قصيدتان
أسماء عزايزة
Listen to the poems read in the original Arabic by the poet:
Decades after the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, the surviving third and fourth generations, whose grandparents had been dispossessed, massacred, and exiled, live on in a divided reality. The establishment of the Zionist state known as Israel created a few geopolitical groups within the Palestinian people: the refugees; the West Bankers and the Gazans; the diasporans; and the 1948ers. The latter live in a paradoxically privileged state. They are sheltered by the very borders that were imposed upon them and dispossessed their people. They are often protected from the wars and death that befall others beyond those borders, realities that they often experience secondhand. Asmaa Azaizeh’s imagery captures that in-between state, where the present divides and the shared past rejoins. In her transition between past and present verbs and conditionals, Asmaa distinguishes and joins two states of being and narration: hypothesis and affirmation.
Asmaa Azaizeh is a Palestinian poet, journalist, and cultural manager based in Haifa, Israel. She won the Young Writer Award from the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2010 for her first volume of poetry, Liwa. Her second poetry collection, As The Woman From Lod Bore Me, was published in 2015, and her third collection, Don’t believe me if I talk of war, will be published soon by Al-Mutawassit, Milan. Asmaa has also worked as an editor of print newspapers, a journalist, and a presenter for various TV and radio stations. She currently works as a freelance writer for cultural magazines, and as the artistic manager of Fattoush, a bar and art gallery in Haifa.
Yasmine Haj is a writer, editor, and translator. She completed her master’s in comparative literature at the University of Toronto with a focus on Modern Arabic literature and French New Wave cinema. She is a co-founder of Dalaala, a collective for translating poetry, fiction, films, and other texts from and into Arabic and English.
