Book Review of Hoffman's My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness
Adina Hoffman writes in a gripping rich language and with a
charming poetic flare. Her avid documentary precision makes her
obvious love for the subject of her biographical account and for
his family, his surroundings and his people almost suspect, were
such evil thoughts not rendered meaningless by her fidelity to the
deeper nuances of Taha Muhammad Ali’s deceptively simple and
un-classical poetry.
Her penchant for linking his every word to the traumatic
events of his life and the lives of his fellow internally displaced
Saffuriyyans, stay-put Nazarenes and ethnically cleansed Galileans
gives special meaning to the book’s subtitle: “A Poet’s Life in the
Palestinian Century.” Her insistent delving into his private
thoughts, and more significantly into his private life, makes his
poetry almost as delectably meaningful read on the book’s English
language page as it is when heard in Arabic from Taha’s own mouth
and with his special delivery style and intonation in his now
hesitant raspy voice.
The cover of My Happiness bears No Relation to
Happiness gives the essence of the story inside: A dozen mug
shots of Taha’s strong-featured post-mature face, two of which
presumably overshadowed by the book’s title, all of which in
various contemplative and silent pensive poses, the deeply furrowed
face cupped and framed by his massive hand except for the very last
in which the poet finally opens his mouth and speaks with an
accusatory pointing of the finger. The autodidact Taha spent a
lifetime silently absorbing what went on around him and peacefully
resisting by earning a living for his family, resisting by
educating himself, resisting by occasionally expressing himself in
the local literary media, and resisting, above all, by honing his
uniquely original poetic skill as the voice of the Palestinian
fellah (peasant) from Saffuriyya whom we, his Palestinian
contemporaries, all know and identify with as our next-door
neighbor expelled from his home for no guilt of his own, and who
the world at large can appreciate for his lack of frills and
pretensions: a struggling refugee with a large heart and a measure
of guile and universality.
All of that and more I learned from Hoffman’s book, though I
have known Taha from as long ago as my teenage years. In the
mid-1950s, the years I attended high school, Taha was a permanent
fixture of the Nazareth landscape as one walked up from Sahit
El-Karajat –Square of the Garages- to the Church of the
Annunciation and the adjacent White Mosque or to the ancient souq.
Later when I returned to Nazareth as Deputy District Physician for
the Galilee I would always notice and greet him on my way to chat
with a friend, none other than his brother Faisal across the way.
Instead of being out hawking his souvenirs to the tourists, he sat
in the shade of the corrugated-iron canopy in front of his small
store or just inside it behind the glass vetrina. His impressive
Abe Lincoln-minus-the-beard facial features and his total
absorption in the books he constantly pored over added to the
impression that one was looking at a part of the shop’s display for
the benefit of the tourists. Until one asked about the price of an
item and Taha’s thick lips parted with a broad smile and his deep
raspy voice issued from his throat like a doomsday warning from a
prophet let loose in the hills of Palestine of old.
My own close relationship then was with his younger brother,
Faisal Essaffuri, the name we, his friends, called him, combining
his real first name – meaning “sword of justice” – and a reference
to Saffuryya, the formerly prosperous town north-west of Nazareth
from which his family was violently evicted during the Nakba, in
place of a surname. (The irony of this combination in light of the
powerlessness of my friend and his fellow uprooted Saffuriyyans to
remedy by force the injustice that befell them never dawned on me
before.) Faisal always looked rather pensive, quoted often from the
old masters of romantic Arabic poetry, and convoluted whatever
topic any of us brought up into an issue of existential
philosophical significance revolving around his Saffuriyya
childhood. Faisal had dropped out of school because of the family’s
limited means and opened another souvenir shop right across from
his older brother, Taha.
I allow myself the luxury of this piece of reminiscence to
make a point: There is little in it that is not covered in full by
Adina Hoffman’s account with the added advantage of a selection of
dated photographs. The Nazareth scene around Taha is further
fleshed out with a full accoutrement of family, friends, literary
contemporaries, those who frequented his literary salon of a
souvenir shop and others who did not, and the social and political
milieu of Nazareth, and that further afield encompassing people and
events all the way to his refugee childhood fiancé, Amira of
Saffuriyya and Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp. Yet Hoffman never loses
sight of her focus on her protagonist, Taha, obsessively arranging
all else around him in concentric and ever-widening circles of love
and understanding that shine through the pages of her book.
