[First published in The Canadian Charger (25 August 2010), http://www.thecanadiancharger.com/page.php?

id=5&a=557.]

[Index: Ehab Lotayef, Palestine]

[Date: August 2010]

Ehab Lotayef's To Love a Palestinian Woman:

Poems in English and Arabic

Michael Keefer

Review of Ehab Lotayef, To Love a Palestinian Woman: Poems in English and Arabic
(Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2010)

Does the title of this collection of poems seem at first glance surprising?
What would it mean to love any Palestinianman, woman, or childwithin a
context where the dominant discourse, and the whole current of state action, seem hostile
to the notion of recognizing Palestinians' possession of even the most basic human
rights?
The politicians of Canada's ruling parties may express a pious commitment to
international human rights law, but their actions show how feebly selective, in fact, this
commitment is.
In 1987, Canada was the only country at the Qubec Francophonie Summit to
oppose a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination.
In 1997, Canada signed a free trade agreement with Israel that accepts Israel's
economic boundaries as incorporating the illegally occupied Palestinian
territories, thereby giving preferential treatment to goods not just from Israel, but
also from Israel's expanding network of illegal settlements.
In 2006, Canada was the first country to join Israel's illegal blockade of the
Palestinians of Gazain punishment for having chosen, in a democratic

election, a government of whom Israel and the West disapprove.

In January 2008, by which time the blockade's devastating impact on public
health in Gaza was evident, Canada was the only member of the UN Human
Rights Committee to oppose a resolution calling for immediate action to end the
blockade.
A year later, in the midst of Israel's military assault on Gaza during December
2008-January 2009, which involved large-scale war crimes and crimes against
humanity, Canada was the only member of the UN Human Rights Committee
that voted in support of Israel's actions.
In 2010, the Canadian government refused to condemn Israel's murderous
attack, in international waters, on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish flagship of a
flotilla that was seeking to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.
As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben reminds us, the ancient Romans had a term,
homo sacer, to describe a person who is deliberately excluded from all of the protections
of the law and can therefore be harmed with impunity.1
Canada's unprincipled support of Israeli and American policies has contributed to
making the Palestinians, as a nation, homines sacri: people to whom the system of
international law that we pretend to uphold as universal in its reach does not even begin
to apply.
The principles of justice and collective security enshrined in international law
ought to protect the people of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967
from ongoing theft of their land and ongoing military aggressions, from routine
violations of their civil rights, and from collective punishmentsincluding intentional
deprivation of adequate food, clean water, housing, medical supplies, and waste disposal
facilities, and a systematic denial of economic and educational opportunities.
But these principles of justice seem to be in abeyance in Canada's relations to the
Palestinians.
Our leaders' message to them is that of Franz Kafka's jurists in his novel The
Trial: There is justice, plenty of justiceonly not for you.
* * *
1 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).

What could it mean, in this context, to love a Palestinian? Ehab Lotayef's poems
may help us to understand.
Lotayef writes across languages (the last half-dozen poems in this collection are
in Arabic, with facing-page English translations), across cultural and literary traditions,
and across the agonies that divide them.
His Arabic poems are written in two distinct registers: in some of them a
colloquial voice sings from the page, while others, written in a more formal register,
attach themselves to a classical tradition that goes back more than a millennium.
The English poems likewise range from song lyrics that invite musical
accompaniment to solemn, often mordant, free-verse reflections.
Some of these poems explicitly respond to deep voices of the present and the
recent pastthe Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Arabic and Hebrew poets Nizar
Quabbani and Aharon Shabatai, as well as Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights
and the murdered peace activist Rachel Corrie.
Elsewhere the reader may hear echoes of other poets whose work is at once lyrical
and public: Harold Pinter, Bertold Brecht, and perhaps also the antiwar poet Denise
Levertov.
As these names together might suggest, Lotayef is refreshingly serious about the
ethical, social and civic responsibilities of poetry.
In an introductory note he alludes to the passage in Sura 26 of the Qur'an which
speaks of poets who say what they do not do. His own practice, as poet and activist,
has been to be present in the streets, the slums, the danger zones where the pain and
suffering on which his poetry reflects is inflicted, endured, and resisted.
This presence in the midst of suffering is evident in the compassion and the
measured ironies of Lotayef's lyric voice. Commenting on the fall of Kabul in November
2001, he offered congratulations
... on swapping Abdul for Abdil
Opium will be flowing still
and all the amputees,
survivors of a war that can never be won
will continue to live in hell[...].
In response to the terror bombings in London in July 2005, he drew what should
have been (but never was in the mainstream media) the obvious comparison:

No conference postponed
No podium
No cameras
No one says barbarians when it happens in Basra
On a hot summer day
in the middle of winter
on pleasant spring evenings
or windy fall nights
each day of the year it happens in Basra
Downtown, in the suburbs
in classrooms, in homes
in slums and in villas
on factory floors
No one ever counted the bodies in Basra.
(The comparison becomes harsher still if one remembers that shortly after this poem was
written, British SAS soldiers in civilian disguise were caught by Iraqi police in the act of
preparing a bombing attack near a marketplace in Basra.)2
Another poem addresses the Dalai Lama, who was in Israel in 2006 to celebrate
the centenary of Ben Gurion's immigration to Palestine:
Beloved of Hollywood, Ocean of Wisdom:
can a liberated celebrity
bring freedom to a people?
[....]
They'll hide the sun under your crimson robe
drown the truth in your words of hope
Leave my aching land alone
To Lhasa
I support your right of return.
Lotayef demands that the truth be spoken. In a poem commemorating the sixtieth
anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophethe ethnic cleansing of 700,000 to 900,000
Palestinians from their homeland in 1948he writes, They stole your Qur'an and your
2 See my article Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra? Suspicions
Strengthened by Earlier Reports, Centre for Research on Globalization (25 September 2005).

Bible / Burned your orange groves and olive trees (a reminder, if one be needed, that
many Palestinians are not Muslims but Christians).
Yet while he spurs us to remember, Lotayef writes with equal insistence (as in the
title poem of this collection) on the need for a love that is conjoined with solidarity, and
with pity:
When you love a Palestinian woman
your heart is tuned
to the beat of a heart
that won't forget
You travel far;
you walk the narrow streets of Jerusalem,
in the footsteps of Jesus,
carrying his cross, cleaning his wounds, wiping his tears [...].
And in the poem Abyss, written on the first anniversary of 9/11, he denounces hatred
as being not liberating, but a deeper form of entrapment:
Gates that can't be opened
a wall within a wall
hostages of hatred
have no hope at all [...].
One of the ways in which Lotayef configures hope in this book is through the ten
fine photographs, which he took for the most part in Gaza, the West Bank, Baghdad, and
Cairo, and with which his poems are recurrently in dialogue. These include sensitive
portraits: two haunting images of women with their young children in Gaza and in
Baghdad, an elderly man in Dehaisha refugee camp in the West Bank holding out the
keys to his lost home in Israel, and a more formal portrait of Adil Charkaoui, imprisoned
for years, without public charges or a trial, on a Canadian security certificate.3
Other photographs are of landscapes, for the most part damaged or desolate: a
street in Hebron, an avenue of tents on barren land in Gaza. But one of these turns out to
be a powerful image of hope. What at first appear to be two leaning tombstones
photographed in Gaza, near the Egyptian border, with only the sky behind them, resolve
themselves on closer inspection into crazily tilted concrete segments of the Israeli
3 The principal evidence against Charkaoui, so far as I can ascertain, appears to have been that his
surname differs only in dialect from that of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the semi-mythical Jordanian to
whom for several years the Pentagon's fabulists ascribed nearly every feat of the Iraqi resistance.

apartheid wallwhich was for a short time breached, one remembers, near Rafah.
But hope alone is not enough, as Lotayef reminds Barack Obama in a poem
addressed in mid-November 2008 to the President-Elect:
The train on platform three
is quarantined
Passengers are dying
in their seats
The station master forgot the codes
and lost the keys
[....]
Night is falling, fast
Children
with sad eyes are waiting for their dads to take them home
Maybe you can
But we
we can't survive for long
on hope alone.
Obama has been consistently deaf to messages such as this. But perhaps Canadian
readers of this memorable book will be more willing to open their heartsand to help
sustain Palestinians' hope through political action, based on compassionate solidarity, and
aimed at returning this nation to an awareness of our responsibilities under international
law.