PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS

In an online discussion with the Greek economist and activist, Yanis Farouvakis, the poet Mohamed El-Kurd insists “Optimism is a political obligation, it is not a feeling, … not something you’re bestowed by God or whatever divine power before you begin your work in your organisation. It is your obligation to believe in your decolonial project…we don’t have the luxury of despair, the luxury of cynicism…”^{[1]Varoufakis and el-Kurd, Internet Video.}

Nida Younis, like ElKurd, is one of this generation of Palestinian poets, offering a lesson not only how to live, but how to recalibrate one’s moral position and be in tune with the times. Knowing the cruelty that ended the life of Hind Rajab, the arrogant impunity that goes on and on and on, this review argues that when we immerse ourselves in art, writing, and activism, we are accompanying Younis and all of Palestine to the funeral of human compassion. We attend the people of Palestine as we attend the people of Sudan, of Congo, of Myanmar, because it may be the best we can do, this act of ukuphelezela, or solidarity, but not just solidarity, also medelyding. Your pain is our pain. And in that feeling, we hope to offer some fragment of community, freedom, hope, respite, nourishment. It is sobering to realise that we can never do enough to stop this genocide. That everything we do will perhaps have no impact whatsoever. But we don’t have the luxury of indulging thoughts of futility.

This review is conducted in intense conversation with memories of poets and cultural figures, starting with Lesley Perkes, who died of Hodgkins Lymphoma ten years ago. Lesley was my friend and neighbour. When we first met, I was pregnant, recently disowned by my adoptive mother. Lesley quietly asked for my mother’s phone number. Fifteen years later, Lesley told me that she had phoned my mother once or twice a year, to tell her what was going on with me. My mother never replied to Lesley, but she also never put down the phone. Lesley’s action showed me that even when the people claim disinterest, it is still worthwhile to reach out. Unconditionally, without the expectation of a reward, a person quietly appeals to the humanity of someone who is actively performing cold-heartedness. I am haunted by my mother’s breath, her tense silence on the other side of the phone conversation. And I am mesmerised by Lesley’s generous act of ukukhapha, which is more like escorting a friend to the bus stop, or the principal’s office, or the hospital dispensary. These ways of being and doing are the hidden work of the artist, and are generally not discussed, not out of shame, but out of respect. When that work hits home, another art is revealed, like a shaft of light revealing the closeness of things we thought entirely separate.

All artists know that the work is brought to completion by the listener, the spectator, the viewer. Lesley chose to be like Deutscher’s Non-Jewish Jew, and be a mensch, her hidden work contributed to my mother’s softening towards me, allowing us to part in love when she also, two years later, walked into the endless night.

Our culture fears death and hides it from children, from ourselves; it is a great taboo. But Lesley walked calmly toward it. When the child of artist friends committed suicide, Lesley’s Jewish background inspired her to be a mensch and phelezela the family. She invited me to join her at the grieving house, but I refused for the cowardly reasons of not knowing how to act or what to say. I was not yet ready to understand the lesson. Remembering it now is the learning I missed then. Ukuphelezela with Nida Younis’ imagery which raises the dead, comforting and correcting me, like a gogo.

It is common for secular folks to claim intellectual superiority over religious people, despite their own helplessness when confronted with the great unknowable. In Of Water and the Spirit, the Burkinabé spiritual teacher Malidoma Somé draws from the wellspring of Dagara culture to reflect on the value of life, which always springs into sharp relief in the presence of death. “During a Dagara funeral ritual, all kinds of grief are released – not just a regret for the departed, but all the pain of everyday life.”^{[2]Some, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman.}

When we really look at the dead and dying, we are confronted by the loss of life, their leaky, faulty body, their unrealised dreams, their futures, their grudges and debts. As Somé’s relating of the death ritual unfolds, when we fully embrace the enormity of death, other losses come to the surface. While thinking of Palestine and the terrifying toll of life I remember my friend and the way she cherished relationships in such a concrete way, showing us how to love. In facing, embracing and responding to death, the poet, the artist, the shaman, religion itself, relieves the fear and horror by making it real.

