"The Eye of Lifta" by Aida Qasim

Foreword by Anil Korotane -

Aida Qasim, regards herself as a 1st generation descendant of Lifta born out of Palestine, in Exile. She is also a 2nd generation poet who perceives her task is to purposefully create alchemy of oneness between her poetry and Palestine. A purpose initially brought to the fore and epitomized by the late great Mahmoud Darwish, a figure who she commemorates in the opening lines of her Poem: 'The Eye of Lifta':


O, beloved swallow of the Galilee:
I (too) belong there—


The first line of my poem addresses Mahmoud Darwish, he is the swallow of the Galilee and he wrote the poem: "I belong there"; hence Aida's affirmation and retort. I asked Aida, paraphrasing 'I (too) belong', did she really? Or more precisely, knowing she was an American Palestinian - born on another land - and now resettled to a life in the affluent Abu Dhabi with her family, in what sense? Is it a sense of an injustice that has been passed down into her own experience, therefore yearning for justice to a past inherited? Or as a Palestinian American now living in Abu Dhabi, is it about sustaining a sense of 'origin' to something identifiable to a place?


She concurs - "In fact on all counts - yes, I think it is the injustice of it all the experience of being 'othered', the rootlessness...it breeds anger, rage in fact, if not self loathing as a result of being dehumanized, made invisible. And also, I (too) belong there, because I am a recipient of that history and were it not for the Nakba, I too would have been there. I am nostalgic for that which never was. My experience as a refugee-exile who was born out of Palestine and not of that era is intertwined with the Nakba. In fact it is intertwined with the history of Palestine.


An imaginative Gardner
tends to her fragmented umbilical cord
and I am vessel for her obsessions
over your aborted dreams and my still birth.


“The Nakba generation's dreams have been aborted, while mine are still birth. I don't know which is more agonizing!" To make clearer this enunciation she goes on by referring to the next lines of the poem:


A parasite scavenges the remains of you
from my scattered shards,
and then escapes like an elusive acrobat.


She explains, "Here the parasite and acrobat are nostalgia. If you are familiar with post memory which was observed with descendants of the holocaust, it's a sort of post traumatic stress disorder, where the survivors carry the trauma and grief which gets communicated in different ways, even subversively by those who have witnessed it to subsequent generations." "Even as a child it’s as though I had an antenna that picked up on the pain and I felt it - like an open wound, and still is.


Aida's poetry is a new visitation into the postmodern experience and she is grateful that she can use her writings as a vehicle to turn the energy into something constructive, "I write to make a case for a disenfranchised people and gather strength from a universality of the Palestinian cause as it enables me to channel my rage at and be engaged by all forms of oppression and subjugation."


“Like the title of Edward Said's Memoir: Out of Place; I, like many who have experienced the kind of displacement and injustices visited upon the Palestinian people, have always felt out of place. "And yet, I never quite allowed myself to assimilate. It was a decision I made as a young child growing up in predominately middle class Anglo American neighborhood at the height of American Xenophobia in the early seventies. I suppose even then, I was aware that I had inherited a most noble cause and so I felt compelled to defend it by asserting my identity, with painful consequences in the form of peer rejection.


I think, also my rebellious nature precludes me from ever truly belonging anywhere. And if Palestine were to be liberated today, I would surely be opposed to the ruling government and stifling social conventions. Perhaps it’s the temperament of the poet, perhaps it’s the feminist, or the disenfranchised native carrying the weight of centuries of colonization or all those things.
But I also see my exile as a profoundly postmodern experience. And that's why, the poet can be a metaphor too for the stateless and disenfranchised: in a perpetual state of moving, not quite belonging anywhere and yet everywhere. I (too) belong there (inside) and I belong (to) there (outside) positions at once...one exists in many states. I think limbo is a state that always seems to hover right beneath the surface, where home is neither here nor there, alternating between searching and waiting... But then at times, one comes to terms with one’s exile and home becomes exile and exile--home, and yet when all is still... a dormant desire for paradise lost, gently erupts and reminds us..."

In commemoration to the 61st Nakba Day -



“The eye of Lifta”

O beloved Swallow of the Galilee,
I (too) belong there—
where old men are boys
and fig trees
­­—mothers birthing memories like moss
in the valley of a mischievous mulberry tree.

There—
where a desolate kingdom of an eternal spring
fortified with an unwearied wind
pollinated Sixty-One autumns
with Sixty-One offerings:
to consummate a reunion with an almond seed.
Sixty-One offerings:
rebuffed by an unbending river
that flows neither here nor there;
Sixty-One offerings:
overruled by obstinate threads
luring a dying metaphor into a river of limbo;
Sixty-One offerings:
exiled for hijacking a glimpse
of the Golden Dome;
Sixty-One offerings:
frozen at nostalgia’s salon.

Nostalgia passes over infertile soil
like a punitive teacher
passes over an absentminded student.
An imaginative gardener
tends to her fragmented umbilical cord
and I am vessel for her obsessions
over your aborted dreams and my still birth.
A parasite scavenges the remains of you
from my scattered shards,
and then escapes like an elusive acrobat.
Nostalgia is for nostalgia’s sake
and the scorn of time her bed-mate.
This coveted mistress bleeds mosaic memories
and dwells deep in the cervix
of splintered selves.

Memories born of the same womb (wound):
Do BATTLE!

O weeping Goddess of Canaan,
Rise up from your grief!
Accept this poem sculpted from clay
of words and tears;
all is constructed and destroyed
with words and tears!

There—
where a jury of motherless cacti
is witness to Franks taking refuge
from the peddlers of forgetfulness
in a dome of dancing Byzantine terraces
and ululating golden Aleppo threads
celebrating an agnostic olive tree’s
mutiny against false prophets
of an unyielding harvest.
A paperless traveler scales walls
of indifference
and a nameless peasant paints green kohl
in the eyes of stone monuments,
with the devotion of a pilot sowing mines
on the edges of orphaned cities,
while a pensive sky archives maps and resolutions
under the pillow of a banished raindrop.
--
A poet collects her belongings:
a duffle bag;
a rain coat;
the scribbled lines to an unfinished poem:
I belong (to) there—
written on the back of an unpaid bill,
in the smoking lounge of an airport.


Aida.Qasim@gmail.com