A faux shared misery as in your poem, “I often like a hostage/ confined to my own history,” where your compare your social confinement to Israel’s unlawful and sadistic torture suffered by Palestinian prisoners. I had expected that by giving your collection the title, “Dear Dawish” that I, along with you, would enter into a relationship with Palestine’s monumental poet, a poet whose aching soul is the soul of all Palestinians aching for their violently appropriated homeland. However, such a relationship is tenuous here, particularly missing is an emotional connection with the emotive and passionate Darwish, inhibited by the invalid opening and underlying premise of your poetry; you are not ‘telling the same story’ nor is there a fusing of the same wounds, “For now: our wounds shift their edges into the center formulating a perfectly symmetrical square “(43-4) Moreover, motive dictates why Palestinians and Israelis do not ‘share the blood on our hands’. The Israeli motive is the theft of the whole of ancestral Palestine (a war crime). Yet Israeli hasbara insists that Israelis and Palestinians are equal; that there is a war going on between them. There is no war. Nor can you equate your ‘exile’ to that suffered by Darwish; the voice of 8 million indigenous Palestinians coerced into exile. “You ask, “Who Am I, Without Exile?” I answer: You are the bulb of the pregrown plant carried in the stomach of a squirrel. You ask: Who Are You, Without Exile? I answer I am the wandering exile seeping my roots in our land.” ‘Our’ land. Which land? The ancestral land of the exiled Palestinian or of ancient Kazah in Europe from which the majority of Israeli Jews did not wander but emigrated? * The Nakba (Catastrophe) – Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began in 1948 * Sumud – Palestinian steadfastness to their homeland. Darwish says, “Between memory and the suitcase there is no solution but resistance. Justice, freedom, belonging, and worthiness are only proclaimed through resistance.” * Hasbara- lie, propaganda, spin Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:28:46 +0000
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