Region | The Writing on the Wall

step gently

a nation is

dreaming...

[ poetry ] The construction of the Israeli barrier that isolates the West Bank from the outside world began almost a decade ago. It is now 450 miles long -- the distance from San Diego to San Francisco -- and stands 26 feet tall, more than twice as high as the Berlin Wall. It has been called both the anti-terrorist fence and the racial separation wall. No words come to mind, however, as you walk on the streets of Bethlehem, Palestine. You do not need to delve deep; the wall's impact is visible in people's faces, faces that still smile at you as they pass by and go on with their lives.

Contemplating the soul-numbing injustices with which these people live, an urge to commit your life to the cause of Palestinian independence dominates you. But most likely you will move on too. It is only the Wall that stays -- it has uprooted olive trees, thwarted access to health care, cut through farmlands and villages, separated brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren. It has been built to stay, to rise and stand tall, to cast its shadow on our humanity. Ironically, it is also on the streets of Bethlehem where a more just world is most imaginable. It is in Palestine that your heart dares to dream of peace, not in the long corridors of the United Nations headquarters where "peace" is a resolution yet to be passed.

The streets of Palestine are where free-spirited activists and artists have come to change the face of apartheid, to add the bright colors of their vision to the monochrome gray of the Wall. Through graffiti art and poetry, Palestine now owns the longest "living canvas of resistance and solidarity." The Persian-language verse of Ahmad Shamlu is found alongside Mahmoud Darwish's poignant poems in Arabic. "Nations United" written in English is right next to "This wall will fall, and I will return to claim my piece," in Spanish. Story after story of suffering is present, displaying the profound universality of the human condition. From a tombstone of the world imagined by the politics of "separate but equal," the Wall has been turned into a monument that summons, in every one of us, a sense of affinity and shared vulnerability, a monument that insists on the presence of lost lives.

Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, writes, "From the suffering Other, there comes a giving that is no longer drawn from the power of acting and existing, but precisely from weakness itself. What the suffering Other gives to he or she who shares this suffering is precisely the knowledge of shared vulnerability and the experience of the spontaneous benevolence required to bear that knowledge." The following selection includes work by Darwish, Palestine's most celebrated poet, as well as graffiti art and writing captured on the Wall. What do these latter expressions add to the discourse of Palestinian rights and suffering? They beautify a despised structure that some locals would prefer be left in its naked, repressive form. Where formal texts often distance us from the Palestinians' predicament and Israel's policies, graffiti art speaks to us with the same warmth and intensity one encounters in conversation with people on the streets of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Ramallah. Art may not change the reality on the ground in Palestine, but it is potent enough to turn an inhuman barrier into a living narrative that mirrors the best of a nation that still dares to dream.

Selections from Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah

The soldiers measure the distance between being

and nonbeing

with a tank's scope...

Siege is the waiting

the waiting on a ladder leaning amid the storm

(to poetry:) besiege your siege

Do we harm anyone? Do we harm any

country, if we were stuck, even if from a distance,

just once, with the drizzle of joy?

We store out sorrows in our jars, lest

the soldiers see them and celebrate the siege...

In Damascus:

the traveler sings to himself:

I return from Syria

neither alive

nor dead

but as clouds

that ease the butterfly's burden

from my fugitive soul

Selections from the Wall

For he himself is

our

[PEACE]

who has made the

two one and

has destroyed

the barrier

the dividing Wall

of hostility

-- Ephesians 2:14

[written for the oppressor]

The Wall is in your head

to exist

is to resist

-- Zapatista Army, Mexico

MADE IN USA

our revenge

will be the laughter

of our children

-- Bobby Sands, Northern Ireland

an eye

for an eye

leaves the

whole world

BLIND

a country is not

what it does

but also what

it tolerates

you look at me

and I look at you

what is this

teaching our children?

dream

as if

you will

for ever

If I sit silently

I have sinned

-- Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran

I have come to your land

and I have recognized

shades of my own

my land was once

one where some people

imagined that they could build

their security on the insecurity of others

-- Faris Esack, South Africa

let never-smiling people rise

let them rise

-- Ahmad Shamlu

The only peace Israel wants

Is a piece of my land

Berlin 89

Palestine?

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in al-Birweh, Palestine. During the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, his village was destroyed and his family fled to Lebanon. Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his political activism and for publicly reading his poetry. He lived in exile for 26 years, between Beirut and Paris, until his return to Israel in 1996. Approximately 30 collections of his poetry and prose have been published, which have been translated into more than 22 languages. Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas. (Retrieved from Poets.org.)

Further reading:

Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine (Lawrence Hill Books, 2011), by William Parry. A stunning book of photographs that captures the impact of the apartheid wall on Palestinians.

The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah. A bilingual collection of the work of Palestine's national poet.

Banksy. Website of the British graffiti artist and political activist whose work has appeared on the streets of the world's slums and war-torn cities.

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