Fadwa Tuqan: The Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, who has died aged 86, forcefully expressed a nation's sense of loss and defiance. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general, likened reading one of Tuqan's poems to facing 20 enemy commandos. In Martyrs Of The Intifada, Tuqan wrote of young stone-throwers:
They died standing, blazing on the road
Shining like stars, their lips pressed to the lips of life
They stood up in the face of death
Then disappeared like the sun.
Yet the true power of her words derived, not from warlike imagery, but their affirmation of Palestinian identity and the dream of return. In Call Of The Land (1954), she tells how a refugee is lured by the distant lights of Jaffa to cross the border, knowing he will lose his life.
In a gentler sequel, Tuqan depicts herself as a link in the chain of history:
I ask nothing more
Than to die in my country
To dissolve and merge with the grass,
To give life to a flower
That a child of my country will pick,
All I ask
Is to remain in the bosom of my country
As soil,
Grass,
A flower.
Fadwa Tuqan was the sister of the poet, playwright and Radio Palestine director, Ibrahim Tuqan, who died in 1941 and whose poems became rallying cries for Palestinians during the anti-British revolt of 1933-37. Ibrahim tutored his younger sister in poetry via letters posted from Beirut, where he was lecturing.
She was born in Nablus, shortly before the Balfour Declaration promised the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. Her upbringing was privileged, yet strictly circumscribed by social norms.
In 1948, when thousands of Palestinian Arabs poured into Nablus, the town assumed the cultural mantle of the lost cities of Jaffa, Haifa and West Jerusalem.
Paradoxically, the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) and the death of Fadwa's stern father, also in 1948, coincided with a sense of liberation for the poet. Feudalism crumbled. Suddenly, young and educated women could mix freely with their male counterparts. "When the roof fell on Palestine, the veil fell off the face of the Nablus woman," she wrote.
Imbued with this heady spirit, Tuqan followed her initial collection, My Brother Ibrahim (1946), with new ones: Alone With The Days (1952), Give Us Love (1960) and Before The Closed Door (1967). They trace the evolution of Palestinian political consciousness: from shock, despair and victimhood to summud (steadfastness), resistance and renewed pride.
Israel, however, was not her only foe. Another was Arab society itself and in particular its treatment of women. In her autobiography, translated as Mountainous Journey (1990), she describes how Arab women were hidden in the household like frightened birds in a crowded coop.
Her student years at Oxford University, 1962-64, where she studied English language and literature, represented a welcome escape from the sorrows of the Levant. She relished the English countryside and travelled widely in Europe and the Middle East.
Tuqan gained an international audience after her poetry was translated into English in the 1980s. Young Arab-Americans read her work to rediscover their roots; Israeli and Jewish feminists divined a sympathetic resonance from their sister across the "green line". She did not marry or have children.
Many Israelis, however, regarded her political analyses as woefully two-dimensional. Some Palestinians felt that her attacks on Arab society merely reconfirmed the "orientalist" prejudices of westerners.
Ultimately, Tuqan will be remembered for the potency of her poetry.
Fadwa Tuqan, poet, born March 1st, 1917; died December 12th, 2003