The People & The Book: Literature that kicks- Are we loving it?

By PAMELA PELED
Roses (photo credit: ING IMAGE/ASAP)
Roses
(photo credit: ING IMAGE/ASAP)
Everyone needs one extra special friend to love, a favorite song to sing, and a preferred poem to unpack from time to time. Occasionally my dad, during meal times, would lay down his fork and proclaim, with an I-bet-you-didn’t-think-that-I-could-do-this look that he’d “wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills.” My father had an eclectic taste in poetry; tying for first place in his top picks was Thomas Hood’s “Faithless Nelly Grey,” though he only knew the first stanza:
BEN BATTLE was a soldier bold,
 And used to war’s alarms,
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.
That was my introduction to the joy of words; at seven years old, over a dinner of cottage pie and peas I got it: words can wriggle and wiggle and tiggle inside you until you laugh out loud. My dad’s declensions gifted me with another lesson for life: everybody should plant at least one poem into their blood.
So, it was with high hopes and zero trepidation that I assigned my class of student teachers what I thought was a lovely task: find a fabulous poem, commit it to memory, and teach it to the rest of us. The year was 2002, the country was Israel and the Teacher Training College not far from Tel Aviv catered to a mixture of Arab and Jewish students. And, oh. The second intifada was raging.
We had some lovely lessons. Someone brought in “The Highwayman” just for the joy of tlot-tlotting in the frosty silence and again in the echoing night. We wondered together, as everyone surreptitiously checked phones to make sure no human bombs had detonated that morning, whether it was wise to bring a sanctification of suicide into the Israeli classroom, no matter how scintillating the alliteration, or how marvelous the meter.
It was not all so somber: yes, Dylan Thomas was trotted out, and why it’s good to rage, rage against the dying of the light, and we squirmed through D.H. Lawrence’s sexual hang-ups in his sinuous “Snake,” but we also had fun.
I learned a new poem, by Dorothy Parker, which my young Jewish and Arab female students discussed with common hilarity.
One perfect rose
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet –
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, ”his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
Then there were the Jewish Haikus – that quintessentially Japanese art form of seventeen syllables, hijacked by an anonymous Jackie Mason clone:
Beyond Valium,
the peace of knowing one’s child
is an internist.
And another:
Yenta. Shmeer. Gevalt.
Shlemiel. Shlimazl. Tochis.
Oy! To be fluent!
I should win the Nobel Prize for Peace, I thought smugly to myself: coexistence in a classroom. Outside, bombs might be decapitating our kids, but here we are giggling together over gezuntn Yiddish. How great is that.
And then, boom! One of my Arab students, a shy and quiet young woman, brought in a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, and recited it diffidently.
Darwish, arguably the most famous and most beloved of the modern Arab poets, was born in the village of al-Birwa in the Galilee, and fled to Lebanon with his family when Israeli forces took over their hometown in the War of Independence in 1948. Darwish was seven. Although the family returned to Israel a year later, the child’s early exile weighed heavily on his poems; his idealized and anguished images of Palestine turned him into an iconic national poet. After Darwish joined the PLO in 1973 he was banned from entering Israel; he later settled in Ramallah, in what he again considered “living in exile.”
Darwish has been called reconciliatory by some; inflammatory and dangerous by others. While he once said that “nothing, nothing justifies terrorism,” he also proclaimed that every beautiful poem is an act of resistance. Darwish was briefly almost incorporated into the literature matriculation syllabus by then-education minister Yossi Sarid, who argued that “the time has come for Israelis to understand the Palestinians better.”
The Likud opposition was quick to table a no-confidence motion in Ehud Barak’s government over the issue – a motion, which, had it passed, would have been the first time in history that a government had fallen over the power of poetry. It is easy to feel the welcoming warmth of some of his words –You who stand in the doorway, come in, / Drink Arabic coffee with us / And you will sense that you are men like us / You who stand in the doorways of houses / Come out of our morningtimes, / We shall feel reassured to be / Men like you!
