Fadwa Tuqan wrote Song of Becoming in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in the defeat of the tripartite Arab coalition (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) by Israel. The defeat also meant that the Palestinian struggle against dispossession, which had been going on since 1948 (the year the United Nations recognized Israel), was still unresolved and that the creation of a Palestinian nation-state was not going to happen soon. Song of Becoming takes a defiant stance against this despair and calls for continued resistance to occupation.
The means for what Tuqan calls “plain rejection” would no longer be the armies of other Arab nations, but the Palestinian youth who had gained an irrevocable level of national consciousness and were beginning to assume “the roles of great heroes in history.”
Song of Becoming is therefore a celebration of this new generation that came into being in the first 20 years of the Palestinian dispossession. It invokes national sentiments and views the post-1967 momentum not as a loss but rather as an opportunity for the Palestinians to “build [themselves] anew” in the face of destruction.
In that respect, Song of Becoming has an epic tone by virtue of its desire to reread all the previous moments in the nation’s history as steps toward its coming into existence. From that perspective in Song of Becoming the nation is represented mythopoetically as the Phoenix, the bird that rose renewed from its ashes after having been consumed by fire for many years.
Another aspect of the poem’s epic quality lies in Tuqan’s deliberate attempt to force the physical limits of time and space to account for the heroic potentials of the new generation she praises. Those legendary “boys” have “grown suddenly . . . more than the years of a lifetime.” “Soaring high towards the sun,” they personify “the voice” and “the anger” of rejection to the extent that even the poet who recites their “song of becoming” is compelled to recognize that they surpass her poetry—“all poetry.”
Song of Becoming remains one of the landmark poems in Fadwa Tuqan’s literary career as well as of modern Palestinian literature. It has been a source of inspiration for many Palestinians in search of a national consciousness.
Bibliography
DeYoung, Terri. “Love, Death, and the Ghost of Al-Khansa.” In Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature, edited by Kamal Abdel-Malek and Wael Hallaq. Leiden, Netherlands, and Boston: Brill Publications, 2000.
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.
———. “Song of Becoming.” Translated by Naomi Shihab Nye with Salma Khadra Jayyusi. In Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 316.
Categories: Arabic Literature, Literature, Palestinian Literature, War Literature, World Literature