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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Samih Al-Qasem:
The rifle and the rose
Profile by Nadia Abou El-Magd
Samih Al-Qasem is the Palestinians' bard who stayed behind. In poetry, under occupation, lovers must be snipers lying in wait
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"If I hadn't been a poet, I would have been a hit man." This is Samih Al-Qasem's answer to a question I didn't ask. "My poetry is full of momentum, and maybe a violence that could only be compared in real life with professional murder," Al-Qasem explains, laughing. The question was when he had started writing poetry, but he doesn't care about dates, as I will discover later. "The need to express oneself is a human need... through poetry, music, drawing, or violence... I was lucky; I was born into a cultured and religious family."
Listening to him reciting his poetry the night before, I wondered what use a microphone could be to a man like him. The small hall at the Writers' Syndicate in Zamalek was packed. Wrapped in wool scarf, a bespectacled Al-Qasem recited poetry about Egypt, Salaheddin, and the Qana massacre. "A mountain and a mountain do not meet,/People meet": this was one of the first poems I memorised.
A few minutes after we met, I felt I had known him and his sense of humour for a long time. "I'll answer the questions you don't ask," Al-Qasem told me. As I commented on his excellent command of Arabic, he interrupted: "Language is love. You have to love the language to be able to master it." What about Hebrew? "Hebrew is a challenge," he replied swiftly. "I studied and mastered it. I don't think the leaders of Israel speak it any better than I do."
Samih Al-Qasem was nine at the time of the 1948 War. "I may not remember what happened yesterday, but I remember what happened in 1948," he says. He is staring at the Nile. "I remember my uncle, who went to war and came back with one eye. I remember how I ran after my father one day to give him his helmet. I thought it would protect him from death. He didn't take it. Before he died, I asked him why he didn't take it. He smiled and said: 'I'm still alive. Helmets don't save people.' I remember the small victories and the huge defeats. I remember the bombardments, the day the Jewish troops entered Al-Rama." After three nights spent in watchful half-sleep, the family elders decided to stay. How is it, life under occupation? "I'm living in my country. The roots of my family go back to 900 years in Palestine. The country is mine. Whether it is ruled by Israelis, British, or monkeys doesn't change the fact that it is my country."
Like all the "1948 Palestinians" who stayed in what has become Israel, Al-Qasem has Israeli citizenship. "I had a choice between the country and the formal procedures. If the Arab League is prepared to give me a passport in exchange for my country, I don't want it. I believe holding an Israeli passport and staying in my country is more revolutionary than departure." However, it took Al-Qasem almost 10 years before he was psychologically ready to visit Egypt after it signed the Camp David Accords. "I thought visiting Egypt was normalisation."
When he came here for the first time in November 1988, he was immediately overwhelmed by new feelings: "Oh my God. This building is Arab, all its inhabitants are Arabs, the cars, the weather, the Nile, the trees, the streets, even the stones are Arab," he told the press at the time. "I was in awe of the Pyramids, I fell in love with Islamic Cairo. I felt the monuments were gripping me. What touched me most in Egypt was the call to prayer. I was baffled, because I'm not a religious person at all. But Egypt means something very special to me as a Druze, because we started here during the Fatimid Caliphate. Cairo is pure and has a special sanctity."
He has visited Cairo many times since then. Would visiting him in Al-Rama, where he lives, or in Al-Nasra (Nazareth), where he works, be considered normalisation? "Of course not." What is normalisation, then? Al-Qasem doesn't give a clear-cut answer: "Relations between Israel and the Arabs cannot be normal because occupation, a displaced nation and oppression still exist. There are no reasons for normalisation." Dialogue, on the other hand, is different: "Dialogue is my form of war."
Al-Qasem, who is the chief editor of the weekly publication Kull Al-Arab and the cultural quarterly Ida'at, adamantly denies receiving financial aid from the Israeli Culture Ministry. "The million Arabs inside Israel pay taxes that amount to the GDP of an Arab country... I deprived myself of my right to receive financial support for my magazines, because I'm not only a Palestinian poet or a poet for all the Arabs: I am a poet of Arabism." Just plain poet is enough, though.
He has known Mahmoud Darwish for almost 40 years. "He is my brother, companion, friend, everything". From 1986 to 1988, Al Qasem in Al-Rama and Darwish, then an exile in Paris, published their "letters between the two halves of an orange". In his first missive, Darwish wrote: "As long as you are there, I am there... Sixteen years: enough to make me scream 'I want to return...' It is enough to annihilate me in song, until victory or the grave; but where is my grave, my friend?"
