A Voice of Gaza: On the Poetry of Anees Ghanima 

Abdalhadi Alijla

Hope is born from hardship, but what could Gaza give us? What does it offer the world? Despite all its trials—siege, occupation, genocide, and dehumanization—Gaza still provides the world with hope. Every time I see a Gazan flourish in their career, write a poem, paint something, or publish a book, I am reminded that Gaza was a center of wisdom for 200 years. How can we forget the rhetorical school of Gaza, which made it one of the most important hubs of intellectual exchange in the fifth and sixth centuries? Even today, I cannot help but think of Aeneas of Gaza (an influential figure in Neo-Platonism, the philosophical system that best accorded with the Christian revelation), Procopius (a Christian sophist and rhetorician, and one of the most important representatives of Gaza), and Choricius (a scholar and public orator) as sons of Gaza. There is something unique in this city and its surroundings, in its daughters and sons. And Anees Ghanima is no different: he is an addition to the long list of Gaza’s sons. A young poet, born and raised in one of the most overlooked neighborhoods in Gaza, Shejaiya—a place known for its hardworking, wise, and tenacious inhabitants.

I first became acquainted with Anees as a poet when he received one of the most prestigious national poetry prizes, despite coming from the same neighborhood. For me, his poems always evoke memories of Mahmoud Darwish and Muin Bseiso. I often remark that the next Mahmoud Darwish walks among us. Anees has shown himself to be exceptionally talented, though he still lacks a proper platform. Due to economic hardships and the neglect of poets and the cultural scene in Gaza, Anees worked as a software programmer and even had his own IT company, all while continuing to write. How does a poet transition into a programmer? Perhaps it’s a phenomenon unique to Gaza.

In 2017 he was honored with the Abdel Mohsin al-Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer of the Year award in poetry. His works have been showcased in various magazines, including Maznah, Arab Pop-Tamo, and Al-Araby al-Jadeed (The New Arab), among others. He is planning to publish his second poetry book soon.

His new poems express the melancholy, malaise, and desperation experienced by Gazans, depicting how they witness their friends and family members wasting away like beads on a rosary. “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Graves behind the Window” are brimming with emotion and speak to the experiences of every individual in Gaza.

Anees serves as a voice of Gaza. His words resonate with the entire Palestinian community. Gazans are not voiceless, but they need their voices to be heard, and Anees is here to speak directly to you.

Translator’s Note

Leena Aboutaleb

A few years ago, I read a conversation between Lindsay Choi and Erik Isberg with Sarah Clark titled “Faithful, Lossy, Radical: Talking Translation.” In it, Isberg references a collaborative work by Johannes Göransson and Sara Tuss Efrik: “The translator is not invisible / the translator has a body in the underworld.” Choi likened the translator to the myth of Persephone, asking where her and our bodies now are. As I considered the ambiguity of self and language that translation and anti-translation bring us, I felt my own language abstracting and migrating somewhere in between worlds. 

When Logic(s) editor-in-chief J. Khadijah Aburahman reached out to ask my thoughts on the poems of Anees Ghanima, I felt ardently the compromise of translation and the politics that language embodies. We craft worlds through language. We pray, we tell history, we become resistance not only through actions but through language itself. Language needs humans as much as we need language. They are dual edges of the same sword. 

The translation process comes with a few difficulties. As anyone translating from Arabic to English knows, it is akin to moving from 3D into 2D. This work took a personal dimension for myself, as a Palestinian witnessing the brutality of genocide and the wrath of empire, while Ghanima himself writes to us live from Gaza, displaced from his home. 

My translation attempts to vivify the loss that the original Arabic so delicately holds. The politics of translation are a liminal space that hold the burden of many modes. Bringing Ghanima’s work into English led me to realize that, despite my hesitation, I would take over a part of his voice; that, in translation, the echo of my voice would become a ghost in Ghanima’s work. 

Both of these poems, however, already hold bodies, literally and figuratively. Arabic is a dense and rich language in itself. By adding in the layers that contextualize these poems—the horrifying genocide that is devastating Gaza, the brutal siege of Gaza that has lasted over a decade, and the almost eighty-year long occupation and colonization of Palestine—Ghanima creates a visceral urgency in the work of both poet and translator. 

His other work, as well as his award-winning collection A clown’s funeral (جنازة لاعب خفة), writes in the Palestinian struggle, specifically in Gaza. His recent works, published in the literary journal Mizna, “Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are in Gaza, and Other Reflections” as well as “Searching for a Chocolate Bar in Gaza during the War,” circumvent Western legacy media—apparatuses of empire—and show the fullness of Ghanima’s work and artistic practice.

Ghanima’s work is solemn, oscillating between banality and gravity. The poems “Graves behind the Window” and “The Wretched of the Earth” show the stain of the world for allowing (and gleefully partaking in) the horrors to which Palestinians are subjected by the zionist entity and its allies. 

