Poets in an 'enemy' language - Haaretz

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Thu., January 24, 2008 Shvat 17, 5768

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Poets in an 'enemy' language

By Meron Rapoport

Tags: Israel, Arabs, poetry, Jaffa

At a certain point during our conversation at Cafe Yafa, I started feeling stupid. Across from me sat two young poets from Jaffa, Samaa Shakra, 18, and Muhammad Agwani, 20, talking about their poetry. Both are Arab, and both write in Hebrew. Poets use language so intimately, I said. Isn't it strange for you to write in a language that's not your mother tongue? "I've been learning Hebrew all my life," Shakra replied. "I feel comfortable in Hebrew. I like the language." "It's easier for me to express my pain in Hebrew," Agwani added.

Actually, why should that be surprising, I thought to myself. To find other historical examples, there is no need to go as far afield as Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian who wrote wonderful English, or Irishman Samuel Beckett, who wrote in French: Jewish history is replete with writers and poets who spoke Yiddish or Ladino at home, but wrote in Russian, German or Arabic.

Shakra and Agwani are Arabs who write in Hebrew. They don't ascribe great importance to that fact, and feel no need to apologize. "Just like I don't go around telling Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] whether or not to shake [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert's hand - I don't want anybody telling me that I can or can't write in Hebrew," Agwani explains.

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Make no mistake: Shakra and Agwani are not any more Israeli or, for that matter, any less Arab because they write in Hebrew. If anything, the opposite is true: "I thank God for being born as an Arab and a Palestinian in Jaffa," says Agwani, who even has the word "Jaffa" tattooed on his arm in Arabic. "My only complaint to God is that he didn't give me an army, a soccer team and a national anthem." Shakra says she is loyal to her people precisely because she writes in Hebrew, which "lends a voice to her scars."

The Hebrew language is relatively new in Agwani's home. The family always spoke Arabic. They had no Jewish neighbors on their street in Jaffa's Jabaliya neighborhood, and Agwani attended an Arab school. To say he "attended" is really an exaggeration. His father suffered a stroke when he was in sixth grade, and "I'd go to school one day and be absent for 400," he says. When he did go, he would skip Hebrew classes, because "it was someone else's language. I didn't feel the need to learn it."

Somehow, he picked up spoken Hebrew, but only learned to write at age 15. "I would watch television and copy down the subtitles," he says, adding that he began to write adaptations of stories he heard. "At first I only wrote in block letters. I didn't know script."

Agwani's first poem was born during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. He read something on the Internet that made him angry and he wrote a poem, which he left on the desk of the computer instructor at the youth club where he sometimes hung out.

New generation

When Jonathan Konda, who did a year of his national service as a youth counselor in Jaffa and is a poet himself, found the poem, he asked who the author was. Agwani: "I told him it was mine, and he should leave it alone. We had a little argument."

"A little one?" laughs Shakra, and Agwani smiles - something he doesn't do much. He's a serious young man.

But Agwani was one of the first to join Konda's writing workshop in Jaffa. Today, the group numbers seven or eight teens, both Arabs and Jews, who are working on an anthology of Jaffa poetry that is to be published by the Mifal Hapayis national lottery foundation.

According to Konda, right from the start Agwani and Shakra proved to be the most mature participants. They made rapid progress, and within half a year they had material ready for publication. Their poems were published in the latest issue of Mit'an, a literary journal to which Konda also contributes.

Shakra's road to writing Hebrew poetry was a lot less bumpy. She grew up in a Jaffa neighborhood with Jewish neighbors, studied at a Jewish school and even went to a Jewish kindergarten. "My mother thought that Jewish schools offered more opportunities," she explains. But it wasn't easy: When she was in elementary school, the Jewish parents demonstrated against the large number of Arab children in the school.

"It was totally weird," she recalls. "Only the adults went out to demonstrate. The kids - Jews and Arabs - got along terrifically. We wanted to live together and go to class together."

In junior high school, she says, the teacher forbade her to speak Arabic in the yard with her friends, "so the Jews wouldn't think we were talking about them." She complied. Although she argued over this ban with the teachers in high school, by then she was already used to Hebrew. She speaks excellent Arabic, of course, at home and with friends. She dreams in Arabic. But she does her reading and writing in Hebrew. Now she is taking classes in Arabic at Sadaka Reut, a youth center in Jaffa where she is doing a year of voluntary service.

