Sawaie, Mohammed. Tbraranslator. The Tent Generation: Palestinian Poems. London: Banipal Books, 2022. 160 pages. Paperback $17.99
Mohammed Sawaie’s book The Tent Generation, newly translated poems by 16 Palestinian poets, is an excellent addition to the existing anthologies of Palestinian poetry for English readership. The selections of previously untranslated poems is enlightening about a few known and less known poets, who depict the Palestinian experiences of three wars: 1948, 1967, and 1973. The Tent Generation also includes biographies of the poets, translator, and artist of the cover page; a glossary of important names of cities, historical personalities and landmarks; and an informative introduction by Sawaie.
The introduction helps contextualize the poetry from within modern Palestinian history and culture, which have been traumatized and besieged by the settler colonial state of Israel. The title of the collection comes from Salem Jubran’s 1965 poem by the same title. Jubran, who belongs to the first generation of poets of resistance, gives voice to the banished generation after 1948, one among 160,000 Palestinians who had remained inside what became Israel. Jubran’s poems, the largest segment in the collection, are a pleasure to read. The poems chronicle the multi-layered history of Palestinians – the Zionist war that expelled and forced many to flee for safety; the Nakba and the loss; the burning of villages and sad life in the camps and ghettoes; the blocked borders between the new state and the neighboring Arab states. Having lost their homes, renamed “Arab Israelis,” and forced to live in ghettos under military rule, Jubran expresses the Palestinians’ poverty, hunger, rootlessness, sadness, and exile in their own country, bemoaning the nightmare of history. But there is also singing, love of the land and its landscape, and the call for endurance of those who “still walk on thorns / to birth spring” (88). Due to the “cultural siege” under which Palestinians in Israel live, Palestinian poets became the leaders-educators who provide hope and confidence to their people as they began demanding the recognition of their national Arab identity and equal rights with Israeli Jews.
It is refreshing to read poems by the younger generation of poetry of resistance, many of whom reside in refugee camps in Jordan and Gaza. The poems embody real-life experiences of the individual and collective, under the settler state, as well as the occupied territories in the post-1967 war. They express awareness of injustice, exile, and the pain of the longest occupation in history, in refugee camps across the Arab and wider world. For example, Youssef al-Khatib from Hebron writes about the freedom of a lark, which freely moves around borders violating “a thousand sacred prohibitions” while he is weighed down by his wounds (67). Yousef al-Deek, who was born in the refugee camp of al-Baqa al-Gharbiyya, satirizes the Palestinian Authority in “Abbas’ State” for being a tame one, with “no authority in this ‘Authority,’” after “Oslo.” The poet needs only a half tongue to “tell the whole truth” of the betrayal of the Palestine cause by its leaders (123–124).
The Tent Generation will be of interest to scholars, students, and the general reader. It illuminates the modern Palestinian cultural heritage and teaches about the historical conditions under which Palestinians live.