Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the village of  Saffuriyya in the Galilee, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, and now, northern Israel. He fled to Lebanon with his family after their village came under heavy bombardment during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military campaign that captured the Lower Galilee),

They were among more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine‘s Arab population – who from their homes or were expelled by Jewish militias and, later, the Israeli army.

We did not weep
when we were leaving –
for we had neither
time nor tears
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting
so where would our weeping 
have come from?”

Unlike most who fled, he returned the following year – to Nazareth, where he lived until his death in 2011. During the 1950s and 1960s, he sold religious souvenirs to pilgrims and tourists during the day to Christian pilgrims, and studied poetry at night. Self-taught, through his readings of classical Arabic literature, including Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar and adored classical Arabic poetry. He read American fiction, and English poetry in translation. He began his poetry career in his forties. His shop in Nazareth, near the Church of the Annunciation, became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop.

In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era. “My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told his biographer. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish, the most celebrated of Palestinian poets, and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.

The Saffuriya of his youth  and the political and social upheavals he endured served as inspiration poetry and fiction that is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination.

A profile on the From the Poetry Foundation website reads:

“Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and an unflinching, at times painfully honest approach; his poetry’s apparent simplicity and homespun truths conceal the subtle grafting of classical Arabic onto colloquial forms of expression. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences have been powerfully moved his poems of political complexity and humanity. He has published several collections of poetry and is also a short story writer.

In a direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, He combines the personal and political as he details both village life and the upheaval of conflict. Comparing Muhammad Ali to his contemporaries, John Palattella commented in a review in The Nation: “Whereas Darwish and al-Qasim, like most Palestinian poets, have favoured the elevated and ornate rhetoric of fus’ha, or classical Arabic, Muhammad Ali writes non-metrical, unrhymed poems that blend classical fus’ha with colloquial Arabic’.”

Amongst contemporary Palestinian poets, Taha was an atypical. His aversion to performing poems that referred to intifada and resistance raised numerous questions in the hothouse atmosphere Israeli and Palestinian politics and conflict. When asked his opinion on what he called “placard like-poetry”, he declared: “The poetry of the stones is fleeting, and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”

His collections in English include Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (2000) and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006), both translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. He traveled to read his work in Europe and the United States, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In 2009, the writer Adina Hoffman published a biography, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which won the 2010 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.

Meeting at an airport

I made my first acquaintance with the poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali with a poem about a chance meeting at an airport. Aware of his background, and the tumultuous  times he lived through, it spoke to me on many levels.

In common with much contemporary Palestinian poetry, it portrays thepain of separation and of leaving home – and of exile. It recounts a chance meeting four decades after an event which we are to assume is al Nakba.

Two friends are taking their customary walk to a village spring. The language suggests that they are more than friends – he recalls how is his companion surprises with him questions that send his blood rushing. He answers and she laughs – her laughter startles the starlings into flight,

They part or are parted – we do not know which – and do not see each other again until forty years later when they just chance to bump into each other at a foreign airport in what we assume from the Arabic title of the poem, liqa’ fi matar mahayid , is a “neutral” or “friendly” airport. Are they just travelers or is his old friend an exile? Again we are not told – although Taha did not leave what became Israel, living in Nazareth all his life, so we assume it was the latter.

He is absolutely shocked to encounter his old friend. “Ya lalmuhal min al muhali!” he exclaims, using the a high Arabic idiom equivalent to “Oh my god!
“ or “wow!” He doesn’t think she recognizes him – but it is not so. She asks the very same questions she asked all those years ago. Again his blood rushes. He gives the very same answer. But this time, she does not laugh – instead, she weeps, and there no birds to sing, but invisible, heartbroken doves.

And so, two people meet at last and harbour the same feelings for each other as the first time they met long, long ago. But in life as in art, reconnecting with a loved one does not just bring joy – it can also bring sorrow and regret. It is a timeless theme – think Rick and Lisa reunited unexpectedly and ultimately temporarily in the “gin joint” in Casablanca.

I could go out on a limb and suggest that the lost love encountered at the airport could also be construed as a metaphor for the lost Palestine.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz provides some further insight into the poem:

“He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.