The original Arabic of “Graves Behind the Window,” “قبور الأطفال، مَن طَحنتْ أجسادهم المجنزرات في شارع الموت ”—“Graves of children, whose bodies were crushed by the bulldozers of death”—includes specific images that are important to note. “Crawlers, pulverizing (to a powder) on Death Street.” “Crawlers” (or “caterpillars”), pulverizing Palestinians to death with bulldozers—the sickening evidence of which we have seen online—as “Death Street” becomes a literal place, rather than a metaphor. As Ghanima writes, to use the Gazan phrase, “The asphalt of the roads won’t tolerate them.” This is a loss of translation: how the simultaneity and vileness of the situation affects the translation.

In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Ghanima’s closing lines ask that we not forget our martyrs, in all their glory and our heartbreak. The translation of “martyr” from Arabic to English is a notable point; in Arabic, it connotes a “bearing witness” (rooted in “ شَهِدَ ”) A shaheed is the final and ultimate witness to oppression and violence, no matter their age. Ghanima’s poem focuses on the righteous anger born of empire’s intentional massacring of children. As Ghanima writes, “As we move from house to house trying to outrun the devils unleashed in Gaza now, as they have left Hell empty, I want to say that we are, every day since the day we were born, being exterminated. But let the world remember: we do not die.”

“The Wretched of the Earth,” which takes its name from Frantz Fanon’s text, is both a eulogy and memorial. Ghanima tells us to leave for that lonely flower its light on the grave; to spare that lonely flower on the grave its light (اتركوا للوردة عند القبر نورها.). We are exhorted to become a witness to their blood, as they move through Gaza and, even in death, their footprints remain. This is the match struck against empire: for every martyr, we still cherish life. There is always a future in Palestine, always a future for Palestinians. No man and his empire can steal that; for greater empires have fallen, and, as Palestinians like Mohammed al-Ardah tell us, the occupation is an illusion of mere dust. 

In one stanza, Ghanima opens each sentence with “لطالما,” meaning “(for) as long as.” First Sartre, then Lorca, and closing with Fanon. Ghanima writes to Fanon: “Always stood in your protests from the ‘wretched of the earth.’ ” In this, we understand Palestinians as the tormented—but, more importantly, as those whose experience is a testament to enduring inhumanity. Ghanima writes, “May the world damn our peace, we are the sons of war; Let the earth be blessed with our bodies, we are the sons of death.” 

At the poem’s haunting close, his choice of words is particularly striking: an “erasure” that in the Arabic (“يمحى, ” from the root “ مَحا ”) connotes a memory to be deleted, an act of wiping out. Ghanima leaves us with a weary, indescribable exhaustion—one that should never be lived by any being. As Ghanima acts, he tells us, “Let’s speak up together. Let’s be loud. Let’s be angry. Together, we can be angry.”

I hope my translations of these important works hold a candle to the emotive depth the Arabic contains. It is also my hope that these poems continue to revitalize all our actions into a material solidarity with Palestine, and Palestinians, until liberation is no longer futural but a present state. Language is only as useful as the one who wields it. For Anees Ghanima and all Palestinians, liberation is within our lifetime. I’ll see you on the other side, where the absolution of language is merciful.

Two Poems

Anees Ghanima

Graves behind the Window

Graves along the way,
Graves without a headstone,
Chiseled into the earth, as if they have existed since eternity
Graves, like scars that never fade.
Those silent and unending graves before my home there
Graves of children, whose bodies were crushed by the bulldozers of death
Those disarrayed graves all along and over, like blisters on the face

Above their heads, a small sign, writes:
“Here lie a group of the unknowns!”

So that is what we call them now.
O what a word that pierces the back like a stab
O what an obscene word, like a mark of disgrace,
And now you resemble them, O World.

* 

I want to open the doors to their unknowns
I release the birds around them.
And for flowers to grow in their shade
I want their names to bloom in the symphonies of celebration, 
and to rush, rush in joy—once more—down the staircase 
at the end of a school day, in their race toward life. 
Oh, O, children, who will you ask for milk from now? 
What breast will nourish all of these dry lips?
I am tired,
and I too am asking.

The Wretched of the Earth

Leave a single flower on the grave and do not water it.
I want my tears to suffice
Those that latch onto my eyelids,
awaiting a funeral procession bearing my friends
Spare that lonely flower on the grave its light

I want it to signify their lives:
They were born of the olives of this land
And took their names from the za’atar
Their feet have crossed streets and neighborhoods and cities
Cut through days and years and centuries
Scratching their names with their nails on the walls askew
Writing in blood on the chalkboards at school
I still remember them—

Always they believed in your existentialism, Sartre.
Always embraced your weariness of the world, Lorca.
Always stood in your protests from the “wretched of the earth,” Fanon.

They carry these songs on their shoulders as they carried their own children:
“May the world damn our peace, we are the sons of war;
Let the earth be blessed with our bodies, we are the sons of death.”

But they fell off the back of the earth,
As brave stallions fall.
I distributed their remains on the killers’ dinner tables
During intermission at the condemnation feasts

But their footprints remained.
They are in the streets of the refugee camp there, 
Where I knew them,
Traces that tell of weariness, 
Traces that cannot be erased.