Dangerous Poetry: Across the Cultural Divide

David C. Deller, the USA

David Deller studies included drama, and American literature and music. He has worked in the Middle East for 10 years, published on music and African fiction, and done conference papers on memoir. His interests include teaching language through literature and other arts, nonfiction, and international education. E-mail: dcdeller@hotmail.com

Jerusalem

On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe the sweat off of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City
a kite.
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can’t see
because of the wall.

We have put up may flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think they are happy.
To make them think that we’re happy.

Yehuda Amichai

I should have known better. Of course. Everyone was looking at me, after the tension had grown so high. The room was still, all eyes on me, when I said, “Well, do you want my interpretation?”

It was a class in world literature. I was teaching at a university in one of the Arab Gulf States, to students of English, pretty good students, with pretty good English.

I just thought it a good poem. A great poem. I was choosing all the best poems I could find. I usually didn’t teach by genre, or theme, that kind of rubric. I just chose the stuff I thought was best, and discussed with the students the quality of the piece. I thought this poem of great quality.

But there was one problem. The writer was an Israeli.

I was having the students introduce the poems, and begin our discussions with whatever they thought notable about them. I joined the students out in the audience, as they took over the lecturer’s position at the front. They were often awkward, but it usually went fairly well. But when Ali, a very bright, engaging guy, got up to lead, I thought I could feel the tension settle in even before he started. And then he started.

His first attempt was to help us understand the historical background of the poem. So he drew this awkward map of the Middle East on the whiteboard, with most of it shaded in.

“What is this?” he asked us. “The Arab countries,” a number replied. Then he darkened out a space with the blue marker.

“And what is this?” he asked. “Palestine,” they replied.

“Or…?” he continued.

“There is no ‘or,’” said Rashid, sitting 3 seats away from me. Ali hesitated, but continued – “or, or as they say, Israel.” The mood thickened.

Then he went into the historical background of the founding of Israel, British rule, invasion of Jews, etc. To his credit, I think Ali was trying to be objective and balanced. He seemed to be trying to present these things as mere facts, and even the view of the other side about them. “According to their view…” he began, looking around at us , speaking softer, “they lived in Palestine, but were forced out, to –“ and he gestured toward the empty space that represented Europe on the map. He did seem somehow to be trying to present it as mere information. But this, of course, wasn’t just any information.

I was peeved, writing notes to myself next to my copy out of exasperation. “Here we go again – same old stuff – why is he going into this, they know all this – what about the poem?”

Then it was time for the background of the author. Yehuda Amichai – he kept calling him “Yehuda” as he went on. Born in Germany, went to Palestine in 1935. Ali was sitting down now at the lecture table, glancing at his notes. He was considered the greatest Israeli poet, with many prizes and honors. He had written so many books. He especially loved, and wrote about, Jerusalem. But Ali did seem to be trying to establish Amichai as a suspect figure, despite seeming praise. “He spoke, read his poems at the Nobel Peace Prize for Rabin, Yichtzak Rabin” – he seemed to know the name well, and I saw other students nodding. But he said it as if that speech branded Amichai as an apologist for the Jewish state, to appear at such a time, with Rabin as the leader of the enemy. I had forgotten, but remembered later, that Yassir Arafat was honored together with Rabin and Shimon Peres for that prize. But Ali did not mention Arafat.

As is common with me, I picked up on, and tried to show my understanding of the students’ at least implied point of view. At root, Amichai was an Israeli nationalist, a strong supporter of Israel. Speaking in front of Rabin was proof, he had indicated. I volunteered my support for this tacit assessment. “Yes,” I said, “Amichai served in the Israeli army.” Ali looked over, and nodded, seeming grateful, as if I were throwing him a lifeline, that he himself wasn’t some sort of collaborator by just speaking about the poem’s author, that I was at least breaking the sullen silence that had settled over everyone. But the mood didn’t change. Students often enough got tired of Chinese and Indian poems after a while, and would stir, and glaze over, after we’d been there for an hour (the class was 90 minutes long, from 12:00 to 1:30, right at lunchtime). It was one o’clock, when everyone’s attention normally began to flag. But all eyes were open now.

And then it was finally time for the poem. I looked at my watch. At least he only took 10 minutes for this background stuff – though it seemed like an hour. I usually cared little for most historical and biographical info, though it did help often enough. But I wanted the poems, first and foremost. I had wanted this poem.

He began to try to work through it. The poem was entitled “Jerusalem.” “We call it Al-Qds,” Ali informed me, glancing over. I tried to be polite, but my exasperation may have been showing as I chose my words – “Yes, I’ve heard that.” I’d been around long enough to know. A couple of people snickered. Get on with the poem, I felt.

Ali began by just restating the poem. The speaker, looking out over the Old City, sees the white sheet of a woman, the towel for sweat of a man, hanging on a laundry line on a roof. There is a kite whose flyer, a child, is hidden. The poem concludes with the speaker’s comment or assessment, about “We” and our “flags,” “they” and their “flags,” we “to make them think that we are happy,” they “to make us think that they are happy.” But there was one other word. Not just the sheet of a woman, the towel of the man, but the sheet of a woman who is “my enemy,” the towel of a man who is “my enemy.”