"I'm living in my country. The roots of my family go back to 900 years in Palestine. The country is mine. Whether it is ruled by Israelis, British, or monkeys doesn't change the fact that it is my country"
Al-Qasem responded in a letter entitled: "The country awaits your return". "Ask me not about your grave. As long as the cradle is an unresolved matter, the grave will remain an embarrassing question, to which there is no answer." Darwish was only allowed to return to the self-rule area, which is not his hometown, in 1995, after 25 years in exile.
Part of the price Al-Qasem paid for staying in Israel was spending time in its prisons. "I don't count the days, the nights, the number of times. It was quite a time." He was placed under house arrest in Haifa, too, after having served one of these sentences. He was arrested for writing: "Once, I am a flower. Once, I am a bomb. My veins are pipes of oil and water. I deserve to live..." Al-Qasem was arrested at 8.00am on 5 June 1967. He was imprisoned before and after 1967, but that year "I had to choose between becoming an ascetic and going to live in the mountains, or searching for another revolutionary framework. Until then I was a Nasserist, but I had good relations with the communists." Al-Qasem is no longer a member in the Israeli Communist Party, but his sentiments and affiliations have not changed. "All the defects of the communist era don't justify the crimes of capitalism." He visited Nasser's grave during his first visit to Cairo and wrote in the visitors' book: "Nobody should say you are dead. Your soul's son, Samih Al-Qasem."
Despite his imprisonment and the immense suffering caused by Israeli occupation, Al-Qasem insists on seeing degrees of difference: "I hate occupation and its symbols, but I don't hate the Jews, or all Israelis. There are Israelis who are my partners in the battle against occupation, and I respect them. I believe our struggle against Zionism should not strip us of our humanity. If we lose that, they have won."
Another poem: "Somebody else should sing for peace. On the hills and in the valleys of my country, peace has been butchered." The Israeli censors censored the second phrase, "to portray me as anti-peace. We are not against peace. Arab societies, Arabism and Islam are not against peace." Al-Qasem sees the current process as "surrender, not peace", however.
When the Oslo Accord of September 1993 was signed, he wrote an article entitled "A Monologue for the Event: Rehearsal for Doomsday". Six years later, he still has mixed feelings. "Oslo has two faces: the disappointing one, for it brought nothing in comparison to even the smallest sacrifices of Arab martyrs; and the other one, the possibility, for the first time in history, of putting a halt to Zionist expansion and regaining land on which Palestinian people can live, build a school and plant a garden." So does he condemn the Palestinian Authority, which accepted and signed Oslo? "If there is anything wrong, I will be the first to call Abu Ammar." Yet has he not mocked "those who stutter in action"? "I meant those in authority, not the weak nations."
Shortly before he died, Nizar Qabbani demanded: "When will they announce the death of the Arabs?" Al-Qasem flatly rejects the question. "They won't. We are alive, and will remain alive."
Al-Qasem never finished school. After graduating from high school in Al-Nasra, he studied philosophy, economics and politics in Moscow for a year. "This was my rebellion. I wanted to travel around the world and live a bohemian life, which I did." He was a poet before then, though; in fact, he has been a "professional poet" since 1958. "There is no contradiction between poetry and bread. I despise the idea that poetry is separate from life. Cutting creativity off from politics shows a fear of confrontation. Poetry is my oxygen, my lifeline, a way of keeping my balance... I don't write for The People, The Nation, or History. I write for myself. I try to keep my sanity by writing. If my poems express people's concerns, that is because we have a lot in common. I'm trying to stay alive by writing, but what I write seems to take on cultural and political dimensions."
That may be why it is so difficult to know where poetry stops and politics begins for Al-Qasem. He writes about love, life, war, switching from tragedy to comedy and back again with unnerving agility. Then he switches to seriousness, exactly the same way he moves from tragedy to comedy and vice versa in his poetry. He subjects his personal life to the same brutal scrutiny, mixing metaphors with glee. "My wife is a martyr: we've been married for 22 years, and women married to poets must have a special place in heaven." His children -- four sons, Watan Mohamed, Wadah, Omar and Yasser -- have made him acutely aware of "war, famine, backwardness and ignorance". In his poems, roses and birds are similes for gunfire, lovers are snipers and death is life.
At 60, what has he learned? "Who said I'm 60?" he demands, then bursts into hearty laughter. "I'm just 20, three times over." He won't call it wisdom, but feels it is important "to take from life as much as possible, because it will come to an end. Asceticism is stupid. Life is unbelievably short." Somehow, he couldn't have said anything else.
photos: Randa Shaath