One could claim that Shakra and Agwani belong to a new generation of Arabs for whom Hebrew is not a burden, but rather a tool. Nowadays, many Arab youngsters living in Jaffa are finding it difficult to read and write in their mother tongue. The education level of Arab state schools is relatively low, Jewish state schools don't teach much Arabic, and outstanding students from wealthy families go to church-run schools, where the language of instruction is French. According to a teacher at one of these schools, most of her Arab pupils have problems writing Arabic and find it easier to read Hebrew. She says this is because Hebrew dominates in the street, and also because there is little difference between spoken and written Hebrew. By contrast, in Arabic, the differences are tremendous; it's almost like two separate languages.

"If you're not 100 percent proficient in Arabic, it's better not to dishonor the language by writing in it," says Agwani. "I missed the boat, but maybe I'll get there one day."

Shakra also admits it's painful to be able to read Mahmoud Darwish only in translation, although she blames only herself: "My mother taught me never to blame others. It's true that the schools in Jaffa were not that great, but they never held me back from learning Arabic."

The two young poets both know that much of Arab society looks down on them for writing in Hebrew, the "language of the enemy." A while ago, during a poetry evening in Jaffa, another Arab poet, an older man, yelled at them for not writing in their own language. "I'm used to people telling me that if I write in Hebrew it means I identify with the enemy, but I don't see anything wrong with it," says Shakra. "Okay, we're in the midst of a conflict, and if I wrote in English I'd have no problem, but how can you say that Hebrew is the enemy? I love Hebrew."

'Daily fix'

Shakra began writing at a very young age - "the kind of poems little girls write," she explains. "You know, in pink notebooks with hearts on them." Only later, under Konda's tutelage, did she begin writing serious poetry. Her Hebrew is full of literary allusions, and today her work is much more political. "The important thing is the content, not my grammar," she says.

Agwani is angrier and less trusting. "Actually, nothing matters," he says, getting into a little argument with Shakra. His poems are simpler and more straightforward. School has never been his thing. He has been working in maintenance and cleaning jobs for years. For a while, he has been doing janitorial work at a college in Tel Aviv, which has given him an opportunity to observe education from its dirtier side. While cleaning up, his poetry has also been spruced up. The head of the maintenance department, a Yemenite Jew, has treated him very well ("What's the matter with you?" Shakra interjects. "What's so surprising about someone treating you like a human being?" Agwani: "I'm not surprised, but it's not something I take for granted."). The man asks to see Agwani's poems, corrects his mistakes and teaches him Hebrew proverbs.

"He says: Forget work. Let's read poetry," Agwani says. The first tip he gave him was to "tackle a poem the way you do your work - with your hands, your head and most of all your imagination."

Agwani writes as many as four to five poems a day. "People like my poetry. They treat it like a daily fix. So why shouldn't I give them what they want?" It's important to him to reach many people and make a name for himself. That's one of the reasons he writes in Hebrew. But it's more than that, he adds: "I enjoy writing and entering a world that isn't mine. The problem is that this world disappears as soon as you write the last word. I have to keep turning the movie of life back on."

For Shakra, poetry is also an existential need, a desire to "escape into a world that listens to me, a world without defects," she says.

"I'll continue writing until my last breath," Agwani says.

"I'll continue writing as long as there are problems in the world," Shakra adds.

Both are devastated over what is currently happening in Jaffa. Both see the wealthy Jews descending on the ancient city as part of an attempt to uproot its Arab residents, erase its Arab identity and rip out its soul. "There's nothing wrong with progress," says Shakra, "but to evict people from their little houses overlooking the sea and replace them with rich Jews is to treat human beings like leftovers."

"My street hasn't changed," Agwani explains. "What would a rich guy want with a street like mine? What would he find there, apart from childhood dreams? I see the city disappearing before my very eyes, but you can't destroy a house full of pain and secrets and childhood memories. I love the ruins of Jaffa. I love the hill of garbage they're turning into a promenade. Why can't they let my garbage be?"

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