CINEMA 2 ~

 

Mehdi Hasan sits down with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas to discuss their latest film ‘Palestine 36,’ which explores the ‘Great Revolt’ against British rule in Palestine from 1936-39, before the Nakba in 1948. The film is Palestine’s official submission to the Oscars for 2026 and received one of the longest ovations from an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival. They also discuss censorship in Hollywood and what it was like filming in the middle of an ongoing genocide.

ILAN PAPPE ~

R E A D   M E 

and new:

      Oneworld 2024

RAJA SHEHADEH ~

 

R E A D   M E

     Other Press, 2024

ANATOMY OF A JERUSALEM TRAGEDY ~

R E A D    M E

Very well told but a

 tragedy bounded by more tragedy

 — better catastrophe —

in that none of the life of

this text since

October 7, 2023

 any longer exists

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI ~

PETER COLE ~

The Prayer Book




For years I've wanted to write a prayer book.

Why? Because I've learned

that the solid hangs upon nothingness.

Because I've found that the sentence is a kind of petition.

And because I've found that in all that I've said

in all that I've said I've said only thank you.

So, little by little,

                       in fact I've written that book

and today it weighs some two hundred pounds

and soon it will celebrate its fiftieth birthday

and yesterday I bought it shoes.


Aharon Shabtai (translated by Peter Cole)







Kharja / Closure






 "Oh, I'll

love you alright;

         so

   long as you

manage to bend



   both of my

anklets

back to the

   thin silver

earrings you gave me."


(Anonymous, Mozarabic, 12th century
 translate by Peter Cole)








Palestine: A Sestina


Hackles are raised at the mere mention of Palestine,
let alone  The Question of — who owns the pain?
Often it seems the real victims here are the hills —
those pulsing ridges, whose folds are tender fuzz of green
kill with softness. On earth, it's true, we're only guests,
but people live in places, and stake out claims to land.

From Moab Moses saw, long ago — a land
far off, and once I stood there facing Palestine
with Hassan, whose family lives in Amman. (We were his guests
at the Wahdat refugee camp.) Wonder shot with pain
came into his eyes as he gazed across the green
valley between Nebo and Lydda beyond the hills.

Help would come, says the Psalmist, from one of those hills,
though scholars still don't know for certain whether the land
in question was Zion, or the high places of Baal. The green
olives ripened, and ripen, either way in Palestine,
and the memory of groves cut down rings on pain
for those whose people worked them, for themselves or guests.

"I have been made a stranger in my home by guests,"
says Job, in Hebrew that evolved along these hills,
though he himself was foreign to them. His famous pain
is also that of those who call the Promised Land
home in  another tongue. Could what was pledged be Palestine?
Is Scripture's fence intended to guard this mountain's green?

Many have roamed its slopes and fields, dressed in green
fatigues, unable to fathom what they mean, as guests.
And armies patrol still, throughout Palestine,
as ministers mandate women and men to carve up its hills
to keep them from ever again becoming enemy land.
The search, meanwhile, goes on—for a balm to end the pain,

though it seems only to widen the rippling circles of pain,
as though the land itself became the ripples, and its green
a kind of sigh. So spring comes round again to the land,
as echoes cry: "It's mine!" —and the planes will bring in guests,
so long as water and longing run through these hills,
which some (and coins) call Israel, and others Palestine.

The pundits' talk of Palestine doesn't account for the pain—
or the bone-white hills, breaking the heart as they go green
before the souls of guests-on-earth who've known this land.



————————————
Peter Cole
Hymns & Qualms
new & selected poems & translations
Farrar, 2017