Atef Abu Saif: Portraits

Portrait
He was delicate like a breeze, and soft like a virgin branch on which the birds hadn’t yet perched.
His face was like a sun when it first rises, and his frame spread out in the space around him like a solid mass.
He walked in a leisurely manner, looking at the road without stumbling.
He liked to smile for the people he met on the road, greeting them with a movement of his hand.
Whenever he came home, his children gathered around him like moths around a lamp. He was a warm person, and a kind man.
He died. How can death take away all this beauty?

Alone
She likes loneliness (as she claims), and to keep herself away from the world because it is full of evil (she’s escaping, nothing more), and she likes to play the role of a lover who can’t swim against the waves of love (and there’s a lot of that in her). She said to him that Gaza likes scandal, and that people’s tongues spread rumors like rain on a sloping street.
When he left the house for the last time, after they had agreed on a permanent separation, she appeared nonchalant and proud. “This is better than people’s chatter.”
He closed the door, pulling his shadow between its two halves and dragging it on the surface of the road.
That day she wept like a cloud. The rain fell from her lips. She threw herself on the floor. She turned around in the dark. The sun had disappeared; so had he; and loneliness as always remained her companion.
Who is it that can praise this pain?

Thursday Visit
Like other people in the camp he goes to the cemetery every Thursday to visit his mother, his brother, his two friends, his aunt, his grandmother, and the child who was his neighbor and played behind the window every morning.
The good time in which he could see all those he loved went away. The ones he loved went away and became boxes made of marble decorated with beautiful words about heroism, or about the last day, or about sacrifice and the homeland, but nothing about his grief.
When he comes back home, there will be a little girl playing by the door. No sooner does she see him than she jumps between his arms like a butterfly. He laughs, hiding a tear that almost betrays him behind his eyes.

Four
There used to be five of us
He was not the first to be born, or the last
He was not even in the middle
It was not his luck to be firstborn, to be indulged most
He also was not the last to arrive, the final cluster on the vine and sugar crystallized
He was not the symbol of glad tidings, where middle is best
His birth did not suggest anything in the history of the family

Yet, in spite of all that, he was the most spoiled and closest to our parents’ hearts, most privileged and most rewarded
It was Joseph, whom we envied for the space people made for him in their hearts
We did not throw him in the well and we did not sing at his departure. We cried!
Now we must live without our jealousy, give up part of our nature, and we must accept that we have become four

Undesirable Wisdom
She was sipping water from the transparent glass and staring in at the bottom, that she might see his face like a sun darting between the clouds. She laughed as she removed the chapping from her lips, saying, “If only time were to return; if only the time were to pass!” She wanted the moment when she was holding him, but the wisdom of time (someone is bound to say, “how sad!”) is that it will not come back, that it will not pass, just as it will not die.

The Postman
He passes by every morning after the sun rises, around eight thirty, riding his motorcycle with its rusting handlebar but with bright blue around the wheels. He always wear a black overcoat, even in the summer, as though holding on to a picture of himself. Dangling from his neck is a black satchel with letters that seem to be looking out like birds wanting to fly the cage. He will park his motorcycle where the street begins and will start delivering the letters.
For the past six month when she saw his motorcycle, with the rusty handlebar but with bright blue around the wheels, turning into the street she would run to the door where he never stopped to bring a letter from the one who has been in prison for four years now. He had promised to write her, hoping against hope that they would allow him, as his mother told her after she had visited him.
Who will implore this postman to stop, even in jest. Perhaps he could bring some joy to her heart.

Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi.

Atef Abu Saif: Four from Gaza

Interruption
He hadn’t watched the television for two weeks, and hadn’t read the newspapers for longer than that. He hadn’t opened his e-mail for two weeks, and hadn’t listened to the news on the radio for ten days. And he hadn’t left the house for a week. The electricity was a strange visitor that hadn’t visited their neighborhood for fourteen days. The city was wrapped in darkness, and destruction was coming its way from the edges slowly but surely. He saw the air raids on the neighborhoods, and his only recourse was to tell his child that their home was very, very far away from where they were shelling. He lied, telling his child that the jets had used loudspeakers to make the shelling sound close when it was very far away.
He’s terrified because he doesn’t know anything about what’s going on around him. He wanted to stand at the window and stare into the darkness, that he might understand something, but the darkness brought him nothing but more fear and more sounds of jets and ricocheting of bullets and the sirens of the ambulances. He thought the best thing would be to sleep, that he might dream about what’s taking place and see it clearly. Darkness taught him to sleep early, since he could do nothing in the dark except stare into the emptiness. He would sleep to wake up early, before the sun, and drink his coffee very slowly as he looked through the window to the sea that had no ships except the destroyers and the fierce wind of December. In a while the children will wake up and their day will begin full of questions to which he will give answers that their eyes will say aren’t convincing, but they are sufficient for these times in which he is cut off from the world like a disconnected computer.