However it is hard to construe the poem presented in my class – “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words” – as super-conciliatory:
O those who pass between fleeting words
Carry your names, and be gone
Rid our time of your hours, and be gone
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sand of memory
Take what pictures you will, so that you understand
That which you never will:
How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky.
O those who pass between fleeting words
From you the sword – from us the blood
From you steel and fire – from us our flesh
From you yet another tank – from us stones
From you tear gas – from us rain
Above us, as above you, are sky and air
So take your share of our blood – and be gone
Go to a dancing party – and be gone
As for us, we have to water the martyrs’ flowers
As for us, we have to live as we see fit.
O those who pass between fleeting words
As bitter dust, go where you wish, but
Do not pass between us like flying insects
For we have work to do in our land:
We have wheat to grow which we water with our bodies’ dew
We have that which does not please you here:
Stones or partridges
So take the past, if you wish, to the antiquities market
And return the skeleton to the hoopoe, if you wish,
On a clay platter
We have that which does not please you: we have the future
And we have things to do in our land.
O those who pass between fleeting words
Pile your illusions in a deserted pit, and be gone
Return the hand of time to the law of the golden calf
Or to the time of the revolver’s music!
For we have that which does not please you here, so be gone
And we have what you lack: a bleeding homeland of a bleeding people
A homeland fit for oblivion or memory
O those who pass between fleeting words
It is time for you to be gone
Live wherever you like, but do not live among us
It is time for you to be gone
Die wherever you like, but do not die among us
For we have work to do in our land
We have the past here
We have the first cry of life
We have the present, the present and the future
We have this world here, and the hereafter
So leave our country
Our land, our sea
Our wheat, our salt, our wounds
Everything, and leave
The memories of memory
O those who pass between fleeting words!
As I watched the coexistence in my classroom crumbling like yesterday’s pita, I struggled to find my own Michelle Pfeiffer moment. Surely I could beam out some clarity from grey-blue eyes, and shape my luminous lips around inspirational phrases that would harness the energy in the space to create all manner of miracles. So what if my eyes are just boringly brown, and my cheekbones aren’t chiseled, does that mean I can’t do an imitation of an adult who was coping?
“Hey, we’re all thinking individuals here; let’s listen to each other with respect, can we? Guys? Can we?” I begged. Remember, these were the years of terror. Human bombs were exploding everywhere: in supermarkets and banks, on buses and streets. Love, and loving the Other, were not high on the agenda.
But even as I was cajoling some very, very angry individuals into grudgingly getting off their tlot-tlotting high horses, I was struck anew by the force of the word. It’s pretty impressive what a poem can do.
Literature, (like its quintuplet siblings: art, music, theater, movies) is obviously much more than just a pretty face. But do art forms that challenge mean art forms that subvert? Should Darwish’s plea for us to leave his land be banned in a Jewish classroom in the Jewish nation state? Should I have thrown the student out through the door, together with her seductive, seditious words?
Or should we embrace Wilfred Owen’s words, together unpicking the poetry to find the hurt underneath, and see whether then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels / I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, / Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
Would that be kosher in the classroom? And if we can’t even agree whether El Al’s food is badatz enough for the more particular travelers, who’s to say what is, and what isn’t kosher for the soul?
Literature has been left to us from ages long gone from memory – one thousand years of words wielding a power mightier than any missile could ever be. Emperors and kings, tyrants and dictators, and politicians across the globe have tried to silence pens; in the end it is Solzhenitsyn whose legacy survives, not Stalin’s.
I think it’ll be fun to look at literature which challenged the ideas of days that have dissolved into history; how poetry and plays slipped through the scissor-wielding hands of medieval Miri Regevs, and how literature changed our world. In a series in The Jerusalem Report, we will revisit Beowulf and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Swift, and wonder together whether we are better off for the fact that they disturbed the peace.
Dr. Pamela Peled lectures at the IDC and Beit Berl. peledpam@gmail.com


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