“I’m bowled over,” I told Sam.
A movie unlike any other, stories unlike any others, and one tragedy giving birth to itself inside another.
Despite Lanzmann’s Zionism, his peacock-like personality, and his later movie “Tsahal”, in which he glorifies the Israeli army with a blind partiality informed by a loathsomely romantic attitude towards an armed force that hides its amorality under claims of morality, my admiration for “Shoah” has never gone away. I regard it as a humane work in which the content is greater than the form, and one that succeeds in telling what cannot be told.
Nevertheless, I feel perplexed when faced by fate’s coincidences and try to find an explanation for them, which I cannot. The coincidence of my meeting with Murad is understandable and logical: falafel, hummus and nostalgia led the seventy-year-old to the Palm Tree restaurant. But what possessed Claude Lanzmann to bring a group of Holocaust survivors and men who’d worked in the Sonderkommando teams to the Ben Shemen colony, just outside Lydda, to tell of their suffering when burning victims, victims who were of their own people? We may be sure that Lanzmann was unaware of the existence of a Palestinian ghetto in Lydda. Even if echoes of the great expulsion of 1948 ever reached him, it’s certain that, if he’d had to choose between it and the stories of the Nazi Holocaust that he decided to tell in his movie, he would have granted that marginal event no consideration. All that is understandable — or, let us say, something that I try to understand, having drunk that experience to its dregs, and adopted the identity; indeed, at one stage of my life I believed I was Jewish, the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, my recall of scenes from that coincidental event fifteen years before my encounter with Murad al-Alami, who witnessed the transformation of the Palestinian youth of the ghetto into a new form of Sonderkommando, shook me to the core.
Why did Claude Lanzmann bring the Jewish men of the Sonderkommando to Lydda?
And would the Franco-Jewish writer and movie-maker have been able to imagine a possible encounter between those poor men and Murad and his comrades, who carried out the burning of the corpses of the people of Lydda in obedience to the orders of the men of Tsahal?
I have no idea, but what makes me angry is that no one confronted the French director with this truth, which was known to all the youth of the Lydda ghetto. Maybe the tragedy has to remain enveloped in silence, because any discussion of its details would disfigure the nobility of that silence.
Murad was right to be silent.
Murad’s silence resembles that of Waddah al-Yaman. Now I understand why Murad severed all ties with me and why Waddah al-Yaman rejected my attempt to identify with his story.
It’s the story of the sheep that was driven to slaughter and never opened its mouth.
That is the story of the children of the ghetto.
I don’t want to draw a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba. I hate such comparisons and I believe the numbers game is vulgar and nauseating. I have nothing but contempt for Roger Garaudy and others who deny the Nazi Holocaust. Garaudy, who walked the tightrope of ideology from Marxism to Christianity to Islam and who ended up a mercenary at the doorsteps of the Arab oil sheikhdoms, committed the crime of playing with numbers, reducing that of the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis from six million to three million. No, Monsieur Garaudy, in the Holocaust everybody died, for whoever kills one innocent person is like him who kills all humankind. As it says in the Mighty Book, Whosoever slays a soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, shall be as if he had slain humankind altogether.
That said, what is the meaning of the chance encounter of these two incidents? Did they meet so that the banality of evil, the naïvety of humankind and the insanity of history could be laid bare?
Or does their encounter point to the apotheosis of the Jewish issue at the hands of the Zionist movement, which transformed the Jews from victims into executioners, destroyed the philosophy of existential Jewish exile and, indeed, turned that exile into a property of its Palestinian victims?
I swear I have no idea! But I do know that I am sorrowful unto death, as Jesus the Nazarene said when he beheld the fate of humankind in a vision.
Translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies
ASHUR ETWEBI
A Dog Hides Its Tail in the Darkness of Night
In my village, Etwebia, in the last drop of wine in the glass
I see the tree I planted in front of the guest room
I see its yellow flowers blossom in winter
where I used to sit with the red-chested bird
I drink my glass cold, the way I like it
and he takes peanuts from my hat the way he likes
Oh, my tree, my winter tree!
Oh, my Etwebia, captured by militias
I used to enjoy the pouring rain
I used to hear it falling through thirsty sand
Now, in a country ravaged by death, rain loses its sound
Drops tangle in blue, fall, fall, fall silent
A dog hides its tail in the darkness of night
The water rises high. The olive tree listens in
Translated from Arabic by Ashur Etwebi and James Byrne
MOHSEN EMADI
from The Poem
VII.
