Enough For Me

Fadwa Tuqan’s short poem “Enough for Me” articulates in a mere ten lines the demand (in this case, of the Palestinians) for a homeland in a personal and unpretentious mood. Tuqan’s earlier poems, such as “Song of Becoming” and “I Shall Not Weep,” had already established her as an important Palestinian poet committed to the national cause. In those poems, Tuqan assumes the role of a national bard by expressing and mobilizing the collective claims. “Enough for Me,” however, has a relatively different tone in that it communicates what the love for one’s own country means to the poet herself.

The poet demands the gift of dying on her country’s soil. She longs for that spiritual moment in which she vanishes into the beloved soil that enables her to take root in its embrace and “then sprout forth as a flower.” The poet’s plea is not an empty death wish, but a devotion to future generations that will live in an independent country. The implication of the poem is, therefore, that bare existence under dispossession is nothing but to be doomed to oblivion and to be eradicated from historical memory. Death in one’s own country, on the other hand, is a solemn way of securing an afterlife and resurrection, a fate very different from being disposed of as a wasted corpse.

The brevity of “Enough for Me” reinforces, rather than weakens, its rhetorical power. By means of the conceit of burial and germination, the poem recapitulates the urgency of a homeland and the need for national self-determination. In so doing, “Enough for Me” does not employ a zealous and hyperbolic language; rather, it affirms itself in a modest and self-effacing tone, assuring that the poet does not call for the obliteration of the enemy, but for a piece of land with which she can identify her soul. What is important for the poet is the metaphysical security that the soil of her country offers her.

Bibliography
Tuqan, Fadwa. A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography. Translated by Olive Kenny and Naomi Shihab Nye, foreword by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1990.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Palestinian Literature

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