Poetry of Resistance In Occupied Palestine

(Collected by Sulafa Hijjawi, Written 1948-1966)

As a way to commemorate Thursday’s upcoming Revolutionary Revue: Palestinian Liberation Cinema, from Epoch to Exile, Write Brain TV is presenting a special TRIPLE DROP of some of the most revolutionary and beautiful works of prose and poetry to come out of Palestine in the last half-century! 

In translator Sulafa Hijjawi’s Poetry Of Resistance In Occupied Palestine, we get an excellent scattershot selection of some of the finest and most well-known poems, post-1948. With an introduction by our next writer, Ghassan Kanafani, he describes the early 20th-century Palestinian literary scene as flourishing, albeit as a smaller part of the greater Arabic literary circle. However, the situation changed drastically following the Nakba, as a more immediate Palestinian identity was forced to arise, “As the Zionist occupants closed their military ring, … [t]heir chief purpose was to eradicate every trace of the Arab personality and to implant the seeds of new trends which might grow and integrate within the Zionist political and literary life.” It was up to the artists now to continue their Art in Exile. This casts a spotlight on the pain & suffering of modern Palestine, while fusing with the generational trauma of its past, showing an Apartheid still unfolding in real time.  Sulafa Hijjawi has an extensive expertise & understanding of the struggle in the middle east & the hard to find poetry lurking under American imperialism & Western-funded oppression.