When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge
of dark evil
onto the good green land
'They' gloated. The western skies
reverberated with joyous accounts:
"The Tree has fallen!
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane
leaves no life in the Tree!"
Had the Tree really fallen?
Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever,
not while the wine of our torn limbs
feed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive
tunneling deep, deep, into the land!
When the Tree rises up, the branches
shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
the laughter of the Tree shall leaf
beneath the sun
and birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
-translated by Naomi Shihab Nye with the help of the Editor, from Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, edited and introduced by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 1992
Hello and welcome to words that burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is The Deluge and the Tree by Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan. At the time of publishing Palestine has been under assault with the threat of eradication looming heavily since October 7th of 2023. I felt it was, not only the right thing to do but, the necessary thing to do to draw attention to the crisis in Palestine, through the inclusion of more Palestinian poets.
This is just a drop in the ocean in terms of supporting a state that has been unfairly occupied and brutalised since 1948, but raising awareness of the pain and anguish felt by the Palestinian people is the best I can do. If you’d like to donate there’s a donation link to the IPSC or Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the description of this episode.
Fadwa Tuqan was and is, to this day, one of the most celebrated voices in Arab literature (Mir, 2013). She was born in Nablus in Palestine in 1917 and so lived through the invasion of Palestine in 1948. Not only that, she lived through and experienced the mass displacement of Palestinians (Tuqan and Zayyad 2022)
Having received little formal education, Tuqan’s early lessons in poetry came from her brother, Ibrahim Tuqan, a prominent Palestinian poet in his own right. (Khalidi n.d.). When she was born it was into British occupied Palestine shortly before The Balfour Declaration, the statement of British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”(“Balfour Declaration” n.d.). She grew up in a strict Muslim household, one that clung closely to the idea of silent women. Her father ruled the house with an iron fist.(L. Joffe n.d.) Such was the oppression she faced in her family that her earliest poetry was published under a pseudonym; Dananir(Al-Saleh n.d.)
It discussed the themes of silencing women, the suffering of girls and the need for a kind of Muslim feminism. Her work in this area is enough to secure her rightful place in literary history but in 1948 the theme, tone and voice of her poetry would be changed forever.
In 1948, The Nakba happened. The term Nakba is an Arabic term that translates literally to Catastrophe, is used to refer to the violent, mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the Israeli state.(Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022(“Anti‐Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting” n.d.). The Nakba encompassed the violent displacement of Palestinians, destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages, and the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees during and after the 1948 Palestine war. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, representing about 80% of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel.(Erekat n.d.)
Fadwa Tuqan lived through this horrific ordeal and it fundamentally changed both her and her work. She, like many Palestinian poets, became a voice of resistance, one that spoke to the Palestinian people, urging them at once to fight for their land, whilst simultaneously ensuring their people did not lose hope in the face of an overwhelming military enemy. The year 1948 shook not only her country but also her personal life, as it was the year her father died.(Shackleton n.d.)
Her work became increasingly political after 1948, though her confidence in writing on such matters did not. She frequently expressed an uncertainty as to whether she should be the one to give voice to nationalist anguish.(Shackleton n.d.) Unfortunately further tragedy for Palestine would eradicate her doubt and replace it with a burning need to speak up.
In 1967, just 19 years after the first, the second Nakba event happened. (Nuseibah 2017) Another violent wave of targeted displacement was undertaken by the Israeli government, this time with further regulatory restrictions to stop any of the displaced from returning to their homelands. This event would later become known as the Naksa, in arabic escalation, for ease of distinguishing.(Nuseibah 2017)
The violent and callous manner in which the Israeli state undertook both these mass displacements made it clear to the world that they were in way interested in negotiation or land sharing. It made it even clearer to Palestinians that they would have to fight. Fadwa Tuqan numbered among them.
For the remainder of her career she would emerge as the voice of the resistance, constantly crafting poems that would stoke the fires of resistance in Palestinian hearts and make sure they remained hopeful no matter what.(Nuseibah 2017; Lawrence Joffe 2003).
She was so successful in this endeavour that even a former Israeli General, Moshe Dayan, likened her poetry to facing 20 enemy commandos. (Lawrence Joffe 2003)
This week’s poem, The Deluge and the Tree is a prime example of Tuqan’s powerful works of defiance. It was first published in her collection Daily Nightmares : Ten Poems published in 1988.( Tuqan 1988). The English translation of today’s poem was by by Naomi Shihab Nye with the help of the Editor, from Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, in 1992
There are three stanzas that I will read in turn, beginning with the first:When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge
of dark evil
onto the good green land
'They' gloated. The western skies
reverberated with joyous accounts:
"The Tree has fallen!
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane
leaves no life in the Tree!"
Immediately a metaphor of land and nature is set before us. There is a clear antagonist in the Hurricane, the force that seeks not only to destroy it’s opposite, a Tree, but erase it altogether. The tree on the other hand is an unshakeable symbol of resistance.
Nature imagery became an integral part of palestinian resistance poetry. As academic Barbara McKean Parmenter puts it in her excellent book Giving Voice to the Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature:
The use of place imagery in literature helps Palestinians, as individuals
and as a group, to maintain a sense of belonging to a
particular place and milieu. But it also sends a message to the
outside world by incorporating nature and the local environment
into the political argument. Poets and novelists depict the microworld
of rural life, for example, to emphasise the Palestinian's
close link to nature and the land.(Parmenter 2010)
Tuqan is reinforcing her people's tie to their land by minutiae of the landscape just as Parmenter describes. The metaphor that Tuqan is creating acts as a stand-in for the Nakba and the Naksa. By 1988 the term Nakba had evolved to become an all encompassing term to describe the ongoing atrocities committed by the Israeli Government against the Palestinian people.(Al Jazeera 2017).