On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as, his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.

He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”

Meeting at an Airport follows, in English and in Arabic, together with a selection of Taha Muhammed Ali’s poems – all translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin

Arab poets and exile

 A million spaces in the earth to fill, here’s a generation waiting still – we’ve got year after year to kill, but there’s no going home. Steve Knightley, Exile

Historical and social memory, and indeed, remembrance and commemoration, and their opposites, forgetfulness and letting go, are intrinsic to our human story … For the exile, the refugee, the involuntary migrant, theirs’ is a yearning, a longing, an absence of belonging – an existential homelessness and rootlessness, that is almost like a phantom limb. It is a bereavement, a loss, a spiritual and cultural death that could qualifies for descriptors drawn from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief: (Shock and disbelief), denial, anger, bargaining, depression, (testing) and acceptance.

One way the refugee can assuage his or her anguish is through writing. Chicago librarian and writer Leslie Williams notes: “The literature of exile encompasses bitter, impassioned indictments of unjust, inhumane regimes, but also includes wrenching melancholy for lost homes, lost families, and a lost sense of belonging. The pervasive feeling of rootlessness, of never being quite at home echoes across centuries of exile writing” (read here her The Literature of Exile).

See also, No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2)

Read about other Arab poets in In That Howling Infinite: O Beirut – Songs for a wounded city, Ghayath al Madhoun – the agony of an exiled poet  and Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow 

Jerusalem Rooftops, Sliman Mansur

Jerusalem Heritage, Sliman Mansur

Hope, Sliman Mansur

Meeting at an Airport

Taha Muhammad Ali

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .

And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

From So What New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005

لقاء في مطار محايد

طه محمد علي

سألتني
وكنا من ضُحى النبعِ
مرة
عائديْْنْ
‘ماذا تكره
ومن تُحِب؟

فأجبتُكِ
من خَلفِ أهدابِ الفُجاءة
ودمي
يُسرعُ ويُسرعْ
كظل سحابِة الزُرْزُورْ
‘اكرهُ الرحيلَ
أحبُّ النبعَ والدربَ
واعبُدُ الضُحى
فَضَحِكْتِ
فأزهرَ لوز
وشدَتْ في الايكِ أسرابُ العنادِلْ

سؤآلٌ
عُمرُه الآن عقودٌ أربعةْ
يا للْجواب من السؤالْ
وجوابٌ
عُمرُه عُمرُ رحيلك
يا لَلْسؤآلِ من الجوابْ

واليومَ
يا للْمُحالْ
ها نحن في مطارٍ مُحايِِدْ
على شفا صُدفةٍ
نَلتَقي
وّيحيْ…؟
نلتقي…؟
وها أنتِ
تُعيدين السؤالْ؟
يا لَلْمُحالِ من المُحالِْ
عَرَفْتُكِ
ولم تعرفيني
‘أهذا أنتَ؟
ولم تُصَدِّقي
وفجأة
انفجرتِ تسألين
‘إن كنتَ أنتَ أنتَ
فماذا تكره
ومن تُحبْ؟

فأجتبكِ
ودمي
يغادرُ الشُرفةْ
يُسْرعُ ويُسْرعُ
كظلِّ سحابةِ الزُرْوُرْ
‘أكره الرحيلَ
أُحبُّ النبعَ والدربَ
وأعبُدُ الضحى

فبكيتِ
فاطرقت ورُودً
وتعثرتْ بحرير حُرقتِها حَمائِمْ

Revenge

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth, April 15, 2006

ِنْتِقام

أَحْياناً
أَتَمَنّى أَن أُبارِزَ
الشَّخْصَ الذي
قَتَلَ والِدي
وَهَدَمَ بَيْتَنا
فَشَرَّدَني
في بِلادِ النّاسِ
الضَيِّقَةِ
فَإِذا قَتَلَني
أَكونُ قَدْ ارْتَحْتُ
وَإِنْ أَجْهَزْتُ عَلَيْهِ
أَكونُ قَدِ انْتَقَمْتُ!

