Summary
The poetry and popular poetry that, in Kanafani’s Background: The Intellectuals, carried national awareness into the villages, attacked the land-selling leadership, and helped spark the 1936 revolt; the later poets under occupation are presented as its extension.
Details
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Popular poetry in particular reflected a growing concern of the rural masses over the course of events, and this spontaneous awareness led to a spirit of mobilisation in the villages despite widespread illiteracy (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.14 / printed p.27).
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Taufiq Ziyad is quoted calling the revolutionary poetry of Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and himself an extension of the revolutionary poetry of Ibrahim Tuqan, Abd al-Rahim Mahmud, Mutlaq Abd al-Khaliq and others, because their battle is an extension of theirs (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.28).
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The booklet’s unsigned Political Writings essay in the front matter credits Ghassan Kanafani with introducing the Arab reader outside Palestine to what he called the Poets of resistance, Darwish and al-Qasim being first discovered by him; the credit is the essay’s, not Kanafani’s own (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.4 / printed p.7).
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The popular poet Awad, the night before his execution in 1937, wrote on the walls of his cell in Acre a poem Kanafani quotes, referring to the battles of Bal’a, Wadi al-Tuffah and Beit Amrin (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.31).
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Popular poetry broke with the inherited proverbs of submissiveness to the point of calling on the Arab son of a weak and poor woman to sell his mother and buy a gun (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.17 / printed p.32).
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In Said, Chapter Three II: Arabic literature now boasts a genre of Palestinian resistance writing, a writing of self-assertion and of resistance to anonymity and political oppression, and its national poem is Mahmoud Darwish’s Identity Card, governed by the imperative Record (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.176 / printed p.155). Sources update: this page also draws on raw/1979-said-question-of-palestine.pdf.
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Wadi al-Bustani, Ibrahim Tuqan, Ghassan Kanafani