The hurricane then seems a fitting symbol for the attempted ethnic cleansing of the land. Fadwa invokes biblical imagery in her use of deluge , conjuring up images of the great flood. She leaves no doubt that a war of good and evil is being waged. dark evil onto the good green land.
There are careful but deliberate references to the fact the people arriving in their lander are foreign, as the The western skies reverberated with joyous account.
She goes on to describe the bizarre celebration that this invading force undertakes when they believe their attempt at invasion has been successful.
"The Tree has fallen!
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane
leaves no life in the Tree!"
In other words: Hurray we’ve successfully eradicated the Palestinians.
A wonderfully poetic but simultaneously brutal tone is established by Fadwa Tuqan, one that highlights the sinister sense of victory felt by a force inflicting violence and murder on civilians. It does this whilst at the same time paying homage to the beauty of their landscape, their green land.
The choice of the tree as the symbol for Palestine is incredibly poignant. In my other episode on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, which I’ve linked below in the description, I explained how the olive tree had become a symbol synonymous with the Palestinian nationalist cause due to it’s deep roots and resilient nature.(Kuttab 2021). Here we can see that self same imagery being utilised in fact it becomes the core of the second stanza:
Had the Tree really fallen?
Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever,
not while the wine of our torn limbs
feed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive
tunneling deep, deep, into the land!
If the first stanza is the tragedy come to Palestine, then the second is sure the resistance that met it.
It starts with a questioning of history, which in a sense is just a questioning of narrative: Had the tree fallen? In this simple rhetorical question, Tuqan introduces a note of scepticism to her reader about sanitised western narratives about the invasion of her home. The reports of the ‘’success of Israel’’ and their right to this land being greatly overemphasised, if not outright false.(Whitelam 2018)
Tuqan answers it with a resounding Never! From here she creates a beautiful tapestry of landscape, culture and biology. She combines the bodies of Palestinian people literally with the land not with our red streams flowing forever a nod, both to the blood that continues pumping through her countrymen’s veins, whilst at the same time understanding that Palestine cannot rest until blood stops being spilled in their rivers.
This notion of unflinchingly witnessing violence is driven home in the next few lines: not while the wine of our torn limbs
feed the thirsty roots,
Their land is literally drinking the blood of those limbs. The evocation of torn limbs leaving the reader in no doubt that these people are under real threat. Fadwa Tuqan rallies once again, claiming that those drinking vines are arab roots alive. Staking her claim that Palestine is an Arabic place before it was forcibly colonised. The imagery of the olive trees deep reaching roots is once again used to enforce that the speaker and all around her belong in this land and have for the longest time: deep deep into the land
This stanza is not only an account of atrocity and violence but a testament to the Palestinian will to resist. It's not surprising to find this kind of fervour in poetry from the country. Poets like Fadwa and Tuqan and Mahnmoud Darwish became essential both in stirring nationalist sentiment and providing hope for the continuing struggle. There is a loose parallel to be drawn between them and the Irish nationalists back in the early 1900s who did the same during the Celtic Revival.(Tahrir Hamdi 2014)
Like in much of Arab literature , poetry holds a special place for public discourse. It is not the elitist niche discipline that it sometimes appears as in Western Anglo-Centric Cultures. As academic Mohammed Sawie puts it:
It should be noted that poetry has had an extremely high status
among other cultural productions in Arab culture. Poetry arises for a
variety of occasions; it is not some rarefied genre of literature, but one
with some mass appeal to a variety of audiences and readerships. More
than other literary genres, poetry has played a similar role among
Palestinians in Israel, and it is characterized as a product created
spontaneously in reaction to events.(Tuqan and Zayyad 2022)
Fadwa Tuqan is, without a doubt, writing in reaction to something but she is also writing to help people look past the present and understand that there is hope. This is what the third stanza is all about:
When the Tree rises up, the branches
shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
the laughter of the Tree shall leaf
beneath the sun
and birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
This is a call to resistance, an understanding that a passive response cannot be the answer. There is a recognition that when this resistance takes place, the tree can heal and not only that but, flourish green and fresh in the sun. Fadwa Tuqan paints a picture of a happier Palestine, one filled with laughter and sunshines. The tree takes on another symbolism, as a place of shelter and calm. A point of relief after what feels like endless struggle.
There is a lot of repetition here with words like tree and sun being repeated multiple times. This is important; it is almost a chant of sorts, not a violent one at all but a reminder of what Palestine could be again. The end of the poem uses the refrain of birds:
and birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
Birds are a traditional symbol of peace.(Chadd and Taylor 2016) They have been used throughout history and literature to symbolise that. Fadwa Tuqan uses this symbol in repetition to remind both herself and Palestinians that one day they will succeed. One day, history will right itself and the world will recognise Palestine as a state again. And, most importantly, Palestinians will know peace again.
The Deluge and The Tree has a very simple message: Free Palestine. Fadwa Tuqan passed away in 2003 ((Chadd and Taylor 2016; Khalidi n.d.) but her words, sadly, remain as necessary as ever. In this poem she has created a very simple metaphor for the palestinian struggle. One that shows just how outnumbered and overwhelmed Palestine truly is in the face of a government that wants nothing but their complete eradication.
At the time of Publishing Gaza has been under siege for weeks. There is no amount of logic, historical weaving or argument that can justify this. War and genocide is being waged on people who have had no respite in decades. A people who are at the mercy of a military that outweighs them in every measure.
If you’d like to donate to the Gazan relief effort I’ve included a link to the IPSC or Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the description of this episode. If you’d like to hear more Palestinian poetry check out the link to my episode on Mahmoud Darwish, also linked below. Other than that keep sharing Palestinian content and amplifying Palestinian voices.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
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Bibliography
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