لكِنْ…
إِذا تَبَيَّنَ لي
أَثْناءَ المُبارَزَةِ
أَنَّ لِغَريمي أُمّاً
تَنْتَظِرُهُ
أَوْ أَباً
يَضَعُ كَفَّ يَمينِهِ
عَلى مَكانِ القَلْبِ مِنْ صَدْرِهِ
كُلَّما تَأَخَّرَ ابْنُهُ
وَلَوْ رُبْعَ ساعَةٍ
عَنْ مَوْعِدِ عَوْدَتِهِ
فَأَنا عِنْدَها
لَنْ أَقْتُلَهُ إِذا
تَمَكَّنْتُ مِنْهُ

كَذلِكَ…
أَنا لَنْ أَفْتِكَ بِهِ
إِذا ظَهَرَ لي
أَنَّ لَهُ إِخْوَةٌ وَأَخَوات
يُحِبّونَهُ
وَيُديمونَ تَشَوُّقَهُمْ إِلَيْهِ.
أَوْ إِذا كانَ لَهُ
زَوْجَةٌ تُرَحِّبُ بِهِ
وَأَطْفالٌ
لا يُطيقونَ غِيابَهُ
وَيَفْرَحونَ بِهَداياه.
أَوْ إِذا كانَ لَهُ
أَصْدِقاءٌ أَوْ أَقارِبٌ
جيرانٌ مَعارِفٌ
زُمَلاءُ سِجْنٍ
رِفاقُ مُسْتَشْفى
أَوْ خُدَناءُ مَدْرَسَةٍ
يَسْأَلونَ عَنْهُ
وَيَحْرِصونَ عَلى تَحِيَّتِه

أَمَّا إِذا كانَ وَحيداً
مَقْطوعاً مِنْ شَجَرَةٍ
لا أَبٌ وَلا أُمٌّ
لا إِخْوَةٌ وَلا أَخَواتٌ
لا زَوْجَةٌ وَلا أَطْفالٌ
بِدونِ أَصْدِقاءٍ وَلا أَقْرِباءٍ وَلا جيران
مِنْ غَيْرِ مَعارِفٍ
بِلا زُمَلاءٍ أَوْ رُفَقاءٍ أَوْ أَخْدان
فَأَنا لَنْ أُضيفَ
إِلى شَقاءِ وَحْدَتِهِ
لا عَذابَ مَوْتٍ
وَلا أَسى فَناءٍ
بَلْ سَأَكْتَفي
بِأَنْ أُغْمِضَ الطَّرْفَ عَنْهُ
حينَ أَمُرُّ بِهِ في الطَّريقِ
مُقْنِعاً نَفْسي
بِأَنَّ الإِهْمالَ
بِحَدِّ ذاتِهِ هُوَ أَيْضاً
نَوْعٌ مِنْ أَنْواعِ الإِنْتِقامِ!

Below, poems from Norbert Bier’s Poetry Dispatch and othet notes from the Undergoud

Where

Poetry hides
somewhere
behind the night of words
behind the clouds of hearing,
across the dark of sight,
and beyond the dusk of music
that’s hidden and revealed.
But where is it concealed?
And how could I
possibly know
when I am
barely able,
by the light of day,
to find my pencil?

from SO WHAT New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, Copper Canyon Press, 2006,

Empty Words

Ah, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
I’ve protected you
from dampness and rodents
and entrusted you with
my sadness and fear,
and my dreams—
though in exchange I’ve gotten from you
only disobedience and betrayal…
For otherwise where are the words
that would have me saying:
If only I were a rock on a hill…
unable to see or hear,
be sad or suffer!
And where is the passage
whose tenor is this:
I wish I could be
a rock on a hill
which the young men
from Hebron explode
and offer as a gift to Jerusalem’s children,
ammunition for their palms and slings!

And where is the passage
in which I wanted
to be a rock on a hill
gazing. out from on high
hundreds of years from now
over hordes ,.
of masked liberators!

And where is what belongs
to my dream of being
a rock on a hill
along the Carmel—
where I call on the source of my sadness,
gazing out over the waves
and thinking of her
to whom I bade
farewell at the harbor pier
in Haifa forty years ago
and still…
I await her return
one evening
with the doves of the sea.