In my language
every time everybody suddenly falls silent,
a policeman is born.
In my language
on the back of each frightened bicycle,
three thousand dead words are sitting.
In my language,
in murmurs, they make confessions,
in whispers, they wear black,
in silence,
they get buried.
My language is silence.
Who will translate my silence?
Translated from Persian by Lyn Coffin
COSMOPOLITANISM AND ROOTLESSNESS
THE CHILEAN POET AND diplomat Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945), aside from being only the fifth woman, and second non-European after Rabindranath Tagore, and while Mistral isn’t as widely read today as when she was alive, her work has consistently attracted passionate readers and gifted translators, not least of whom Langston Hughes and Ursula K. Le Guin. One of Mistral’s most commented-on poems is “La extranjera” (“The Foreign Woman”), which some critics claimed prophesied Mistral’s death far away from her native home.
As the translator Stephen Kessler has noted: “The murder of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) and the scattering of others into exile or into the mountains to defend the Republic against Francisco Franco’s fascist invaders was a cultural cataclysm to match the political and military catastrophe of the next three years — a catastrophe that turned into the protracted nightmare of a four-decades-long dictatorship. In 1938, when things were looking especially bleak in Spain, Luis Cernuda (1902–63) accepted an invitation to lecture in London and simply never returned. He taught there and in Glasgow, Scotland, until 1947, when he took a position at Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in Massachusetts, where he wouldn’t even have the invigorating experience of lusting after his students. Openly homosexual in his life and his writing, Cernuda chronicled his misery during these years of exile in the north even as he continued to create some of his best poems and to establish himself as one of his generation’s most astute and respected critics.”
Arguably one of the most famous of the Spanish Generation of ’27 poets, Cernuda’s “Impression of Exile”, most likely written either in 1939 or 1940, finds the poet mingling with a crowd in the “salon of the old Temple, in London” and suddenly overhearing, “From someone’s lips”, “Heavy as a falling teardrop”, the single word “Spain”, which carries with it all the emotional burdens of the Republic’s downfall and the permanent loss of his motherland, given that Cernuda would perish in exile twelve years before the death of Francisco
Franco.
Another poet fated to die in exile before witnessing the demise of the dictatorship that exiled them in the first place was the Díli-born author Fernando Sylvan (1917–93), a Timorese poet who died in Portugal a mere six years before Indonesia ended its military occupation of East Timor (1975–99). Despite living in the womb of the colonial power that dominated his homeland for close to three centuries, Sylvan devoted his creative energies to the resurrection of an independent artistic consciousness among the Timorese, and as one of his translators, David Shook, has pointed out, the distance from his homeland did not diminish his appeal, given that his work was “clandestinely distributed through occupied East Timor in facsimile editions”.
After marrying a woman of Vietnamese descent, which was then illegal in his native country, in 1975 the South African painter, poet and activist Breyten Breytenbach (1939–) snuck back to South Africa on behalf of Okhela, the anti-apartheid organization he had helped establish, in order to secure funds for pro-African National Congress activities and establish a network of contacts. Ironically, it was members of the ANC who eventually gave him up to the South African government, which, he later discovered, had been kept abreast of his every step from the outset of his clandestine return. Convicted in late 1975, Breytenbach served two years in solitary confinement in the maximum-security section of Pretoria’s prison, incarcerated in a six-by-five cell. In his groundbreaking collection of essays, Notes from the Middle World (2009), part of Breytenbach’s “Middle World Quartet”, the South African poet and painter sketches out his definition of what he has called the Middle World, essentially an elusive transnational cultural space that lies beyond one’s origins and even one’s exile from one’s origins. As Breytenbach writes: “To be of the Middle World is to have broken away from the parochial, to have left ‘home’ for good (or for worse) whilst carrying all of it with you and to have arrived on foreign shores (at the outset you thought of it as ‘destination’, but not for long) feeling at ease there without ever being ‘at home’.” Is this just exile, he asks?
Maybe. But exile is a memory disease expressing itself in spastic social behaviour: people find it a mysterious ailment and pity you greatly […] Exile could be a passage and you may well speak of “passage people”. Yet, the Middle World is finality beyond exile. For a while at least the reference pole will remain the land from which you had wrenched yourself free or from where you were expelled. Then, exile itself will become the habitat. And in due time, when there’s nothing to go back to or you’ve lost interest, MOR9 will take shape and you may start inhabiting the in-between. The terrain is rugged, the stage bathed in a dusty grey light. It is not an easy perch.