Having established what the lines said, Ali began to try to elicit their meaning. He did as I normally did, and just started asking questions. He began with the first image.

“The white sheet of the woman – what do you think this represents, the white color?” Hamed, a quiet but usually discriminating reader when he spoke up, volunteered, “Peace?” (I later found myself wondering why no one said “Surrender”).

But no one else said anything. Ali seemed embarrassed, nervous, glancing back down at his paper, looking up with some kind of helpless hope.

“And the next image…what, about this one, the towel?”
Badriya, the most responsive student every day – for whom I was grateful – responded, “This could be a way of saying they are low class people, low people.” But again, no one else said anything. The silence was heavy, thick. But no longer the silence of as recently as the day before, the silence of boredom. Ali tried the images of the flags.

A couple more of them did try at this point. A flag is a symbol of a nation, or pride. Ali had stuck to just descriptive statements, identifying which flags. “You know,” he said, tentatively still, “there are the Palestinian flags, and they…the Israelis – they, have their flags too.” This just didn’t go anywhere. Ali had done what he could do, little as it was. He too went silent. I had moved to sit on the edge of a table, and looked out at all the stone faces.

It occurred to me later (of course) that I could have given them the poem with no title, and no author, no way to link it to a nation. Then they would have actually, or more easily been able to respond to the poem: a divided city, a man who can see his enemies, except the most vulnerable ones, and reflects on what both sides display and why. What could that mean? What attitude or tone would they find in a poem decontextualized in that way? Would they naturally see it as a more universal statement? Only after the effort at interpretation would I then reveal the author and the title, and discover how that would change their interpretation of and response to the poem. Or I could have presented alternatives. What if it had been in Berlin during the Cold War? Or the fractured city of Belfast? Or a Palestinian in Al-Qds? How would they have responded to the latter? A person very wise? A very morally imaginative person? A compassionate person? Or some kind of traitor? And then, finally, the fact: an Israeli. I could have done any of those things But I did not. They came to me too late. Would that strategy have been too manipulative? But I had blundered into the minefield with little enough forethought, and now had to face up to them with no misdirection.

“Do you want my interpretation?“ It was now past 1:15; they’d never looked so wide awake. I had every eye now.

“The images. What is a white sheet? It’s just laundry. Everyone does laundry. It’s a statement about affinity, a recognition of common humanity, something people share. Same with the towel. The man wipes the sweat from his face. You know the story in the garden – the punishment for the man was to have to work, the literal statement – to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Everyone, all of us, share this. The man is hot. Everyone is hot in a hot place. Everyone works. Everyone uses a towel to wipe their face. They are the same, they both share this common inheritance, the curse of taxing effort just to survive.”

I searched their faces. Noor, a pretty girl from last semester’s Modern Drama class nodded. She seemed to buy it; her face was open, not hostile. But the others remained as before: stones.

The kite, I went on, is a toy. It’s just a child with a kite. But yes, he is behind a wall. The speaker cannot see him. But a child symbolizes what? “Innocence,” said Hamed; one more actual face not of stone. Yes, I said. A child is a child, isn’t it? When you see a child, you don’t say that is an American child, or an Indian child, or an Arab child, do you? Or – I hesitated – a Jewish child? Isn’t a child, any child, first just a child? Now, complete silence, but something else now. Looking down a row of men’s faces, I caught one that was not of stone, rather, with the look I had sometimes seen before when Israel was mentioned: one pair of searing eyes, glowing, red hot, something like a smile showing underneath.

At that moment I remembered another student, Huda, who had once told me of her distress over the killing of Israeli children by Palestinian suicide bombers. All the other students, she said, said it was fine to kill them. They’ll just grow up to kill us, they told her. But Huda wouldn’t accept it. She had gone to the village religious teacher she revered, and asked him. Is it ok, does God, does Islam allow for the killing of children, children of enemies? No, he had told her. Huda’s relief at this answer was obvious and enormous. Her story flashed across my mind at that moment, but I thought better of telling it.

A child was a child, I said again, and Noor nodded again. A couple of others seemed to recognize my point, from what I could tell from those staring eyes. I took up Hamed’s point – isn’t a child a symbol of innocence, that innocent people are trapped in this situation? And he cannot see the child – this seems a sad admission, that he is separated from a mere child at play because of the wall that has separated them.

“Maybe it means that there is no innocence behind that wall,” said Rachid, with a kind of amused sneer. Yes, maybe so, I admitted. I didn’t think so, but only when I thought students were wildly off did I question their speculations on meaning. I should have pushed Rachid to explain, find some additional elements in the poem that would support him. But I was being tentative myself, just like Ali. I was walking on eggs too.

