The New Dark Age

It’s that time of year, when we give, if we can, something nice to people we love. The past few years on Peacepalestine, and not only at Christmas, I’ve suggested books, and this time, it’s not going to be any different. The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan was one of the best books possible to read for an understanding of Palestine/Israel history. Joe Sacco’s Palestine, a graphic novel, does for the Nakba what Art Spiegelman did for the Holocaust, and it is a book with images that stay imprinted on the mind for days. This year’s suggested book takes some of those things and combines them with a few new elements in a completely different format. Poets For Palestine, (Edited by Remi Kanazi, who you can see on Palestine Think Tank performing two of his poems), is a collection of poetry and artwork that is an emotional tour de force.

The works presented are by a wide range of (mostly) young poets. There is an overall feel of musicality and rhythm that is a soundtrack of the Palestinian urban experience as well as a facet of the Exile experience that many Palestinians live, where the need for space is always a pulsing demand. Yet, there is a lyricism and tenderness that resounds in many of these poems, bringing to mind not only landscapes and horizons, but also a sense of longing, loss and desire that comes from the tradition of the greatest love poems. There is a sense that the goal is fulfilment – always expected and never attained. The beloved is close, always there, but unreachable just when we need love most. The love of Palestine that these poets feel, (not all of them Palestinian) is the common thread, but it is a love story of lovers who lay on a bed of broken glass. Salvation and Destruction are always intertwined, the one always expecting the other, living on the edge of life and death, and always aware of it. Awareness, that is the word that comes to mind, an awareness of the importance of every little thing, of how every memory, no matter how small, is there to serve the life of the mind that carries that memory, so it better be recorded well, no second chances.

And upon reading this collection, dispersing at will the order, driven by the content in the artwork that accompanies many of these poems, I came to the conclusion that this book is a declaration of a very complicated love. Complicated because of the difficulty of obtaining it, and the need to have it. Love not only of Palestine, past, present and future, but especially of the people of Palestine, who are dispersed like the seeds in the wind, but who never lose sight of where they come from. They depict the land and its people like a swoon, a sigh and a sob. But it is more than that, there is the expression of joy, vitality and a serenity within the ritual, as habit and customs replay over and over the story of humanity. Simple things that everyone can identify with, things like sharing a tea, a bed, a smile with someone dear, and the desire that those things, the things that really count, will not be drowned out by starvation, alienation and separation.

The struggle is always there, even when it is “not”. It is part of everything, within everything that counts. And everything counts. This is what these poems tell us, about the importance of detail, the lingering of memory and the liberation of forgiveness. It is a book that shatters and shakes, comforts and embraces. In short, it is an almost perfect collection, and with a leitmotif like Palestine, how could it be any different? Palestine is a paradigm for every human experience, great and small, and this wonderful, beautiful collection presents a crystal with a thousand facets, as every poem in itself is a world unto itself.

Source: PalestineThinkTank