Kamal Nasir poem: "The Story"

 

http://umkahlil.blogspot.com/

Nancy Harb Almendras

It's nothing new for Israel to murder poets. From my blog 18 years ago:

 

Kamal Nasir , Palestinian poet , killed by an Israeli death squad on April 10, 1973 during a time when 1570 Palestinian educators, doctors, and professionals were deported from their homeland as well as assassinated and maimed in botched assassinations. Their crimes: intellect , resistance , leadership. 

 

 

 

 This poem "The Story" by Kamal Nasir was written in 1961.

 

I will tell you a story

A story that lived in the dreams of people

A story that comes out of the world of tents

Was made by hunger and decorated in the dark nights

In my country, and my country is a handful of refugees

Every twenty of them have a pound of flour

 

And promises of a relief...gifts and parcels

It is the story of the suffering group

Who stood for ten years in hunger

In tears and agony

In hardship and yearning

 

It is a story of people who were misled

Who were thrown in the mazes of years

But they defied and stood

Disrobed and united

And went to light, from the tents

The revolution of return

in the world of darkness.

 

Kamal Nasser

umkahlil  "I first heard of Kamal Nasir from my late father, Baseel, who knew Nasir in Ramallah. My father was born in 1922. Nasir was born in Gaza in 1925, but his family lived in Bir Zeit. I was somewhat annoyed that my father, long since living in the states, had not heard of Mahmoud Darwish, famous contemporary Palestinian poet. "Do you know Kamal Nasir?" he challenged. "He was killed in front of his wife by Ehud Barak," he said angrily.

Musician Rima Nasir Tarazi, President of the Administrative Board of the General Union of Palestinian Women, recalls

"Between 1954 and 1956, Kamal Nasir was staying at his home in Birzeit and would pour his soul out in passionate verses singing praises to the beautiful lost
homeland and calling on the masses to stand up for their rights. He would put
his poems before the three of us and we would decide amongst ourselves which to choose.   His song, 'Ya Akhi El-Lajea,' (Oh, My Refugee Brother) adapted to the music of Fleifel immediately after the Catastrophe, had already become a
landmark song widely known all over Palestine. It was a call to rise and to act
against injustice and to stand up against attempts at humiliating our people and
bartering their rights for meagre food rations: 'They offered us poison in our
food / turning us into a docile and silent flock of sheep.'"

Tarazi writes that Nasir "was writing an elegy to a friend" when he was killed. "His body was found with hands outstretched, his mouth and right hand riddled with bullets."

Sina Rahmani paraphrases Edward Said: "Another saddening story he [Said] tells is that of the death of PLO spokesmen Kamal Nasir. Nasir was babysitting for a relative of Said who had gone with Said to Jordan to bury an aunt who had recently passed away. That very night that the two of them had left for Jordan, Nasir was assassinated by an Israeli strike team lead by Ehud Barak, who would become Prime Minister more than two decades later. Exemplifying the vindictiveness of the Israeli attitude towards Palestinians, the eloquent poet and writer Nasir was found riddled with bullets in his mouth and his right hand."

"His poetic talents," Tarazi writes, "which appeared early in childhood, were nurtured by the annual Suq Okath (a traditional Arab poetry contest) held at the College [Bir Zeit] and in which he always extemporized and excelled. He completed his education at the American University of Beirut where he won the prestigious poetry prize for his poem "The Orphan."

By murdering Nasir, who was exiled from Jordan only to return and be deported again by Israel along with hundreds of other Palestinian intellectuals in 1967, Israel "was to demonstrate, once again," according to Tarazi, "its commitment to destroying any embodiment of Palestinian identity and any resistance to its attempts at establishing facts on the ground. Thinkers and writers were viewed as a threat."

Ariel Sharon's legacy wrote Edward Said, will be that of an Arab killer, as will that of Nasir's gleeful executor, Ehud Barak. Kamal Nasir was a threat, but contrary to his rather stupid and short-sighted executioners' expectations, he remains a threat to Israel's injustice; it is in part from his painful experience of the "ugly side of civilization," that he created a wealth of beauty that will inspire and instruct "so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see." It is the legacy which my late father, neither a poet, nor an intellectual, bequeathed to me one day while we were talking in his Central California backyard.

"Nasir will always be remembered as a man with boundless love for his people and for humanity as a whole. His charm, compassion and tolerance won him several friends and admirers among people from all walks of life. As a poet, he was widely acclaimed for eloquently expressing the hopes and pains of his people, and advocating their cause. His charismatic public appearances were a source of inspiration to the masses that flocked to listen to him at every possible occasion."

Kamal Nasir's Last Poem addresses exile and the longing for return as he admonishes his "beloved,"


Tell my only one, for I love him,


That I have tasted the joy of giving


And my heart relishes the wounds of sacrifice.


There is nothing left for him


Save the sighs from my song...Save the remnants of my lute


Lying piled and scattered in our house.


Tell my only one if he ever visits my grave


And yearns for my memory,


Tell him one day that I shall return --


to pick the fruits.



In Letter to Fadwa, Nasir anticipates his death, inspires hope, emits courage, and conveys beauty:



If my songs should reach you despite the narrow skies around me,


remember that I will return to life,


to the quest for liberty,


remember that my people may call on my soul


and feel it rising again from the folds of the earth.



Rahmani, Sina. "Edward Said: The Last Interview, and: Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said, and: The Battle of Algiers (review)" Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 25, Number 2, 2005, Duke University Press, pp. 512-514.
Body

https://umkahlil.blogspot.com/search?q=Kamal+Nasir