As I walk into the house of poems built by Nida Younis, all the precious dead arrive, demanding to be remembered. Only you know what it felt like to lose what you lost, and what happened next. Releasing grief is a physical process, as intimate as brushing your teeth.

Israel’s cruelty towards Palestine is not unique, and it is not new, but technology has made it visible, viscerally present in everyday life. Between dropping our kids at school and paying our library fines, we watch a grief-stricken man holding the corpse of his five-year-old son and pointing to the lacerations on his eight-year-old daughter. Are they even still alive. We are pulled into the vortex of brutality. Screened off, but sucked in. El-Kurd, Lena Khaled Tuffaha, Mosab Abu Toha, Nida Younis and the chroniclers of this moment tell us the state of their lives and hearts and reveal the deafness and blindness of ours. Newspaper headlines, decrees, political speeches, UN declarations, even the International Court of Justice have all proven futile. But still.

Poetry penetrates with a different urgency. The economic indicators and the weather report which are part of every news report, are supposed to help us plan and orientate ourselves in the material world. Poetry reveals the state of the soul, provides an intimate sense of what it is to be a vulnerable human. The ubiquity of victimisation means that there is a sameness to the pain. Two Bodies/Zwei Korper goes beyond witnessing. The physical object of the book is a rich and complex collaboration that drives the image beyond idiom. Superficially, two bodies suggest the archetype of the twin; could lead the reader to linger on the tragic twis of Palestine and Israel, the relentlessness of the colonial project. But Younis and her translator Antemanha and Wendy Marth and the Franco-Japanese artist Léa Kishida, force the particular to the universal. The artworks – plastic soldiers ensnared in yarn, and a series of aquarelles – respond to the poems with their own narrative of dismemberment. Herself an artist dedicated to a daily praxis of observance that borders on the ritualistic, Kishida notes in an interview with Antemanha in the Afterword:

Every day I let my watercolour pigments interact with the particles of seawater, which comes from the tidal cycle. Like a diary, the water evaporates, leaving traces, revealing the existence of molecules created by human activity.

My thoughts revolve around the organelle, this cornerstone of the biological functions of living cells, ours, yours, and those of others…

Day after day, the organelle filters the nanoparticles of the scouring zone of sea, earth, and air… created by man, who, in his deliberately thoughtless greed, satisfies his desires for conquest and war…

The organelle overrides all this, it filters tirelessly every day, capturing these nanoparticles, these infinitely small atoms, these symbolic figures of excessive consumption or our repressed belligerent intentions… digests them, recombines them… and deposits them on the paper, as the tides do on the beach or the artist on his daily sheet of paper. [pg 91]

(translation: Google]

The date stamp appears as a character, a figure of authority, suggesting expiry dates. At once recalling the almost obsolescent library ritual of time-sensitive sharing of books, the metallic machine-like object also evokes the grenade, the mine, mechanisms of war, kept apart from the aquarelle, which remains a representation of the organelle and by extension, the organic and living, the human. Kishida’s images, distributed throughout the book, amplify the sensorial implications of the work beyond the ‘special case’ of Palestine, to a universal suffering that crosses every organic boundary. In a work so meticulously collated, the absence of Arabic is a keen reminder of the other erasures violently taking place. I was deeply satisfied by Kishida’s evocation of the organelle as a lens for considering the beauty, resilience and fragility of Palestinian life, in concert with the poet who insists on precision and the personal, despite the looming geopolitics. The poems feel like those iconic photos of women and children standing up to Casspirs during apartheid. Which reminds me of Rachel Corrie, the American activist murdered by the IDF.

Every phelezela raises lives to the light reminding us of what it means to be human. Hunted. The quest for life colours Younis’ poetics, which play on the tension between the deadly threat to life in Palestine and human desire. The speaker dodges through images in the opening poem, Palestinian, always active, restless, seeking:

The world deceives you with open hands;
Every cross-road a snare.

The world becomes sand,
A swamp of mud—
At its best, a corpse staring out,
As if waiting to crawl back
To its cave at dusk.

The world betrays you,
Hiding dolls, guarding abysses,
Dissecting horrors with measured calm—
As though wiping blood from a shoe,
As though your shiver before death
Were a flaw in your clockwork biology.

