Ali Rahnamae’s Reviews > My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness > Status Update

Since the Lebanon War, sorrow itself had become one of his primary themes, as he wrote, for instance, “The Falcon,” an extended 1984 meditation on his sadness, and how he would, in a sense, be lost if it ever left him: “For without my sorrow, / at the end of the day, / rivers will only be water, / and the flower / merely a plant— / without my grief.”

When our loved ones leave
Amira,
as you left,
an endless migration in us begins
and a certain sense takes hold in us
that all of what is finest
in and around us,
except for the sadness,
is going away—
departing, not to return.

- Taha Muhammad Ali

"Exodus"

The street is empty
as a monk’s memory,
and faces explode in the flames
like acorns—
and the dead crowd the horizon
and doorways.
No vein can bleed
more than it already has,
no scream will rise
higher than it’s already risen.
We will not leave!

- Taha Muhammad Ali

My homeland isn’t a suitcase,
and I am not going.
I am a lover and the land is the beloved.

- Mahmoud Darwish

Poetry hides
somewhere
behind the night of words
behind the clouds of hearing,
across the dark of sight,
and beyond the dusk of music
that’s hidden and revealed.
But where is it concealed?
And how could I
possibly know
when I am
barely able,
by the light of day,
to find my pencil?

Adonis viewed poetry as “a vision. And a vision, by nature, is a leap outside of existing understanding & a change in the order of things . . . a revolt against the old poetic forms and methods & a refusal of the style & positions that they represent. . . By leaving behind the classical
forms, modern poetry helps us to see in existence what familiarity and
habit have hidden. It exposes the face of the veiled world.”

Ibn Khaldun famously wrote that poetry is the “archive of the Arabs,” and the notion seems even truer in the Palestinian context, where almost all other archives are lacking and where poetry has long been a basic fact of life. It is no exaggeration to say that, in their time the poetry festivals made poetry the most important means of political expression for the hemmed-in Palestinians of Israel.

She had just lost her house, her belongings, her neighbors, her fruit trees, her village, her country, the only life she had ever known, and she was now exiled to a single freezing-cold room in a strange land, with absolutely no sense of what the future might hold. So when her only daughter, her constant companion and comfort died—when Ghazaleh died—she snapped.

In The Meaning of the Catastrophe [Al-Nakba], Zurayk writes, “Difficulties and hardships—even disasters—are an incentive to individuals and groups and are one of the causes of their awakening and their renaissance. But they do no not have this effect in all situations, for in some cases they will cause destruction and collapse, even extinction.”

“The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is no simple setback or light, passing evil. It is a disaster in every sense of the word and one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted throughout their long history.”
Constantine Zurayk (Syrian intellectual who coined the term "Al-Nakba")