What dismayed me later on, after class, was that there was evidence that Rachid was wrong, good, obvious evidence, and I had inexcusably forgotten it. Both the man and the woman are identified as enemies. The child is not. And the child is invisible, with only the kite showing. An entrapped innocence? The absence, the invisibility of childhood “over there?” The fact that you could not see the one who most clearly would not be an “enemy,” a child? No place for innocence? That no one was able to be innocent in such a predicament – the kite as ironic? Rachid may have been right, but in a way I thought he did not intend. His attitude seemed to be directed at the enemy he perceived, those who made innocence impossible, or more likely, I thought, that an Israeli would see all Palestinians as equally guilty, or dangerous; there was no such thing as an innocent Palestinian. The evidence – the killing of “our” children by “them.” Perhaps I had allowed Rachid’s disdain to influence my ability to take him seriously. Investigating his assertion might have proven fruitful; this was a missed opportunity. Sometimes I was not as careful a reader as I should have been. Or as responsive a teacher.

But I went on. “I think the tone of this poem is sad, that he is separated from people, other people with whom he shares life, a woman with a family, and man who works in the hot sun, a child with a kite. He is sad that he cannot see them.” As for the word enemy, I said I thought the word was used ironically. “You know what I mean, irony, yes?” Several nodded. I continued, saying that I didn’t think he considered these absent people truly enemies. They were just a mother, a father, a child, as I had said before. The sadness that results when anyone you can recognize this way must be seen as an enemy.

I went to the flags. It seemed so obvious to me. “Do you think he is happy about this situation?” We try to appear happy, they try too, but we are not. In this too, we are the same. I saw it as a statement of a sad solidarity with the “enemy.”

Still it seemed no one had given any sign of open-ness to this, except Noor, but she had been quiet like the rest, had said nothing. Then Badriya spoke up, again, the most responsive and insightful student in the class. She seemed to have been thinking for some time. “It depends on who is the audience for this poem. I don’t think an Arab or an Israeli would be able to read the word ‘enemy’ as irony. This is a very sensitive issue.”

For one moment, I stuck to my guns. Without hesitating, I responded, “I think you’re underestimating the readers.” Badriya looked at me intently, with some surprise, perhaps processing ‘underestimate,’ but I had little doubt she understood. Couldn’t Arabs and Israelis share, at least at times, the sad solidarity Amichai had acknowledged in the poem? I thought I had heard at least a few stories that were evidence for that. But maybe in the Gulf, we were somehow too far away to recognize it, or the students didn’t want to, or maybe the notion was just so strange, some could hardly take it in. It was just too difficult. I recall once mentioning to a class the case where an Israeli soldier had refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, and gone to prison for it. “Would you trust that person?” I had asked them? “Never!” said the bespectacled brightest student in that class. Now, I could still feel this class somehow against me. I again tried to do what I often did – agree – i.e. acknowledge the validity or value of a student’s comment or suggestion.

“Well, I think Badriya is right. Interpretation is the key; there are multiple ways that people interpret texts, and it does matter what they bring when they read, what they believe, what their values are, who they are.” I was talking a bit faster, somehow trying to put it into an academic context which would both recognize her point, and everyone’s reaction, and get me off the hook.

“There is a whole area of criticism called reader-response, with many many books published about it, which examines this exact point of how readers interpret texts.” I could still see the sullenness in their eyes.

“Look,” I said. “I know this is not like reading a Chinese or Indian poem. Those are far away from us, they do not affect us. This topic, this poem, we are living through all this. And it is uncomfortable, and certainly more for you than for me,” and then, naively in these dangerous waters, continued, “But I think, sometimes, it is good for us to be uncomfortable, to see things in ways we normally would not.”

But I couldn’t go on with my evangelism for the value of it all. I had noticed Ali’s rather grateful, final nod at my acknowledgment of the discomfort the poem caused. But I was tense and fatigued by the end of it all. I’d tried to say my piece, however poorly. I just thought it was a good poem, a great poem, and a strong statement about the common humanity of “enemies.” The poet looked out and saw a divided city, and said that everyone, despite whatever face they put on, was unhappy. But looking back, I saw that I had virtually never seen an Arab student able to respond to anything Jewish with anything less than at least suspicion, and very often open, incendiary animosity, like the guy with the red eyes. One student had once turned in a very well-written open topic essay on Jews, entitled “Evil Germs.”

There was one exception in another class, a Singer story about a Jewish village in Poland. It was culturally close to them, and when we finished, it was clear the students had responded positively, if subdued, to the portrayal of simple, religious village people. One girl said, in all innocence, “Yes – I have never read anything positive about Jewish before.” It seemed like a little victory.

But so rare. I didn’t go looking for “Jewish” material. It was just there in our books. Great stuff - Singer. Malamud. Yehuda Amichai. And at least we had the books, and those authors were in them.

But now, in World Lit, I had somehow surrendered to the mood of the class, and was gathering forces to shut everything off, when a girl in the back named Fakhria raised her hand.

“I think he is saying, about the flags, that each side wants to appear strong to the other, they do not want to show weakness, but even so, they are pretending.”

You’re always looking for those few who get something from what you are hoping to do. I told Fakhria that I thought hers a good reading of those lines, and let it go. One more little seeming victory. It was good enough, much more than good enough for a last word. And besides, they had a test our next class. And - utilizing Badriya’s observation - Amichai would be on it.

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