As though war’s disfigurements
Were birth defects.
As though collecting shattered limbs
In a plastic bag
Were an anomaly that still allows for love.

A child with an amputated leg
Stares at her doll’s unbroken foot,
And her lack becomes a commodity—
A need unshaped,
The world’s charity in embracing flaws.
Power speaks of ugliness,
But never its history.

Poetry summons us from the inevitable banality of existence, confronts us with the abjection of the Palestinian “clockwork biology”, an image that elegantly captures the paradox of existence. But the binary, the dual, the constant refraction of the Other haunts the collection, dramatizing the entwined states of Israel and Palestine in Substitution:

I have to admit:
My father built me a life on a dead sister’s name,
He swapped my name on to her birth certificate,
Changing not the date of birth –
As per normal,
But my very existence.

Nevertheless, the poem succeeds in a productive, troubled mirroring of twin sisters who share the same body, like the two peoples who share the same land, a careful juxtaposition with the title poem, layering the meaning. In this complex narration, the victim and the oppressor constantly switch roles, and one sees in this the suffering of the Israel-to-be, the perpetrator of a genocide:

No one suspects I did not kill,
That I did not wipe out others,
That I only use my family’s heritage,
That I know I do not look like myself
__In the life I lead.
__Where I am not supposed to be.

Absolute power is evident not only in the political arena but in the bedroom. Moving from the political to the personal, in a playful wrestle with her “ibex”, the horned goat, in On Sale, the wayward speaker engages with patriarchy. Appropriating bodies to speak back to the colonial project, ironically observed:

With his long-necked sword
He breaks the seal without a map.
Claiming the picturesque view
From the highest balcony
Of my body.

The speaker emerges, instead of a victim, a saxophone player, recasting the origins of jazz, appropriating the blues, a sound that rings true as this complex, creative poet with her centuries-old background in lyric and mystical poetry. A poetry that almost effortlessly carries into English, the formal dexterity of its classical origins that reimagine the occupation in a range of expressions and responses, from the vivid idiom of the street in “It is not a yes” to terse, short lines in Rented Place:

Sex – 
Tied to beds,
Never to open fields.
Desire without aftermaths.

In this sterile future, there is still desire, beauty and ultimately, life, despite the lack of “aftermaths”.

Younis’ poetic craft is assured, steady and fittingly, highly regarded – this is her tenth collection of poetry, two of her forewords were written by Adunis, the giant of modernist Arab poetry, himself. Nida Younis’ poetry has been anthologised and published in English, French, and now German. One feels honoured by reading this work and simultaneously grief-stricken that the people it represents are in such jeopardy because of greed, racism, and cowardice.

Indeed, it is written into South Africa’s founding DNA to walk with Palestine: The first thing Mandela did when he became president, was to recognise the sovereign state of Palestine. “We would be beneath our own reason for existence as government and as a nation, if the resolution of the problems of the Middle East did not feature prominently on our agenda,” he said at a solidarity meeting in 1997. Although talking politics, he gets under the skin of the Palestinian condition, when he says “an invisible wound is more painful than a visible one.”^{[3]Ndebele, Fine Lines From the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country.} It’s as if our founding president’s moral imagination penetrates to the core of Palestinan physical, emotional and existential suffering, owning it. Ukuphelezela. Poet Laureates Mazisi Kunene, Keorapetse Kgositsile and the current incumbent, Mongane Wally Serote, all have several works dedicated to Palestine, and the continuity of revolution.

I must admit that I arrive in Palestine as a perpetrator, on the wrong side of history, wrapped up in the complicity and duplicity of my origins. The paediatrician in attendance at the Princess Alice Adoption Home nearly made me his daughter but my bio mother wasn’t Jewish, so I was due to be transferred to the Orlando Children’s home when Dr Hertha de Villiers, decided to rather take me home as her daughter. In high school, discovering swastikas in family albums via her German extended family led me to rebel; Ann Frank, Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the Jewish popular canon providing me their perspectives. At the end of matric I was offered a trip overseas, and I chose to go to Israel because I wanted to be a socialist and this seemed a good way to experience it. That December I bought and wore my first keffiyeh without really clocking what it meant. Taking a bus from Jerusalem back to Kibbutz Maayan Baruch, a soldier sat next to me with his gun barrel pointed right at me. I remained oblivious.

