer with us and who have contributed in both practice and thought to the rise of the Arabic modernist movement in its various phases. We can list many, many more names of Palestinian poets still with us who write in Arabic and in the many languages of the diaspora.
Palestine as a motif, a metaphor, an experience, and a cause has figured prominently in modern Arabic literature. The Nakba, or Catastrophe, of 1948, which entailed the mass displacement of Palestinian people into endless states of exile and refugeedom in the Arab world and beyond, galvanized many new trends and movements in modern Arabic literature and art in the second half of the twentieth century, and has had lasting and far-reaching consequences for Arabic cultural production more broadly.
And when a genocide against the Palestinian people is unfolding before our eyes, any study or engagement with Arabic poetry or literature or culture that doesn’t launch from a recognition of this unprecedented violence, acknowledging it as an aggression against all Arab culture and existence, is complicit and disingenuous.
SS: What is it about Palestine that allows it to achieve this status and play this role for Arabic cultural production? Does it continue to play the same role it did fifty years ago? Up until these past few months, many had seen Palestine’s political role in the Arab world as having decreased due to the rapprochement with Israel pursued by various Gulf states. This, however, has been shown to have been a policy pursued by governments rather than a representation of general opinion in the Arab world. Did a similar dynamic play out in the cultural sphere, or did Palestine never lose its place?
HJF: In the cultural sphere, Palestine never lost its place. Palestinians have always been and still are an integral part of Arab cultural life across the Arab world, even though Arab governments, regimes, and official institutions have failed them time and again. Still, every literary and artistic movement in the Arab cultural scene is undeniably shaped by Palestinian voices and experiences, in their role as editors, publishers, theorists, poets, novelists, and cultural activists.
Politically, the abandonment and betrayal of Arab governments is something we all know, underlined by the stark contrast between official government stances and popular sentiments across the Arab world. This genocide has only painfully reaffirmed this discord. Nothing will be the same after this, not only in the Arab world but worldwide. Gaza is the defining moment of our time. Gaza alone will be the judge from now on and the gauge of our humanity, or what is left of it.
SS: As it is often cited, Adorno wrote that it was “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, although he later rescinded this claim, coming instead to believe that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.” Hawwash’s poem, alongside Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die”, seems to bring alive the truth of Adorno’s latter statement. Do you have any thoughts on the purposes of poetry during and after man-made tragedy?
HJF: Poetry as the scream of a tortured person imposes itself on the world in times of horror like ours; there is no room or space for anything else other than this scream right now. But poetry, in the long run, does much more than that. It also accounts for history, and saves it from itself by transcending history as a progression of events. The moment of poetry is perpetually present, and poetry makes experiences—no matter how individual and specific—shared and universal. I know that that might sound a bit general, but I can give you an example. As I read and translate poetry from Gaza and Palestine these days, I also find myself reading Paul Celan over and over, going back to favorite poems but also difficult, strange poems and translating them into Arabic. In his confrontation with the impossibility of poetry and language in the aftermath of the horror of Auschwitz, Celan invents a German for that impossibility. He invents a language that is birthed from the silence that follows a genocide. I translate him into Arabic not because I need a new Arabic translation of poems by Celan, but because I need Gaza to translate Celan for me in this moment. And a great poem is capable of that. It can be translated across time, and it can translate all of time into one moment.
SS: Your translations of Celan must be remarkable. It would be interesting to think through how Celan’s approach to ineffability—writing after the fact in response to silence—might compare to Hawwash writing during the genocide. Are there any other non-Arabic poets who you’ve found to have resonance with Palestine at the moment?
HJF: I find myself revisiting Etel Adnan, the Lebanese-American poet and artist, often these days. Of course, the label “Lebanese-American” or “Arab-American” is frustrating. The hyphen is so reductive and misleading in the connection or bridging it pretends to represent, when in fact it is more of a representation of tension—of a chasm (or as Celan might have it, a difficult silence) from which voices like Etel Adnan’s come. Although Adnan wrote in French and English, it is not accurate to describe her as a non-Arabic poet. Much, if not all her work, is motivated by Arab issues and has clear and embedded Arabic investments. I am also rereading poems by Kamau Brathwaite, the Caribbean poet, who similarly interrogates language and lays claim to English, breaking it, chewing on it, silencing it, and invading it with other voices and positionalities.
These poets speak to me now because their poetic voices come out of the cracks one language creates in another, from the silences where much of meaning lies for the bi-lingual, the two-tongued poet. This also applies to poets who write and think in one language, but whose voices are marginalized and alienated, and so they cannot but carve a language of their own into the language that silences them. I am thinking here of Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the most powerful and distinct voices in English.
This takes us back to Adorno. As barbaric as it might seem, poetry after horror is birthed from the silence, and it continues to attend to it and guard it, especially when the silence and the language that will later speak it have violent memories of each other.
SS: This immediately raises the question of the political role of the translator during these times. To what extent do you see the act of translation as always political? As translators, do we have a duty to disseminate and share these poems?
HJF: My loyalty, as a translator, is first and foremost to the text. Translation is the most dedicated form of reading and the most intimate form of criticism. And both reading and criticism are necessarily political acts. The selection of a poem, the translation choices within the text, and the context of the translation are all necessarily political.
Activism through poetry and its translation is the sincerest and most impactful when it commits itself to the aesthetic imperative first and then attends to other purposes and demands after that.
Palestinian poetry is not only poetry for times of crisis. It is not breaking news or soundbites for the media. It is poetry for all time, and it is our duty as readers of poetry to apply to it the same aesthetic and poetic standards and expectations we do to all poetry. Our duty as readers and translators is to disseminate poetry that is urgent now and that can stand on its own, and be just as urgent one hundred years from now. It is another form of injustice to approach Palestinian literature or the literature of any oppressed people, for that matter, only as extensions or symptoms of tragedy, and read them as documents or sources of information—or even worse, as merely tokens of sympathy and solidarity.
True poetry does not serve causes outside of itself. It simply accounts for reality and experience through its own methods and avenues of thought. When reading poetically, history and politics only become relevant in the aftermath of the poem and not vice versa.
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.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She is the author of The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathūn (Brill, 2015), Zaman Saghir taht shams thaniya (Dar al-Nahda, 2019) [A Small Time Under a Different Sun], a collection of personal essays in Arabic; and co-translator of Jawdat Fakhreddine’s Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions, 2017) and The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Salim Barakat’s Come, Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021). She was the guest editor of Michigan Quarterly Review’s special issue on new writings from the Middle East and North Africa, co-editor-in-chief of Middle Eastern Literatures, and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Sebastián Sánchez is a Chilean-American poet and translator and Asymptote’s Assistant Interview Editor. They have most recently had their work published in Protean Magazine and the Oxford Anthology of Translation. They run a translation blog, de Rokha & Others, where they publish translations of Chilean poetry. Their translations focus on poetry published and written by Chilean women and queer people in the 70s and 80s during the dictatorship. These poets and writers (such as Soledad Fariña, Malú Urriola, Diamela Eltit, and Pedro Lemebel) used their position of social oppression and political repression to develop radically innovative forms of writing which expanded the possibilities of what language can do and are deeply underappreciated in the Anglophone world.
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