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PARTISA REVIEW
pathos about survival, the preservation of personal freedom, alienation from
the Western left and from the naivete of its dreams. They speak of economic
pragmatism as the only way to assure freedom in their regions. They
distinguish between the poet as a citizen who may commit revolutionary acts
and the revolution of consciousness that is the arena of poetry. Thus arises
the need to be in the most private, most minimal way, in the instant, to
assassinate the present with a metaphor, to be in the territory of the dream.
As Tomaz Salamun read from his poem, "Birds":
I dreamed that blood flowed from his mouth.
He lay on the sand and stared into the void.
All around breathed the cliffs.
With my shoes on, I stepped on him, crushing his
nose.
It
seemed to me that the birds
feared him. That they wouldn't claw him apart
if the stream of blood was too thin. I broke
his neck at its nape. I made slush
of his ears and face. He squeaked,
soaked with sand. The sky
gave way and deepened. Birds began to
gather in flocks and approach.
(tr. by Michael Biggins)
At a supper for the participants that night I am meeting the poets
whom I will shortly "moderate" to the audience. Gentle-looking Asad
EI
Asad, President of the Palestinian Writers' Union of the West Bank and
Gaza arrives late. He is a refined man about my age, born in Beit Mahsir,
the village whose name reverberates with the sadness of Israeli laments for
the fallen of the War of Independence. I invite him to join our table. Soon we
shall be called upon to represent onstage the two sides of the controversy.
The audience is charged, alert. We already have been in Ireland,
Sweden,Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Standing beside the poets, the actor Itzik
Weingarten reads Hebrew translations. Then it is
EI
Asad's turn. He ap–
proaches the lectern with me. The tension in the audience escalates. Some–
thing is happening here, onstage, unedited - Israeli recognition ofautonomous
Palestinian representation, Palestinian recognition in Jerusalem of an Israeli
poetry festival.
EI
Asad begins with a political declaration. His sentences are
formulated along the rigid, standard ruler-lines ofevery such declaration. And
afterwards, in protest, he reads a poem written by a friend in the camp for
Intifada prisoners. I understand only the ascent of the poetic voice in a lan–
guage I do not know. He reads his poem, "Continue Your Dream." Although
only a small part of it is translated, even from the fragment it is possible to
feel the pain. What is there to say? Thinking about the dream in Salamun's
