Let’s play word association. I say Palestinian, what do you say? Terrorist? Suicide bomber? Anti-Semite? For Adina Hoffman, an American Jew living in Jerusalem, the word that came into her head was Poet.
An odd choice for a biographer, the subject is even odder still. “Nobody’s national poet,” as Hoffman admits, Taha Muhammad Ali has spent 50 years tending his souvenir shop across the road from the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel. Unlike the better-known Palestinian writers (Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Hanan Ashrawi, Samih al-Qasim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Rachid Hussein), Taha has “never edited an important literary journal or run for office or published a fiery political manifesto.” And yet, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness is the first biography of any Palestinian writer in any language.
And so I came to the place itself
but the place is not
its dust and stones and open spaces
While Hoffman gets to Taha’s poetry in good time, her real task is establishing the context. With astonishing persistence, she spends months sifting through documents and records to vividly reconstitute the Galilee village of Taha’s childhood, Saffuriyya, razed by Israeli soldiers in 1948. To a man and woman, villagers recalled the aerial bombing that instigated their escape one July night. But the official record, and memories of former soldiers Hoffman trusted, was that the Arabs left of their own accord, persuaded by their sheikhs and mullahs. Torn, Hoffman wrestles with the two versions: “Whose memory should be believed?” She finds a forgotten army archive. The irony of looking through IDF (Israel Defense Forces) papers doesn’t escape her: the Palestinians “were cursed to have found themselves a basically oral people, wrestling rhetorically with perhaps the most print-obsessed people on the planet.” But it is there, in the archives, that she finds the truth: “I gasp audibly and puncture the hush of the chilly room. Here it is, marked ‘destroy after reading’… the name of the pilot, the type of plane… the precise time that the bombs were dropped…”
We did not weep
when we were leaving — for we had neither
time nor tears,
and there was no farewell. We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting,
so where would our weeping
have come from?
Fleeing first on foot to Lebanon, the Ali family settle (illegally) a year later in Nazareth, and Taha gets busy. Reselling goods on the black market, he sets up a grocery store, then a souvenir shop. He also begins to self-educate in earnest, reading all the literature he can find and teaching himself English. At the age of 52, he publishes his first book of poetry. Described variously as “immediate,” “robust” and “forceful,” Taha tells Hoffman that his poetry is like billiards. “You aim over here to strike over there.”
Hoffman herself “strikes over there,” setting up a sweeping panorama of the last 60 years of Israeli-Palestinian relations. In between, she sketches compelling portraits of hundreds of individuals, from bit players to truly remarkable men and women. Her own story is no less remarkable. Her journey to Taha’s souvenir shop takes place amid great personal trepidation and real risk: “I had never attempted to get too close or to ask the hardest questions about my connection, as a Jew, to that history. And for all my ‘knowledge’ of this part of the world, I now realized I knew very little.”
Lovers of hunting,
And beginners seeking your prey:
Don’t aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn’t worth
the price of the bullet
(you’d waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees every which way,
like a partridge,
isn’t happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness is a masterpiece of contemporary biography, storytelling, and history. Now often found touring American colleges and literary festivals, Taha is perhaps best known for his poem “Revenge.” An excerpt:
At times I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country
…
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set –
then I would not kill him
even if I could.
Leila Marshy is a Montreal writer and editor. She also tries not to seek revenge.