A Game of Luck
No expression can describe his life better than luck. When he borrowed money from his brothers to open an ice cream shop, all wondered why he would gamble on a shop in a distant neighborhood on the edges of the camp that people had a hard time reaching. It all appeared like a short-lived adventure at first, because when the army attacked the camp from the edges to control it, it set about destroying all the fields and orchards that separated it from the fast road. It was a stroke of luck also that the bulldozer blades stopped at the sparse houses in which only a few weeks ago he had opened his ice cream and cold drink shop.
The army left the camp and went back to its barracks in the distance, and the huge space that the bulldozers left behind became an open square for public celebrations. People started to come by the hundreds then thousands to take part in these celebrations. The narrow street leading to the space became congested with demonstrations lifting the banners of different factions and organizations, and the youth running behind these banners. When Fatah organized a celebration, the cassette player inside the shop rang out with the Fatah song “Oh Fatah, mother of the masses!” And when it was Hamas holding the celebration, an Islamic song rang out from inside the shop. The shop became the only refuge for people who wanted to lighten their mood after hours spent in shouting out or listening to speeches and slogans.
And the shop became part of the celebration.

The Mayor
As soon as he became the Mayor, the electricity was never cut from his house, while all the neighborhoods around were bathing in darkness for the whole summer. And all the house in the immediate neighborhood were the only ones with water tanks. And the dirt road, neglected for decades, was paved, with shady trees and street lamps planted into the sidewalk that was made of stone.
And from that day on, that is, since he became the Mayor, the rain no longer gathered in puddles that children had to jump over to go to school, and the handsome car started to pass through the street in orderly fashion while the policemen interfered with all those passing there. And we got used to that.
And we got used to seeing him only in newscasts, cutting ribbons or making announcements.

Hard Times
He kept good track of the morning.
Al-Jazeera news before breakfast showing picture of the dead and the wounded that night, and sudden death.
Radio 105 FM is also broadcasting songs of pain about a mother who says goodbye to her son and starts to cry, while the loud voice of the announcer says, Death has a great flavor (it doesn’t matter what he means).
Every once in a while the police car fills the atmosphere with its siren. Also the noise of trucks and huge carts pass through the narrow streets.
The whispering of the two young neighbors (they are arguing) will soon turn into shouts and shrieks. The whole neighborhood gathers (but they say that contrary to expectations it didn’t lead to divorce).
The voice of the old woman who was muttering a song about old times is lost in the crush.
It was also a fatiguing day. The sun appeared like a ball of flame that could barely catch fire.

Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi.

Atef Abu Saif: Look Closely

A Different Morning
This morning is different.
No jets in the sky. Even the sun was late in rising from its bed. And the sound of guns can no longer be heard at the outskirts. Ambulances that did not sleep all night settled down to rest. Even the sun woke up late from its bed in the east. Children, contrary to their custom, did not fill the streets with the noise of their games; nor did the hawking of the women carrying their baskets on the way to market. Also, in the alley in our quarter, the kiss will not appear that two small lips will draw on the cheek of the mother standing in the doorway saying her last good-bye to the son on his way to school.

Slogans
A young man one day paused and wrote on a wall a short phrase in which he said to a young lady with who had exchanged vows of love with him that he loved her.
Did anyone see that?.
Look closely.
Among all these huge slogans with their bright colors and bright outlines, there’s a phrase beyond this gaggle, singing in another place and saying something different.
Of course no one will look beyond these slogans. No one will make even a small effort to reflect, even a little.
Maybe she was the only person to look amidst all these posters with their bright colors for a small phrase written in fading ink but shining in her heart. At that moment someone surprised her to ask if she wanted to join the faction whose slogans covered the wall at which she was staring.

An Undesirable Poster
Gaza is a huge wall for posters. Election posters are everywhere in the city. A huge box for the posters of those running for President. Huge pictures and slogans hang on the horizon in the street. News bulletins and television programs. Conversations in the coffee shops and differences of opinion. Circulars and fliers promising people sunshine and honey lie about in every alleyway.
Therefore could anything be more touching in all this crash of things than a young man posting the photograph of his mother who died ten years ago (the tenth anniversary of her death) in the middle of the layers of photographs and posters of the candidates. What could be more touching than to have been the only person to see this picture while passing in the street, which, no sooner did the young man turn his book than someone attached a photo of his candidate or maybe he was paid—a poster that covered everything including the picture of the mother of the young man who is sad over her departure on the tenth anniversary of her passing?

