LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksWhen will we pray?Our prayer will be an explosionOur prayer will make the sun rise,Will arm the defencelessAnd cause the banner of the revolution to fly.Our prayer will ignite the hurricane,Will make the arms and the irises grow in the wildernessTurning resignation into victory.The repeated use of the vocative ‘ya’ in this poem shifts its focus from beingone about prayer to becoming an act of prayer in its own right. The vocative ‘ya’is typically used in prayer in Arabic to address God, to ask for His forgiveness orto seek His help and support. This strong spiritual atmosphere is found in otherpoems in the collection. In al-Hijra ila Allah (‘Migration to the Lord’, ibid.: 68–78) Nazik addresses God in a mood of complete supplication, telling Him, usingrepetition again, that her journey towards Him had taken her a very long time(maliki talat al-rihlatu talat, ibid.: 74), no doubt in reference to that period in hercareer and poetry when God seemed absent. Mixing the spiritual with thenational through the topos of Palestine, Nazik tells God that she came on herlong journey carrying with her the grief of Jerusalem, the wounds of Jinin – asmall town in the Occupied West Bank – and the humiliation inflicted on theAqsa Mosque (the first qibla in Islam) in a period of history that lacked leadersof the calibre of Saladin or the Abbasid Caliph al-MuÆtasim, whose victory overthe Byzantines in ÆAmmuriya (Amorium) in 833 is etched in the minds of allschool children, not least because it was encoded in one of the masterpieces ofthe Arabic poetic canon. She also tells him that she came carrying with her thewounds inflicted on the fida’iyyin (Palestinian freedom fighters) whose bloodwas spilled in Amman and Beirut in the 1970s. This poem is full of quiet angerwhich, unlike the fiery anger the poet displays in her earlier poetry, is moreeffective and haunting. The poem also speaks of God’s anger at His own peoplewho, by failing to follow His right path, the path of freedom, have acceptedoppression in their own lives and, in the process, negated their humanity.This weaving of the spiritual with the national takes a new turn in Aqwa minal-qabr (ibid.: 58–67). In this poem, the poet injects a strong personal elementthat connects her with her dead mother who, as we have seen above, championedthe Palestinian and other nationalist causes in her poetry. Upon hearing arecording of one of her mother’s poems in her own voice, memories andassociations came flooding back to the poet (ibid.: 64):Your bleeding poems:Their salt ignites sadness and fire in my bonesAnd I feel the surge of your boiling [anger]Running through me— 223 —www.taq.ir