Posts by Eric Calderwood

Resisting Death, Inanimateness, Silence: Mohammed Sawaie on Palestinian Poetry

January 11, 2023 | in Interviews | by Eric Calderwood

It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians. . .

Earlier this year, Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, published a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems (Banipal, 2022), including poems by sixteen Palestinian poets from diverse backgrounds. I recently had a chance to interview Sawaie over email about this work. Our correspondence ranged over several topics, including the inspiration behind this translation project, the criteria Sawaie used to select the poems in his anthology, the choices he faced in rendering different rhetorical devices into English, and the place of the anthologized poems in Palestinian literary history and in the Palestinian struggle.

Eric Calderwood (EC): Talk to me about the inspiration behind this project. Why did you think that now was a good time to publish a new anthology of Palestinian poetry?

Mohammed Sawaie (MS): The genesis of the project began with reading the poem “He is calm and so am I” (“Huwa hadiʾ wa-ana ka-dhalik”) by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with two of my assistants, while directing a University of Virginia language program at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 2012. It occurred to me then to translate this poem—and the comments on the translation led to a Eureka moment! Following that summer, I started to think seriously about compiling a list of Palestinian poets and their poems to make their translation available to English readers, who, outside specialists, are generally not informed about Arabic literature, let alone Palestinian literary production—especially poetry.

As Palestinians continue to struggle for their home country and their own independent state, they are continually faced by a strong adversary that controls every aspect of their lives. In their struggle against Israeli occupation, the daily violent acts culminate in flareups, devastating wars, invasions of homes, killings, imprisonments, and so on. Such events often go unreported in the Western media, unless there is a large-scale war. Nevertheless, due to the wide use of social media, more and more people are becoming increasingly aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians—the female and male poets of varied generations—who are best qualified to tell their stories, their history, their suffering, their alienation in their diasporic places of residence, and their aspirations for a safe home to return to, to identify with, and to build, on par with other fellow human beings.

EC: In the anthology, there are Muslim and Christian poets, poets with varying levels of education, as well as poets born at different moments of the twentieth century and who lived through the major events of modern Palestinian history—from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), to the Nakba of 1948, to the present. Could you discuss your selection process for this anthology?

MS: Readers may not be aware that Palestinians enjoy one of the highest levels of education in the Arab world despite their nakba, their expulsion from their indigenous homeland, and dispersal in the world. Poetry is often believed to rise and develop because of adverse situations; consequently, there are innumerous poets among the fifteen million or so Palestinians worldwide, poets of varying degrees of quality and recognition by readers in the Arab world.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to say a word about the style of Arabic poetics. Prior to the 1940s, Arab poets—Palestinians included—largely composed in the classical mode of composing poetry, which means adhering to one meter and the same rhyme throughout the poem (regardless of length). Around the mid to late 1940s, many Arab poets forsook this classical style and adopted a new mode of writing poetry, called al-shiʿr al-hurr, free verse, in which the monometer and monorhyme were abandoned. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Eric Calderwood

Language:

Arabic

Place:

Palestine

Writers:

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Teeming With Speech: Youssef Fadel’s A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me

October 30, 2019 | in Reviews | by Eric Calderwood

In Fadel’s hands, the entire nonhuman world is brimming with life, and even with volition.

A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me by Youssef Fadel, translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson, Hoopoe, 2019

A massive construction project looms in the background of Moroccan author Youssef Fadel’s novel Farah (2016), beautifully translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson and published under the title A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me (Hoopoe 2019). The project in question is the building of Casablanca’s Hassan II Mosque, named after the Moroccan ruler who commissioned it. As Elinson explains in a concise and illuminating foreword to his translation, King Hassan II (r. 1962-1999) announced his plan to build a grand mosque on Casablanca’s Atlantic shoreline during his 1980 birthday celebrations. The mosque was inaugurated in 1993, on the eve of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Designed by a French architect and built by a French firm, the mosque project required the labor of over thirty thousand workers, including thousands of master craftsmen who carved, chiseled, sculpted, and formed its dazzling array of tile mosaics, stucco moldings, and decorative woodwork. The structure that emerged from this massive effort accommodates up to one hundred and five thousand worshippers, making it the largest mosque in Africa and one of the largest mosques in the world—but such grandeur comes at a huge cost, both financial and human. The mosque came with a whopping price tag of over half a billion US dollars, and much of the financial burden fell on Moroccan citizens, who were required to help pay for the mosque through a public subscription program. The project also upended life in Casablanca, particularly for the people who lived in the densely populated neighborhood that was razed to create room for the new mosque.

These upheavals are at the heart of Fadel’s novel, which explores the experiences of the Moroccans who both lived in the shadows of, and contributed to, the construction project, and who were eventually displaced to make room for the massive mosque that they had helped build. A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is Fadel’s tenth novel and the final book in a trilogy about contemporary Morocco. The novel centers on an ill-fated love story between two young Moroccans: Farah, who escapes her hometown of Azemmour and comes to Casablanca to pursue her dream of becoming a singer, and Outhman, who works with his father as a carpenter at the mosque. The lovers’ fate is sealed in the novel’s first chapter, where we learn that Farah is the victim of a brutal acid attack, witnessed by Outhman. The rest of the novel is devoted to unpacking the events leading up to the acid attack on Farah. The story is told through an intricate narrative structure that unfolds along multiple timelines and from multiple perspectives, meting out information in suspenseful portions whose full meanings do not become clear until the last page. Each of the novel’s seven sections opens with a chapter narrated from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator located in the present, some twenty-three years after Farah’s death. The internal chapters of each section are narrated in the first person from Outhman’s perspective, beginning at the time he met and fell in love with Farah while working at the mosque’s construction site. The last chapter of each section is narrated in the first person from the perspective of another character in the novel, such as Farah or Outhman’s mother. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of working-class life in Casablanca, one that uses the tragic love story between Farah and Outhman as a launch pad for exploring the tensions running through Moroccan society in the 1980s and ’90s and, in particular, for laying bare the tremendous costs that the Hassan II Mosque inflicted on the people living around it.