Is it fair, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
that you conceal
what you cancel and erase,
simply because it consists of empty words—
which frighten no enemy
and offer no hope to a friend?

From Never Mind – Twenty Poems and a Story,

Twigs

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.

My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist

Abd al Hadi Fights a Superpower 

In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”

Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.

The Palestinian poet who never lamented the occupied land

Sheren Falah Saab, Haaretz, August 30 2023

The play ‘Taha’ offers a glimpse into the life of a poet who eschewed politics, preferring to write about personal pain and lost masculinity

The late poet Taha Muhammad Ali. Nina Subin

Thursday July 15, 1948, began as another ordinary day for the Ali family in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya in the Lower Galilee. It was during Ramadan and Umm Taha was busy preparing mulukhiyah for the iftar meal to break the daily fast at sundown.

The eldest son, Taha – who was also the family breadwinner – returned after a busy day at the shop. After finishing his meal, he washed his hands and went out to the field to graze two goats he had recently bought. Taha found them to be restless, but couldn’t understand their strange behavior. Suddenly, he heard a strange whirring sound. This sound intensified and then he saw two planes approaching his village.

“I heard a terrifying boom. I fell to the ground, my knees shaking. Then another boom, and another boom,” he would later recall. Then he heard wailing and saw smoke in the distance, and parents and children scattering in terror. He left the goats and ran toward home to find his family, but found no one there.

The story of Taha, from an eponymous play that was recently published in Hebrew (as part of the Maktoob project that translates Arabic literature into Hebrew), is based on the life of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who died in 2011 at age 80.

The village of Saffuriyya in the lower Galilee in 1948. נדב מן, ביתמונה. מ?

Amer Hlehel, the actor and playwright who wrote the play, takes the reader on a reflective journey through the poet’s personal life: from his escape from Saffuriyya as a teenager in 1948 following the occupation of the village, through his adaptation to life in a Lebanese refugee camp, to his return to Israel, which was fraught with dangers.

The play was first produced in 2014 and performed in Arabic at the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa. It was subsequently staged in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah, and was well-received by Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. In the play, Hlehel incorporates quotes from things Ali said in interviews and in his meetings with him, as well as excerpts from his poetry.

Writing about leaving their Galilee village, Ali writes: “We did not weep / when we were leaving – for we had neither / time nor tears / and there was no farewell. / We did not know / at the moment of parting / that it was a parting / so where would our weeping / have come from?”

In the play, just as in real life, Ali does not manage to overcome the personal pain, but confronts it by writing poetry. He does not weep for the stones of the house that were destroyed, nor for the land that was occupied, but for the love that he lost and the life that ceased to exist.

Taha Muhammad Ali. ‘He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain. Alex Levac

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in Saffuriyya in 1931. At age 10, he stopped his formal education in order to help his father support the family. Later, he opened a grocery store in the village, as described by Hlehel in the play: “I opened the diwan [central room] in our house, which overlooked the main road. I filled the shelves with cigarettes and chocolate and halvah and chewing gum and pens, and the crown jewel was a block of ice inside a bowl with bottles of orange-, apple- and lemon-flavored soda.”

Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar thanks to his neighbor, il-Hajj Taher. “He had a shelf of books and called it a library: the people of the village would read and return them,” he recounted in an interview with Adina Hoffman, who wrote the biography of Ali’s life, “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.”

It was through Taher’s books that Ali learned about the poets of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties (between the seventh and eighth centuries, and eighth and 13th centuries, respectively), and fell in love with classical Arabic poetry.

The sacrifices Ali made on behalf of his family reveal a generous and reserved personality. He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.

Dr. Daniel Behar. ‘Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry.’runo Charbit/The Hebrew Universe

On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military operation that captured the Lower Galilee), his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.

In an interview with Hoffman, Ali described that moment as really tough. He immortalized this moment in a poem that is quoted in the play: “We were not awake, and we did not fall asleep / on the night we left, that night was not a night for us / No fire was lit, no moon rose.”

