Record! and Psalm 137

I have decided that, as I share a lot of my own poetry here on my blog, I will also begin sharing some of the poems that I like to read and that influence me as I write.

The poem “Record!” (sometimes translated as “Write Down!” –in Arabic “Sajil!”) by the Palestinian poet  Mahmoud Darwish (1941 – 2008) is powerful and evocative.

Record!

I am an Arab

And my identity card is number fifty thousand

I have eight children

And the ninth is coming after a summer

Will you be angry?

Record!

I am an Arab

Employed with fellow workers at a quarry

I have eight children

I get them bread

Garments and books

from the rocks

I do not supplicate charity at your doors

Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber

So will you be angry?

Record!

I am an Arab

I have a name without a title

Patient in a country

Where people are enraged

My roots

Were entrenched before the birth of time

And before the opening of the eras

Before the pines, and the olive trees

And before the grass grew

My father descends from the family of the plow

Not from a privileged class

And my grandfather was a farmer

Neither well-bred, nor well-born!

Teaches me the pride of the sun

Before teaching me how to read

And my house is like a watchman’s hut

Made of branches and cane

Are you satisfied with my status?

I have a name without a title!

Record!

I am an Arab

You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors

And the land which I cultivated

Along with my children

And you left nothing for us

Except for these rocks

So will the State take them

As it has been said?!

Therefore!

Record on the top of the first page:

I do not hate people

Nor do I encroach

But if I become hungry

The usurper’s flesh will be my food

Beware…

Beware…

Of my hunger

And my anger!

I cannot read this poem without thinking of a similar poem enshrined in the Hebrew / Christian Scriptures:

By the rivers of Babylon—

    there we sat down and there we wept

    when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

    we hung up our harps.

For there our captors

    asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song

    in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

    let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

    above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!

    Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

    Happy shall they be who pay you back

    what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

    and dash them against the rock!

Anyone (Christian or Jewish) who defends psalm 137 as an honest and appropriate description of the legitimate grief and anger felt by the Jewish exile living in Babylon, but rejects and denies those emotions the Palestinian people today are either ignorantly inconsistent or willfully hypocritical.