‘They can’t occupy my words’

Conall Quinn, writing in the current issue of Magill, (Issue 3, 2008), has a thought-provoking report from the first Palestinian Festival of Literature which was held in Birzeit University, Ramallah, ‘Beyond the Wall’. Quinn writes: “Almost everywhere we go in the West Bank – Jerusalem, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem – there is a sense that Palestinian writers are desperate to create an art that will somehow influence the political situation and bring their plight, artistically, to the attention of the world.”

Many of the quotes from writers at the festival, including Ireland’s Roddy Doyle, offer fascinating glimpses into art and politics in the West Bank. Doyle says: “Words like ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ make me nervous. I don’t think the Palestinians should be burdened with either. Going into an artistic endeavour with one of those words on each shoulder would probably produce well-intentioned but very bad art.”

Sudanese writer, Jaml Mahjoub, says: “All true artistic expression is in some way political, in the sense that it seeks to alter our view of the world. Art has often been used as an arm in political struggle. It doesn’t make for great art, but it does provide for consolation; this is particularly important in the case of the Palestinians, for whom silence is eradication.”

Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, once had 25,000 people turn up to hear him read in Beirut, writes Quinn. Darwish comments: “Ideally, I would like to stop writing poetry about Palestine. I can not keep writing about loss and occupation for ever. I want, both as a poet and a human being, to free myself from Palestine. But I can’t. When my country is liberated, so shall I be.” Darwish also talks about his own poetry and says: “They [the Israelis] can’t occupy my words. My poetry is the one way I have to resist them.”

Quinn cautions that it “would be a mistake … to believe all Palestinians travel the same artistic road … If our understanding of the varied nature of the artistic response to the occupation is deficient, this is further exacerbated by the rarity of Palestinian literature in translation. Even Darwish has only relatively recently been available in English, and in tiny print runs. Israeli writers such as Amos Oz, David Grossman and, more recently Etgar Keret, have no such problems.”

Quinn concludes: “The passion and eloquence with which the university students, mainly young girls, talked of literature and of writing, the way they riffed on Eliot, on Joyce, even Foucault, like they’d already lived half a lifetime in Café Flore and Les Deux Maggots, made for a moving experience. And if the visiting writers were there to inspire the students of the West Bank, in the end what happened was the exact opposite.

“It seems to be, after being in Palestine, that artistic freedom is, literally, worth dying for,” says [Roddy] Doyle. “It is the freedom to address artistically what surrounds one – or ignore it. Listening to those young women talking about Edith Wharton and George Orwell will stay with me for the rest of my life. Such intelligence and enthusiasm, trapped in a place that is being choked to death, it was a heart-breaking privilege to meet them.”