Customer Reviews

Never Mind: Twenty Poems And A Story

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Gorgeous poems about life in small villages in Palestine, the This book travels over everyday life, eating and farming, how the particular beauties of nature are savored. There are beautiful pictures of a grandfather and a mother. The wonderful story about the author's shoelessness is very touching. This book takes you to the heart of a world that, as an American reader, I knew wxisted but could not find my way to. I am so grateful for Taha for bringing me here.

Taha's limpid and lyrical poems do what wondrous poetry always does. They deliver sensual plesure with their music and special sensibility--they tell us what it means to be alive, in particular ways, "touch the herbs/the wild artichoke and chicory," and to grieve over our losses, again in particular ways: "fatigue, hunger, vagrancy/debt..." These poems embrace the land of Taha's origins, yet never veer into ideology or hatred. They glow with a love of what we are and what we must suffer. Bravo.

English readers may not yet know how lucky they are to be able to read Taha Muhammad Ali's poetry and prose. But once they get their hands on this, they will -- and it will change their minds about the range of themes and styles alive in modern Palestinian literature. Taha Muhammad Ali is one of Palestine's most unique voices. He's been writing, (or telling stories and singing poems) for forty years now, and this collection shows the range of his talent. His sources, famously, are not exactly those of Palestine's literary establishment. Though now located in Nazareth, Israel's largest Palestinian city, he draws his themes from his childhood in his village, Saffuriyya. This means his writing is both as local as the oral epic poetry and zajals he heard as a child, and as cosmopolitan as the world literature he has devoured for decades -- a list that would include Dickens, Mahfouz, and Steinbeck at the top. The mix of local and global, high and low, classic and experimental is as curious as it is engaging. Most importantly, this mix means that Muhammad Ali cannot be pigeonholed as a writer. For all these reasons, Ibis has done us a great favor by introducing us to Muhammad Ali. The translators of this collection -- Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin -- are to be congratulated for the delicacy of their work -- they are a delight to read.

There is, of course, a long history of self-appointed censors who are on the lookout to refute anything a Palestinian might ever say, even when they say it in fiction. They feel it their duty to deny Palestinian self-expression in any form. For students of US history, these attempts to exclude brown-skinned authors from the temple of literature will be sadly familiar. It is not surprising that extremist voices have objected to this book, as they object to all others that don't pass their test of political orthodoxy. What would Muhammad Ali say in reply? Probably just: "Never mind. Go on reading anyway." And then he'd laugh -- and his readers will laugh with him.

In other words, Muhammad Ali's work is itself probably the best challenge to those who would seek to silence him. Pick up "Never Mind" and you'll see why. This author writes literature without a care for small-minded politics -- and readers will appreciate him for that. Finally, it just needs to be emphasized that this book is a work of literature that will expand your mind. Still, if in the midst of reading "Never Mind" you hear a clamor of politics -- a humanist politics that transcends the tribalism of his detractors -- don't be surprised, just keep turning the pages.

The 89 pages of stories and poems here are introduced by a fawning essay by Gabriel Levin, almost half as long. Levin's admiration rests on his false belief that Taha at age seventeen "was forced to leave with his family for Lebanon, after his village was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948," in what he describes as "the shattering and exodus of the Palestinian community." Unfortunately, empirical historical evidence doesn't support Levin's sad fairy tale.

Undoubtedly, Taha fled Saffuriya to Lebanon in July 1948, and returned with his family in 1949 to Nazareth, where they later became Israeli citizens. But IDF forces did NOT drive Taha or his family to flee Saffuriya. Actually, "Saffuriya's inhabitants" engaged in many violent incursions into Jewish communities, and fled BEFORE the IDF took the village---because they expected and feared "revenge for their numerous onslaughts upon Jews," according to operational orders, oral testimonies and diaries cited by historian Yoav Gelber, in Palestine 1948 (p. 165). The villagers fled of their own accord, BEFORE the battle, fearful of retaliation for their collective role in violent attacks against Jewish civilians.

Moreover, Israel's attack on Saffuriya was defensive. Even Levin's 37-page essay admits that Taha's village "had sheltered local militiamen." Indeed, in the 1930s, Saffuriya served as a center for anti-Jewish radicalism and attacks. In 1948, it was the command post of Arab Liberation Army leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji, who rejected the June 11, 1948, UN-imposed truce. Furthermore, Madlul Abbas' Hittin regiment controlled Nazareth, negatively influencing villages like Saffuriya.

Now to the poems. Some of the language is lyrical and lovely, as in "I hate departure.../ I love the spring/ and the path to the spring,/ and I worship the middle/ hours of morning."

But most is militant, angry, and vengeful. In "Empty Words," Taha wishes his notebook had produced words saying, "I wish I could be/ a rock on a hill/ which the young men/ from Hebron explode/ and offer as a gift to Jerusalem's children,/ ammunition for their palms and slings." He wanted a passage where he is "gazing out from on high/ hundreds of years from now/ over hordes/ of masked liberators!" He mourns that "empty words" in his notebook "frighten no enemy...." Taha in other words lauds the murder of innocent children, provided they are Jewish of course.

He also makes false poetic claims. In "Amerbris," he calls Israel's land a whore taken by "newcomers,/ sailors and usurpers," whom he writes "uproot the backyard hardens,/ burying trees." That's his opinion. However, the land that Jewish farmers worked was purchased at above-market rates from Arab landowners. It was not stolen. Maybe the Arab sellers were whores, but certainly not the buyers, and certainly not the land itself.

In "Warning," a version of which Taha read at the Dodge Poetry Festival, he makes the false accusation that Israelis "aim your rifles/ at my happiness...." To Taha, Israelis are "killers." But those soldiers are necessary because Arabs continue to try to kill Jews, just as Taha himself would like to do with his rocks. But for that, no Israeli soldiers would need riffles, which are merely to protect the innocent from firing terrorists, not to shoot randomly at unarmed civilians.

In "Abd El Hadi the Fool," the speaker transforms into a warrior, "no longer a fool." With "bitterness" in his soul, he wants to "burn down the world!" He waits, as the ages drag on, and "lower my eyelashes/ on the raging,/ communing with it/ and longing for bombers!"

Taha's poems, like those of Mahmoud Darwish, drip with violence and hatred. This is false, hateful and ugly stuff, which merely incites continued wars against the Jewish people. I recommend Fuad Attal's "Love and Memory," instead.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Beautiful. Expresses the themes and feelings that come from an identity with a particular place which is a universal experience. Love, home, self, loss, wonder, birth, time, the sweet and sardonic goings on of one's community, and one's own life there. Taha may be Palestinian, but to me he is affiliated with the monks of Tibet who sit on platforms in the Himalayas, on the roof of the world, and chant, constantly, weaving us with their chests and humming into the rythms of order in universe. And if you ever have the chance to see and hear him, you'll agree, I think.

There may, in fact, be a book about the Palestinian Arab dilemma waiting to be written, but this treacly and biased pretense is not it. The Arab's hard turn in Palestine came as a result of an unrelenting war to extirpate all Jews from all of Palestine. If and when Arab writers really confront these facts they will properly blame their "leaders" instead of the habitual Israel bashing. Then some real poetry and literature may emerge instead of this amateur effort.