“Taha Muhammad Ali dedicates space to personal sadness in his poetry,” says Daniel Behar, a lecturer in modern Arabic literature at the Hebrew University who translated Ali’s poems for the play. He stresses that Ali’s poems distance themselves from performative-collective lamentation. “He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”

According to Behar, Ali decided to write in such a personal style as he was not writing with a specific audience in mind.

Ali confirmed these observations while speaking with Hoffman, when he said he would throw his writing “in the drawer and forget about it.” He said he had never thought of becoming a poet or publishing his poems, even though he was interested in culture and literature. After his return from Lebanon in the fall of 1949, his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop. In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era.

‘As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,’ says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play ‘Taha.Noa Elhannan

“My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told Hoffman. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.

But, adds Behar, Ali’s poetry was different from the works of well-known Palestinian poets like Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Al-Qasim, who often focused on Palestinian heroism. “Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry,” he notes. According to Behar, “his writing was intended to fill the silence of the archive for marginalized forms of life and nameless experiences, and whose voices were absent from written history.”

In 1983, Ali published his first collection of poems, “The Fourth Qasida [ode] and Ten More Poems.” This happened only after his friends urged him to publish his work. He later published a collection of stories, “Fooling the Killers” (1989), and three more collections of poetry: “Fire in the Convent Garden” (1992), “God, Caliph and the Boy with Colorful Butterflies” (2002) and “No More” (2005). A collection of his poems was published in Hebrew in 2006, translated by the author and poet Anton Shammas (published by Andalus).

The cover of Hebrew translation of the play ‘Taha.Maktub / Fares Shehada

“As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,” says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play “Taha.”

One of the key motifs in Ali’s poetry was his native village. “Saffuriyya was dear to his heart and his love for it stood out in all his poems,” says Behar. Taha’s brother, Amin Muhammad Ali, said in an interview with the Al-Raed channel in 2016 that “the village never left him.” He added that his brother documented the small and large details in Saffuriyya throughout his life – in conversations with people, in his poetry, both day and night. The Palestinian poet Naji Daher from Nazareth added in an interview with the same Arab channel that “Ali carried Saffuriyya in his heart everywhere, and he also succeeded in conveying it to the world at large.”

The poem “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” written by Ali in 1973 and published in Hebrew in 2006, embodies his approach as a poet. He does not write about Palestinian heroes seeking revenge against the Jews, nor does he try to conceal the sense of defeat and lost masculinity. In the poem, he portrays the character of the village fool Abd el-Hadi as an illiterate person who does not even know what The New York Times is. Between the lines, Ali reveals parts of himself, drawing the reader closer to him. “You can see aspects of Taha Muhammad Ali in the character of Abd el-Hadi – he has a joy and love of life that punctures the sadness and gives value to human love,” says Behar.

Ali concludes the poem with a description of Abd el-Hadi’s forgiving behavior: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury / about his enemies my client knows not a thing / And I can assure you / were he to encounter the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Enterprise / he’d serve them eggs sunny-side up / and labneh fresh from the bag.”

According to Behar, in this poem (and others), Ali plays with words and sounds that were not customary in Palestinian poetry, offering sharp transitions between dialect and a high literary language.

In 2007, in an interview with the U.S. television program “PBS NewsHour,” Ali talked about his attempts to write poetry in the years after he left school. “This went together, reading and trying to write,” he said. “You have to take the pen and to take a paper, and to be ready to wait for it – otherwise it will come and you are not there. As a writer, you have to train yourself to write. Write anything, but everyday.”

Eight months after the outbreak of the second intifada at the start of the 2000s, Ali was published in London. He and Al-Qasim gave poetry readings to audiences in the British capital. Al-Qasim read his “Poem of the Intifada,” an indictment of those he called “Occupiers Who Do Not Read.” Ali, on the other hand, read distinctly different poems. “None of the poems he read contained a single direct reference to the uprising, to the ‘struggle,’ to children or to stones,” Hoffman wrote in her book.

His aversion to performing poems that referred to the intifada raised numerous questions. Hoffman noted in her book that he was indeed asked his opinion on what she called “placard like poetry.”

“The poetry of the stones is fleeting,” he declared, “and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”