Writers like the Pakistani-born Aamer Hussein (1955–) appear to exist very comfortably in Breytenbach’s Middle World, as is evidenced by “Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda”, the first story in Hussein’s short-story collection Insomnia (2007), which was written in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist bombings in the UK in 2005, and which explores the rising tide of Islamophobia in Britain and elsewhere. It features a Venezuelan complaining of how “Muslims in Europe are a demographic problem”, to which the narrator replies: “I guess I’m a Muslim in Europe too […] And foreign wherever I go.”
9 Breytenbach’s acronym for ‘Middle World.’
GABRIELA MISTRAL
The Foreign Woman
“She speaks with an accent of her savage seas,
with who knows what algae and who knows what sands;
she recites prayer to God without baggage or burden,
aged as if she were dying.
In the vegetable garden that made us foreign,
she has placed cactus and unfurled herbs.
She glows with the desert’s heavy breath,
and she has loved with a passion that bleaches her,
that she never talks about and that if she told us
would be like mapping some other star.
She will live among us for eighty years,
but always as if she’s just arrived,
speaking a language that gasps and moans,
understood just by little beasties.
And she’s going to die in our midst,
some night she most suffers,
with only her fate for a pillow,
from a death both quiet and foreign.”
Translated from Spanish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and David Shook
NELLY SACHS
I’m searching for my Right to Roots
I’m searching for my Right to Roots
through this Geography of Countries at Night
where Arms opened to Love
hang crucified along the Lines of Latitude
fathomless in Expectation —
Translated from German by Martin Kratz
LUIS CERNUDA
Impression of Exile
It was last spring,
Nearly a year now,
In the salon of the old Temple, in London,
With its old furniture. The windows looked out,
Past old buildings, in the distance,
Between the lawns, on a grey zigzag of river.
Everything was grey and looked tired
Like the dull sheen of a sick pearl.
There were elderly gentlemen, old ladies
With dusty feathers in their hats;
A murmur of voices coming from the corners
Near tables with yellow tulips,
Family portraits and empty teapots.
The shadows falling
With a cat-like smell
Were stirring up sounds in kitchens.
A very quiet man was seated
Near me. I could see
The shadow of his long profile at times
Looking up absently from the rim of his cup,
With the same weariness
Of a corpse coming back
From the grave to some mundane gathering.
From someone’s lips,
Over in a corner
Where clusters of old folks were talking,
Heavy as a falling teardrop,
Came one word: Spain.
An unspeakable fatigue
Circled my skull.
The lights came on. We left.
After descending long, dim flights of stairs
I found myself in the street,
And next to me, when I turned,
I saw that quiet man again,
Who said something I didn’t quite get
In a foreign accent,
A child’s accent in a voice grown old.
He followed me, walking
As if all alone beneath an invisible weight,
Hauling his own gravestone;
But then he stopped.
“Spain?” he said. “A name.
Spain is dead.” The little street
Suddenly turned a corner.
I watched him vanish into the damp shadows.
Translated from Spanish by Stephen Kessler
FERNANDO SYLVAN
Invasion
They wanted to separate my heart from my island
But I had a green ribbon of palm leaf
On my head
And I crossed the riverbank where
My brothers the crocodiles lived
And because of the emblem of the green ribbon of palm
They didn’t devour me
They remembered
That it was me
The prince
Who thousands of years ago saved
The first one of them all
From the fiery sand
And covered him in water
They wanted to separate my heart from my island
And men from far away searched for me
From Cupão to Lautém
And finally they saw me
Crossing the riverbank
And once I was on the other bank
they entered the waters
But no one separated my heart from
my island …
They didn’t have green ribbons of palm leaf
On their heads
Translated from Portuguese by David Shook
GISÈLE PRASSINOS
Nobody Is Going Anywhere
There is someone who is lost.
The world is so compact
the trees and the houses rise up for breath
in the blue there’s high alert
the streets are dying muffled strangled.
We push on thinking we navigate
through flesh through sounds through encounters
but nobody is going anywhere.
The defeated core still chases after life.
Whoever is lost and who knows it
lets their arms dangle
they will sleep
eyes shuttered down upon
a bird no longer in the sky.
Translated from French by Jade Cuttle
ROQUE DALTON
Spite
Homeland you don’t exist
you’re just a bad outline of myself
words of the enemy I believed
Before I used to believe you were so small
you reached neither
north nor south
but now I know you don’t exist
and it doesn’t seem as though anybody needs you
I haven’t heard any mothers speak of you
That makes me happy