I arrived at Rhodes University two months later, able to medaber ivrit like a Sabra. For the first few Friday evenings I would saunter down to Hillel House for a free Shabat dinner with my new friend Steven Markovitz, with whom I thrilled to the story of Isaac Deutscher, the Polish rabbi who ate a ham sandwich on the chief rabbi’s grave on Yom Kippur, and when nothing happened, became a Marxist atheist. The Non-Jewish Jew, a models of intellectual independence and integrity, like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. Steven co-founded the Encounters Documentary Film Festival, and screened Leila Khaled’s documentary in 2006, inviting her as a guest speaker. Partly because of Steven, since my late teens I’ve separated Zionism from Judaism. And my proximity makes me feel I have skin in the game – because so many white South African freedom fighters are and were of Jewish extraction, although most of them were secular Jews like Lesley. Ronnie Kasrils has been, until human frailty prevented, a powerful voice at Joburg Palestine protests since the October 2023. In the rich and detailed tome, Cutting through the Mountain: Interviews with South African Jewish Activists, edited by the poetImmanuel Suttner, we read the motivation for these stalwart anti-apartheid activists, and their deep humanism. But some of the questions asked reflect distinctly white anxieties of the interregnum. Suttner asks ANC activist Gill Marcus:

“A country where people are free enough of resentments and fears regarding the treatment of their sub-group to really believe an injury to one is an injury to all…it’s a nice vision. But the resentment and fear are there. For example, many Jews will say that nobody lifted a finger for ‘us’ when ‘we’ were being gassed and cremated. Even in 1973, when Israel was close to being wiped out by Syria and Egypt, the silence from so-called progressive organisations was deafening. So – goes the argument – why care about others who in the end will not care for you? … How do we persuade ourselves to move away from complacency and see the bigger picture?”

With Palestinians of all ages starving to death on our screens, or being bombed by drones, or experiencing amputation without anaesthetic, what does this person mean when they speak about “complacency”, and the “bigger picture”? Is there any bigger picture than this, and what it demands of those who actually have some agency? When ‘lifting a finger’ is nothing more than signing an online petition, is this enough? This moment is not only the pain of Palestinian suffering, but what we make of it – poesis initially means ‘making’ – that remains, as a record or a testament. How we respond to the suffering of others has been a moral watermark, as delicate and definite as Kishida’s aquarelle.  

My final haunting comes in the shape of the 2020 death of Myesha Jenkins, a poet and cultural icon who had left the United States in 1992 and made South Africa her home. Towards the end of August 2020, the pancreatic cancer which she had contracted two years before was reaching its climax. Allan Kolski Horwitz, the Marxist Jewish poet, playwright and publisher, came to see her as she lay dying. After hugging her, he sat quietly in a chair, tears running down his face, for half an hour. Myesha’s neighbour and friend, the hospice nurse, the poet, Myesha and I, breathing together in a room turned suddenly sharp-edged with the reality of what was going on. The time-honoured ritual enacted by the Jewish poet compassionately mirrored to all of us the undeniable reality that we would not be able to change, but could somehow make worthwhile, the weighing and recognition of the value of her life.

The poet Nida Younis eschews fantasies of revenge, and sings at the gate:

Like flamenco dancers,
I focus on where my feet are,
And like clouds,
I don’t know where I stand.

But we do. We have lost something irreplaceable, delicate, beautiful and complex. We will never have this moment again. There will be no other chances. We have not only lost, but we have also failed to take care of the very thing that makes us what we are. Anger will come, but sorrow, compassion, regret, always remain and are completely absent from grinning IDF soldiers, Zionist settlers, politicians who sell coal to Israel. To phelezela is to connect with the deepest wound in our collective self. When we stand down from our certainties, and attend the funeral of our compassion, perhaps only then will we know what we have lost.

And weep.

This article received advice and tweaks from Phelelani Makhanya, Anna-Pia Jordan-Bertinelli, and Stacy Hardy.