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ABSTRACT
After the naksa, Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan composed her famous “I Shall Not Weep,” which she later included in her first resistance-themed collection: The Night and Knights. In this poem, Tuqan openly proclaims her intention to enter the male-dominated political arena and join the Palestinian poets of resistance. However, Tuqan's turn toward the nationalist cause did not come without a struggle. She had, for long, resisted this move as a performative denunciation of women's paradoxical location within the nationalist symbolic order. Focusing on The Night and Knights, this article traces the poetic representations of Tuqan's emerging attachment to the collective and investigates the meanings of her engagement with Palestinian nationalist discourse. I argue that while the construal of the gendered self in the collection illuminates the generative power that the Palestinian experience holds, it also reveals how Tuqan's location within various systems of power informs her strategies of representation and resistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 396. All translations of Tuqan’s work included in the article are my own.
2 Ibid., 405.
3 Hadidi, “Fadwā Tūqān: Al-Dhāt al-shāʿira.”
4 Jayyusi, 812.
5 The first volume of Tuqan’s autobiography was translated into English in 1990 as A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography by Olive Kenny. The second volume, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab (The More Difficult Journey), which she published in 1993, has not been translated.
6 Tuqan, Riḥla jabaliyya, 133.
7 Ibid., 137.
8 Ibid., 152.
9 Several critical works have addressed the first volume of Tuqan’s autobiography, offering enlightening insights into the narrative’s depiction of selfhood and its critical engagement with normative gendered discourses. See, for example, Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Bodies, Woman’s Word and Al-Nowaihi, “Resisting Silence.”
10 Eng and Kazanjian, “Mourning Remains,” 10. See also Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy” and Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing.
11 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 16.
12 Tuqan, Riḥla jabaliyya, 237.
13 Ibid., 237. Emphasis is mine.
14 The five poems that Tuqan produced at the time are “Madīnatī al-ḥazīna” (My Sad City), “al-Ṭāʿūn” (The Plague), “Ilā ṣadīq gharīb” (To a Foreign Friend), “al-Iʿṣār wa-l-shajara” (The Deluge and the Tree), and “Ḥayy abadan” (Forever Alive).
15 The phrase “open borders” was one of the metaphors used by the Israeli government at the time to paint an optimistic picture of the reality in the occupied territories. In her analysis of the post-1967 Israeli discourse, Dalia Gavriely-Nuri emphasizes that the phrase metaphorically associated the guarded border crossing with free passage, or with an idea of a world with no borders, ignoring the oppressive restrictions, imposed on Palestinians freedom of movement under the occupations military regime and avoiding any direct reference to the basic fact that after 1967, Israel ruled over more than one million Palestinians in the occupied territories. Gavriely-Nuri, The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 85–86.
16 Tuqan, Riḥla jabaliyya, 131.
17 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 18.
18 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 20.
19 See Andermahr, Decolonizing Trauma Studies; Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing; and Sayigh, “On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba.”
20 Sayigh, “On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba,” 58.
21 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 370.
22 Ibid., 372.
23 Ibid., 371.
24 Ibid., 370.
25 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 17.
26 Cross-cultural scholarship in social psychological theories argues that connectedness and belonging are not mere associations between the self and others, but rather involve central differences in the way the self is construed. These different self-understandings coexist within the same person and are activated at different times or in different contexts. For a detailed discussion of levels of identity and self-representation, see Brewer and Gardner, “Who Is This ‘We’?”
27 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 373.
28 Ibid., 374.
29 Moran, “War in the Middle East,” 73.
30 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 183.
31 Farag, Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile, 81, 76.
32 On representations of the nakba and its effects on Palestinian literature, see Farag, Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile, 18–74 and Ghanim, “Poetics of Disaster.”
33 Farag, Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile, 88.
34 For a discussion of respective literature on gender, war, and the question of empowerment, see Webster, Cheng and Beardsley, “Conflict, Peace, and the Evolution of Women’s Empowerment.”
35 Tuqan, Riḥla jabaliyya, 113.
36 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 16.
37 Ibid., 16, 148.
38 Ibid., 17.
39 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 394.
40 Ibid., 395.
41 Ibid., 369, 398.
42 Ibid. 395.
43 Ibid., 396.
44 Ibid., 397.
45 Ibid., 398.
46 Ibid., 373, 377.
47 Ibid., 378.
48 Ibid., 372.
49 Ibid., 389.
50 Ibid., 390.
51 Ibid., 392.
52 Ibid., 435. This poem is not included in the first edition of The Night and Knights. It was added to the collection, along with several other poems from that period with the publication of Tuqan’s Complete Poetic Works in 1993.
53 Ghanim, “Poetics of Disaster,” 23.
54 Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, 49.
55 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 208–228.
56 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 21.
57 Ibid., 21–23.
58 Al-Musawi, Arabic Poetry, 159.
59 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 28–29. Emphasis is mine.
60 Ibid., 29.
61 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 122.
62 Hammond, “Al-Khansa’,” 3.
63 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 372
64 In their rites of lamentation, pre-Islamic women bereft of their kinsman traditionally engaged in public displays of mourning. In addition to laments, which were performed at grave sites or tribal gatherings, women would go out of their dwellings unveiled, tearing their hair and clothes, scratching their faces, and wailing. Notably, rithāʾ is a familiar territory for Tuqan, for she had devoted a large portion of her poetry to elegizing her brothers and was linked by many Arab critics to the renowned pre-Islamic female elegist, al-Khansāʾ.
65 Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 165.
66 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 394.
67 Hammond, “Al-Khansaʾ,” 4.
68 Tuqan, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 408.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 409.
71 El Cheikh, Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity, 17–37.
72 Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 199.
73 Ibid., 203.
74 For a full account of Hind’s reaction after the Battle of Uhud, see, for example, al-Waqidi, Kitāb al-Maghāzī, 117–118.
75 Tuqan, al-Riḥla al-aṣʿab, 73.
76 Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance,” 53.
77 Badr, “al-Tarjama tanṭawī ʿalā balsam li’l-ṣirāʿāt.”
78 Badr, from the synopsis of Fadwa: A Tale of a Poet from Palestine