God, They’re Burning Us    

Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2009

WITH AN IRON PEN: TWENTY YEARS OF HEBREW PROTEST POETRY
Edited by Tal Nitzan and Rachel Tzvia Back
Excelsior Editions, 2009

Review by Richard Silverstein

 

With an Iron Pen collects eighty-eight Hebrew poems written over the past twenty years, offering a powerful chronicle of the evils of the Israeli Occupation. What I especially like about the collection is that it features the lions of Israeli poetry such as Yehudah Amichai, Natan Zach, Tuvia Ruebner, and Dahlia Rabikovitch, along with young rebels and poets lesser known  (especially outside Israel).

This book confronts profound literary questions for political poetry: How can one of the most sublime forms of human expression apprehend pure evil -- human behavior that is devoid of humanity? What feeble words from a poet's pen do justice to the subject or provide a suitable rejoinder? How can the suffering, banality, and insanity of something like the Occupation be conveyed? Can anyone responding on a pure literary plane to the Occupation really do justice in verse to the suffering it imposes on Palestinians (and Israelis)? Is the job of the poet merely to record the evil for posterity or to encourage a more activist form of resistance? What can poetry really do to combat such evil? Aren't mere words too little and too late?

To their great credit, these poets have made courageous attempts to accomplish the near-impossible. Some fall short. Some succeed intermittently with a powerful image, phrase, or stanza. And others succeed sublimely.

Among the most timely is Yitzchak Laor's Order of the Day, which explores the abuse of the Amalek myth in contemporary Israeli political culture. In Jewish tradition, the ancient Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews because they treacherously attacked the Children of Israel as they left Egypt. Recently, Bibi Netanyahu likened Iran to Amalek, thereby justifying an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. He claimed that like that biblical tribal enemy, the mullahs sought not only Israel's demise but also the entire Jewish people's annihilation. Laor's poem, dripping in sarcasm and irony, is like an inoculation of truth in the face of political-historical mendacity:

Remember

That which Amalek did to you

of course,

Over.

Do unto Amalek

what Amalek did to you

of course,

Over.

 

If you can't

find yourself an Amalek,

call Amalek whomever you want

to do to him what Amalek did to you

of course,

Over.

 

Don't compare anything to what Amalek did to you

of course,

Over.

Not when you want to do that which Amalek did to you

of course,

Over and out,

Remember.

The book takes its title from this stunningly evocative passage in Jeremiah 17:1:

The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen

And with the point of a diamond it is engraved

On the tablet of the heart.

The iron pen that writes the sin of Judah is perhaps also the poet's pen as he portrays the crime of Occupation. In this sense, the poet plays a role similar to Jeremiah, the prophet who records the sins for his contemporaries and subsequent Jewish history. Both are doing the Lord's work. What is especially powerful about this notion is that it removes the issue of the utility of the protest poetry. Of course, it would be useful for the poem to have a concrete impact on the political situation. But given the hardened hearts within both Israel and Palestine, this may be too high an expectation. The invocation of Jeremiah transforms the act of poetic protest from a time-bound and earthbound act to a spiritual-moral act for the ages.

The verse from Jeremiah above also calls to mind one of the most powerfully dark stories of twentieth-century literature, Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony. In it, a nation imprisons criminals in a colony and etches their crimes onto their bodies with an infernal torture apparatus. The machine eventually kills the prisoners, but not before literally writing the crime and sentence into their skin.

As a blogger who has attempted since 2003 to analyze the moral and political bankruptcy of the Occupation, I am often troubled by the question of efficacy: who reads my work and what impact, if any, do I have? What can I actually do to make the situation better in any material way? Am I just writing for an audience of one and a few hangers-on? The invocation here of Jeremiah reminds us that we have a duty to write the sins of Judah, regardless of the impact we may have on mitigating them.

With an Iron Pen is replete with powerful works by Israel's finest poets. One of these is Dahlia Rabikovitch's Story of the Arab Who Died in the Fire. It describes the immolation of a Palestinian day laborer who slept in an abandoned Israeli warehouse (because it was illegal to live or sleep within Israel). Jewish hooligans nailed shut the door before setting it on fire. Rabikovitch describes in clinical details the process by which the fire consumed the victim's body:

... The fire took him all at once,

Such a thing hath not its likeness,

It peeled away his clothing

Seized upon his flesh,

 

... God, they're burning us, he screamed,

That's all he could manage in self-defense.

The flesh was blazing ...

 

By that point his mental faculties were gone,

The firebrand of the flesh

Paralyzed any sense of a future,

The memories of his family

The links to his childhood.

He was shrieking, no longer constrained by reason,

By now all the bonds of family were broken,

He did not seek vengeance, redemption, the dawn of a new day.

 

... From his throat issued inhuman voices

Since many human functions had already ceased

Except for the pain transmitted in electrical pulses

Along neural pathways to pain receptors in the brain.

In a subsequent interview with Yediot Achronot, Rabikovitch says she wrote the poem because she "understood the fear he felt before he was saved by death." The notion that death is a respite from human suffering inverts the typical view of the civilized world that preserving life is an intrinsic good. In this interview, the poet acknowledges that there are some human conditions that destroy the very fabric of civilization and make life no longer worth living. In doing so, she forces the reader to confront the crime in all its gore. It is as if she is telling us: "This is what this Occupation is doing to us. You must confront it. I will not let you look away."

 

Richard Silverstein is a blogger, freelance journalist, and peace activist. He writes the Tikun Olam blog and publishes regularly in the Guardian's Comment is Free section. He earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 1979.