The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey by Ajami Fouad

Author:Ajami, Fouad [Ajami, Fouad]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

The “children of the stones” were everything the older generation had not been: irreverent, defiant, and bold. They would not run away as their elders had. Qabbani was not alone in the awe he felt for the boys of the Intifada. Mahmoud Darwish, the poet of the Palestinian national movement, saw the stones hurled by the young building a new world. Darwish, who had lived in Israel and worked as a journalist in Haifa until 1971, maintained close ties with the Israeli Left and the peace movement. He was to jolt his Israeli friends with a poem published in early 1988 in The Seventh Day, an Arabic weekly in Paris, “Passing between Passing Words.” It was to become the poem of the Intifada, written in the form of an address to the Israelis:

O you passing between passing words

Carry your names and go away

Take your hours of our time and go away

Steal what you will from the blue of the sea, and the sand of memory

Take what pictures you will, so that you will understand

How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of the sky. …

O you passing between passing words

Pass like the bitter dust, but

Do not pass among us like locusts

For we have what to do in our land

We have wheat to grow and to water with the dew of our bodies

We have things here that will not satisfy you:

A stone or a partridge

So take the past, if you wish, to the antiquities market

And return the bones to the bird, if you wish,

On a tray of clay

We have things here that will not satisfy you: we have the future

And we have what to do in our land.

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