Books in Brief

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0084
• Published date: 19 January 2024
• Pages: 84-92
• Date: 19 January 2024

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

BOOKS IN BRIEF

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 Palestin-

ian 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 glos-

sary 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 colo-

nial 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 land-

scape, 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 resist-

ance, 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,

DOI:10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0084