And yet it is all documented through orally recounted history
buttressed by ample archival references starting with Taha’s
childhood in Saffuriyya, through his community’s forced expulsion
to Lebanon, his family's adventuresome return to Galilee, first to
Reineh at the edge of their former fields and within sight of their
destroyed village and then to Nazareth, his lifelong
entrepreneurial spirit and acceptance of responsibility as the
breadwinner of his family as the first surviving son and
considering his father’s physical disability, his lifelong love of
literature and striving to learn through self instruction bordering
on self flagellation, his marriage to another loving Saffuriyya
refugee, building a home and raising a family and suffering the
death of a teenage grandchild, all the way to crystallizing a
private and unique poetic style and being discovered, translated
and celebrated at the far end of his rainbow of a life.
I feel particularly enriched by the author’s forays into the
literary lives of not only Taha Muhammad Ali but also his fellow
Palestinian contemporary poets. Those were also my contemporaries,
give or take a decade or two, and I knew several of them on a
first-name basis. In a manner of speaking, this book gave me, an
outsider to the field of literature, a welcome reintroduction to
those friends as literary luminaries, from Michel Haddad, a close
friend of my late teacher and writer brother, to Samih el-Qasim, a
fellow member of the Boy Scout troop that received Danny Kay in
Nazareth, to Nazareth’s forceful mayor and splendid poet, Tawfiq
Zayyad. Of course, I had read some of their works with varying
degrees of comprehension, appreciation and enthusiasm. But I never
really knew any of them closely as literary figures. Now I feel I
know all of them better, thanks to Adina Hoffman.
For example, I could never imagine anyone who didn't live in
Nazareth in the 1950s being able to grasp the intricacies of the
personality and mental anguish of such a character as Michel Haddad
till I read Hoffman’s account of his literary dabbling (for he
dabbled in many things as she mentions and more people probably
remember him for his radio program for amateur singers than for his
poetry). I find it simply astounding that a person who didn't see
or hear him daily could grasp his character so precisely.
Taha, as expected, is covered even more thoroughly and
sensitively. What is more he emerges not only as a Palestinian poet
but also as “another Palestinian” from an era and a place that the
author manages to un-camouflage for the uninformed, and, more
importantly, for the misinformed reader. And for that we all,
Palestinians, Israelis and all uninvolved others, owe her a
tremendous debt.
Hoffman’s recounting and acceptance of Taha’s remembered
version of events and her insistence on aligning such accounts with
recorded documents is far from an easy task given the highly oral
Palestinian narrative and the most incessant documentarian yet no
less skewed Israeli parallel narrative. Taha’s account of the
events of Saffuriyya’s Nakba, for example, supported by other
Saffuriyyans who lived through the horrific events brings her up
against the contrary version accepted in the Israeli narrative. The
contradiction is finally, and for the first time ever, resolved in
favor of Taha’s truth by Hoffman delving in the Israeli military
archives and discovering the previously unknown records of the air
raid that actually did take place despite the denial of no less a
trusted source than Dov Yarimya, the Hagana commander who entered
the abandoned village and who has since converted to pacifism and
renounced Zionism altogether. He himself had never known of the air
attack.
Hoffman’s tome is written as a contribution to the study of
Palestinian poetry and addresses the life of the poet as it shapes
his art. Her account is rich with bits and pieces of Taha’s poems
as illustrations, though at the end one is left with the feeling
that the account of the poet’s life is no more than an explanatory
note about the connived “simplicity,” directness, authenticity ,
splendor and infectious magic of his village-based universal
poetry. That much becomes clear as she signs off with his last poem
entitled Revenge (translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and
Gabriel Levin) in which he imagines rising above taking revenge in
a dual with his enemy,
the man who killed my father,
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country
because Taha discovers that his enemy is another human being
with family and friends. But even if this vile enemy were
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…
he would chose as his revenge only
to ignore him as I passed him by
on the street – as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
That done Adina and Taha go on a car ride to the fertile
fields of Saffuriyya to buy fruits and vegetables for a feast
celebrating the publication of his translated poems in the volume
So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005.