Opinion: How can Israelis and Palestinians make peace? Reading each other’s poetry is a good start
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Homer wrote about the Trojan War; Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Crimean War; Walt Whitman, the Civil War; Wilfred Owen, World War I. Their poems are part of world history and culture. Poets should and must document the destruction and horrors of war.
But can poetry ameliorate a war or hasten a peaceful resolution? Perhaps, but only if poets and readers can slip behind enemy lines, or if the poetry of the “enemy” can cross those lines. The latest war in the Middle East, and the repercussions here, have illustrated the power and difficulty of reading the other side’s verse.
At the risk of being accused of naivete, I do believe — I assert — that poetry can be a vehicle for change and peace amid war and other conflicts. Robert Bly and Denise Levertov influenced social consciousness about the Vietnam War. More recently, a renaissance of marginalized voices promoted more general awareness of systemic racism in the United States.
No history of lynching is more vivid than Lucille Clifton’s “jasper texas 1998,” about the murder of James Byrd Jr. And of all the accounts of the murders that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, I most deeply remember Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact,” about the killing of Eric Garner in New York.
As a writer with an Israeli mother and Palestinian father, I have seen language be weaponized, causing both sides to overlook the possibility of coexistence.
In the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian voices must be heard if any lasting peace is to be achieved. Among those that have deeply moved me are the poets Mosab Abu Toha and Fady Joudah. They have brought me into Gaza the way no television news coverage could.
I invite any Jewish or Israeli poet who has not delved into contemporary Palestinian poetry to step behind enemy lines to read these and other poets. Reading them means experiencing not only the heartbreak and horrors of the war but also encountering the full force of another’s rage. And beyond the rage is a human not unlike oneself.
Abu Toha’s “My Grandfather’s Well” contrasts an image of the poet “pulling up buckets of water / from the Camp’s well” with that of his grandfather, whose “hands pour water / down into the well” in Yaffa, where he still stands: “He never left it, even after the Nakba, / even after death.” It connects the Palestinian poet with this American Jewish poet, as grandsons whose grandfathers’ lives continue to sustain them. Such moments of empathy, to my mind, move mountains.
How strange, then, to have read that thousands of writers and members of the entertainment industry had signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions — those that just might bring them behind their enemies’ lines to show them something they have closed themselves to knowing. It feels to me as if these writers and artists are committing themselves to not knowing, to not letting art do what only art can.
As a Palestinian American who works in publishing, I see the power of stories to tear a people down or build them up.
An op-ed published in the New York Times last year, headlined “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing,” referred to an online spreadsheet of allegedly “Zionist” authors meant to be blacklisted. It read like the recent book bans targeting gay and trans literature, the McCarthy era revisited, or even the bonfires that consumed “decadent” books in Nazi Germany. Why are the blacklisters afraid to step behind enemy lines, the lines they draw to separate themselves from the Israeli and American Jewish experience?
The original working title of my forthcoming book was “My Partisan Grief,” which remains the title of its first poem. I was shocked and angered that so much of the artistic and poetic world had no interest in Jewish grief. It seems to me that no grief should be privileged or silenced.
Real peace can be achieved only through a reckoning of the grief and rage of the “other.” If artists and poets can’t do this, how can we expect our politicians to accomplish anything? Opening one’s heart to the other’s grief, listening without judgment to the other’s rage, is the only route to healing a rift that grows wider by the generation.
I invite the artists who have vowed to boycott Israeli cultural institutions to read any 10 of the 59 poems recently published in a bilingual edition of “Shiva: Poems of October 7.” Shuri Haza writes, “The table is filled with empty space / Pain hidden in holes and cracks.” Eva Murciano writes, “When I tried to write poetry / After that terrible day / The words fell face down on the ground.”
Yes, we’re all face down on the ground. Every Palestinian, every Israeli, every Jew.
I invite the boycotters to open the pages of Yonatan Berg’s 2019 collection “Frayed Light,” translated expertly by Joanna Chen. I invite them to imagine a time when, as Berg puts it in “After the War,” “The last ships have been defeated, the sea resumes / talking to itself. A black center / sinks behind the hills” and, later, from the same poem, “The land returns from betrayal.”
I pause and repeat that line: “The land returns from betrayal.” We have all betrayed this land that wants peace and coexistence. And wouldn’t it be a betrayal not to read and reflect on these lines simply because the writer is Israeli? Yet I suspect that those who boycott Israeli cultural institutions do feel it is a betrayal to read Israeli poetry.
Self-imposed censorship destroys the chances for peace. Self-imposed censorship destroys that vital curiosity that makes artists thrive, that might lead them behind enemy lines.
Through my poetry and others’, I invite the thousands who supported a boycott to share the experience of an American Jew with family in Israel, one who wants to see freedom maintained for everyone in this country and peace and stability for all in the Middle East.
Naively, I assert, let’s read poetry. Let’s read everyone’s poetry, as painful as it may be. Naively, I ask, can the poets speak? Can all the poets speak?
Owen Lewis is a professor of psychiatry in Columbia University’s department of medical humanities and ethics and the author of the forthcoming poetry collection “A Prayer of Six Wings.”
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