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,… Read More ›
This popular poem by Mahmud Darwish has had more than one translation in English. It is a striking poem and rare in its subject matter. It humanizes the enemy and, more specifically, the soldier enemy who invades one’s country. In… Read More ›
Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry partakes of different cultural and mythological traditions. We find in his poems allusions to seminal texts from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Persia, and India. In this poem, the title is taken from an Indian classic on… Read More ›
Enough For Me Enough for me to die on her earth be buried in her to melt and vanish into her soil then sprout forth as a flower played with by a child from my country. Enough for me to… Read More ›
In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is… Read More ›
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Palestine when it was a British mandate. At the age of six, he experienced the dispersal of his people upon the birth of the state of Israel (1948). The Palestinians had to flee or accept… Read More ›
The novel Men in the Sun is the first and perhaps best-known novel by Ghassan Kanafani (1936–72). Kanafani is widely considered today as one of the most influential Palestinian writers of the 20th century. Before being killed by a car… Read More ›
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