The Shadow of the Butterfly
He was walking the unpaved road carrying his satchel on his shoulders. The satchel is like a butterfly that had just settled on a branch. He never forgot to smile. His shadow was moving along the wall to his right, as the sun was setting in the belly of the sea, only a few meters away.
Today he won’t walk the unpaved road, and the butterfly (I mean the satchel) will not settle on the branches (I mean his shoulders), even though the sun today, like every day, still settles into the belly of the sea. Only his shadow will remain on the wall, like an old portrait that stays in place.

The Road
There is something in the road
I asked, “Are you sure it leads to the sea?”
He answered, “Not just sure. I know it as well as the palm of my hand, and I remember it as well as my father’s name.”
He shook his head, and I walked behind him. But there’s something in the road!
A forest on the edges whose heart is darkness
A cloud over our heads whose face is gloomy,
Women wearing black passing every once in a while
Destructive weeds despite the exuberance of spring
A child with bloody feet standing like a lost piece of marble
A disquiet growing like sea moss in the rock of my heart
And something that is whispering to me that he doesn’t know the road, and we are lost

Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi.

New Writing from Gaza: A Portfolio

Over the last few weeks, protest songs for Gaza -- by Michael Heart and Invincible, among others -- have been flying around the blogosphere, giving a voice to the anguish and anger of Gazans, who were almost silenced by Israel's media blockade, and by damage to infrastructure. Journalists, bloggers and ordinary citizens, resilient and determined, posted when they could, via SMS to friends if they had to, and have made known the stories that didn't appear on the news.

These observations from the moment, on the ground, are thrilling, moving and necessary. They counter media bias, alert us to action, and give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in Gaza. How much more so, then, might a poem or story, honed by a brilliant writer until it is dense with image and meaning? As the outpouring of grief at Mahmoud Darwish's death last year showed, literature, and poetry in particular, has a particular place in Palestinian culture -- and has had a particular place in reaching out from Palestine to the rest of the world, from Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza" to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight.

But only a few Palestinian writers are being translated. In Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Centre and the House of Poetry have both fostered new writers and new magazines. In the UK, Banipal and Modern Poetry in Translation have both had special Palestine issues in recent years, which have shown the depth and range of work being produced. Telegram's Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, edited by Jo Glanville, introduced a number of new voices, such as Adania Shibli.

When I interviewed Adania in early December 2008, she spoke passionately about the writers she knew in Gaza, about the intensity of their work and the way that Palestinian poetry was changing in response to the conditions of siege. That was before the invasion. When the news and images of Gaza (not from Gaza) began to appear, I emailed Adania and offered to host a selection of writing on the blog: her choice of writers, immediate and new voices with essential things to say and powerful styles in which to say them.

Over the next month, we'll be publishing the work that she selected on the blog, as it arrives from Gaza. The first group of writers to arrive is diverse in age, background, experience, and style, but I find all of their voices compelling. On Monday, there will be a selection of short pieces by novelist, playwright and political scientist Atef Abu Saif, who lives and teaches in Gaza.

Following Abu Saif, whose stories will appear over three days, the blog will feature work from:

Soumaya Susi
Khaled Jum'a
Nasr Jamil Shaath
Fatena al-Gharra
Yousef Alqedra
Naser Rabah
Najah Awadallah

posted as it arrives from the Arabic translators have very graciously given time and support to this project, excited by its urgency and by discovering new work. Each writer presents translators with a different challenge and promise, and each will be translated differently. Excitingly, translator Isis Nusair is working on Khaled Jumaa's work with Michael Rosen and Shaun Levin, two anti-Zionist Jewish writers, whose acts of translation demonstrate how literature can build community and solidarity.

Abu Saif's pieces have been translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, a sequence of prose poems framed by the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Abu Saif's pieces - microstories, fragments - are dateless, although filled with precise detail of season and place. Minutely focused on a gesture, a piece of graffiti, on the author's own act of seeing, they are both like news stories - in their brevity, their concrete detail - and utterly unlike anything the media can offer.

In a 2008 Guardian article about the Poetry Translation Centre's ambitious tour and chapbook series, Sarah Maguire, who is translating Faten al-Gharra's work for us, wrote:

Poetry in this country is our favourite minority artform, largely greeted with bafflement, often with dismay. And yet we live alongside people for whom poetry is a central, essential passion. My hope is that by attempting to make their poems at home in our language, we can also translate a little of their enthusiasm. Poetry thrives through translation.

With this selection, we hope to show not only that poetry thrives through translation, but that people thrive through poetry, not only being written but being heard. The act of translation -- whether literally between languages, or metaphorically from the page onto a blog -- is a catalyst, a helping hand, to bring readers to the writing, and through that writing to resonant emotions and truths.

As Adania says: we are "trying to make the words of Gaza louder than those of the bullets and the bombings." Please come back to listen over the next month.