4 -10 April 2002
Issue No.580
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 -10 April 2002 Issue No.580 |
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Plain talk
The recent visit to Palestine of a group of writers of international fame -- including two Nobel Prize winners -- shows that writers are always at the helm of liberation struggle, both as participants and supporters. The writers visited Ramallah at the invitation of Mahmoud Darwish, the poet of the Palestinian resistance. As deputy secretary-general of the Afro-Asian Writers, I was probably one of the first Egyptians to meet Darwish and to receive him with open arms when he came to Egypt. I always go back to an early poem of his, My Father, which opens:
He turned his eyes away from the moon
And bent to hug the earth
and prayed...
To a rainless sky
And told me not to leave!The delegation visiting Ramallah last week joined writers from Portugal, America, France, Spain, Italy, China and South Africa, including Wole Soyinka, Nigerian poet, novelist, playwright and 1986 Nobel Prize Winner. Again, as with Darwish, it was through the Afro-Asian Writers movement that I met Soyinka, a man of letters who may be ranked with such African writers/freedom fighters as Alex Laguma, Marcellino Dos Santos, Agostin ho Neto, Sembeue Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiongo.
Like many African intellectuals, Soyinka -- who incidentally has been elected a member of the Library of Alexandria's board of trustees -- joined a leading British university, Leeds, where he studied under the distinguished literary critic G Wilson Knight. For several years he was co-editor of the literary journal Black Orpheus, but it was his plays that gave him his fame. Some of them, including Kongils Harvest and Death and the King's Hoseman, have been translated into Arabic by Nessim Megalli.
The writers visiting Ramallah bore witness to the atrocities which Portuguese writer José Saramago, the other Nobel Prize winner of the delegation, described -- not as a result of hearsay, but based on his eyewitness experience -- as similar to those inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews. Saramago's statement naturally angered members of the extreme right in Israel who immediately accused the Portuguese writer of anti- semitism. That did not surprise me, but what really was an eye opener was the response of Israeli writer Amos Oz -- who claims to be a supporter of an independent Palestinian state. He too hastened to attack Saramago, accusing him of falling victim to Palestinian propaganda. Oz's attack and accusation sheds much light on the nature of so- called Israeli liberals. The mask has fallen.
There is a Soyinka poem, Civilian and Soldier, which, to me, seems to sum up the barbaric Israeli military aggression against unarmed Palestinian civilians:
My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, 'I'm a civilian,' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.
You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your training sessions, cautioning --
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth
From the lead festival of your more eager friends
Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.
I hope some day
Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair
With meat and bread, a gourd of wine
A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question -- do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?
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