ABSTRACT
Until very recently, poetry had a privileged standing in Arab culture, in narrative and representation, in shaping canons, depicting icons and experimentation in artistic form. Its impact waned considerably in the last three decades of the twentieth century, but a handful of contemporary poets, such as the Syrian Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar) and the recently deceased Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish in particular, were granted remarkable deference as cultural authorities. Poetry was the form least encumbered in travelling across the occupation’s barbed wire fences and pitilessly policed frontiers of Arab states. Palestinian and Arab poets were thus foundational in shaping the nation’s narrative and representational imaginary. Until Arab satellite broadcasts were able to transmit a living image of Jerusalem to the rest of the Arab world, all that generations of Palestinian refugees as well as Arabs had at their disposal to imagine Jerusalem was poetry by Jerusalemites such as Fadwa Tuqan and other Palestinian poets and writers living there. Poetry was the foundational expressive form in the creation of national icons such as the fida’i (the Palestinian freedom fighter) or the shaheed (the martyr), as well as minting national symbols from the natural landscape of Palestine such as the olive tree and orange grove. The salient trope of gendering and feminising the land of Palestine was first moulded in the hands of poets.
