| Personality of the Month |
Taha Muhammad Ali Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in Saffuriyya Village in the Galilee, Palestine. At the age of seventeen, in 1948, Ali was forced with his family into a year-long exile, when their village was destroyed by the Israeli army. They eventually managed to come back and settle just five kilometres away from Saffuriyya, in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. For the next fifty years, Ali would sell souvenirs during the day to tourists from his shop in Nazareth. At night, however, he would study poetry; everything from classical Arabic to contemporary American free verse. In the 1950s Ali published his first short stories, but his poems did not begin to appear in Arabic periodicals until the 1970s. Now perceived as a major Palestinian poet, Ali is esteemed primarily for his plainspoken and quietly sophisticated poetry. His poems mainly disclose political complexity and humanity. They concern personal memories juxtaposed with political events. In his poems Ali writes vividly of his childhood in Saffuriyya and of the political upheavals he has survived. The Saffuriyya of his youth has indeed served as the nexus of his poetry and fiction, which are grounded in everyday experience and the life of simple people. Nevertheless, against the crushing specificity of his historical self, as poet and critic Victoria Chang notes, Ali responds with a delicately balanced generality, allowing him to explore universal themes, as when he writes of bread and water. And so it has taken me all of sixty years to understand that water is the finest drink, and bread the most delicious food, and that art is worthless unless it plants a measure of splendor in people’s hearts. In another poem, titled “The Falcon,” the speaker asks why sadness would have him “collapse / like the eagle’s features,” an especially stunning image for readers more accustomed to the cliché of eagle as a symbol of national power. Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, in short lines of varying beats, with disarming humour and an unflinching honesty. And although his style relies on structures based on classical Arabic poetry, Ali does not yield to embellishment in his diction but tends towards simple words and images. As Chang beautifully observes, “simplicity is something Muhammad Ali risks and exploits.” Poet Gabriel Levin, in his turn, suggests that Ali’s poetry recalls in contemporary terms the work of the great modern Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, as well as the Central and Eastern European poetry of Ungaretti, Różewicz, and Herbert - poets who wrote with unflinching honesty as the lights dimmed in their native lands. Such poets replaced the “poeticisms” of their elders with a stark, emotional directness. Ali, according to Levin, has released a complex of emotions of startling and often unexpected force. He has described a harsh, often painful realism, emotional desolation, images of desertion and ruin, and the sudden eruption of violence, without giving in to mere folklore and nostalgia. Muhammad Ali’s books of poetry include al-Quasida ar-Rabia (Fourth Qasida, 1983), Dhahek ala Thuqoun al-Qatalah (Fooling the Killers, 1989), and Hariq fi Maqbarat al-Dayr (Fire in the Convent Garden, 1992). The upcoming Palestine Literature of Festival (1-6 May, http://www.palfest.org) is honouring Taha Muhammad Ali in its opening ceremony in Jerusalem on 1 May 2010. The festival’s full programme will be available from mid-April. |
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