There is no room for Palestinian creativity in Lebanon because Palestinians are refugees! Quiet terrifying, isn’t it? It is the sad reality, however. This is the price that Palestinians pay every day because they decided to reside in Lebanon and escape inevitable death in Palestine. Nevertheless, Palestinians were able to cope with daily challenges, assimilate to new cultures, thrive, and persist. This article presents a brief analysis of Mazen Maarouf’s representative works. A young Palestinian poet who lived in Lebanon, Mazen defied and resisted oppression, inequity, and injustice through literary work. In Lebanon, the most religiously and culturally diverse nation in the Arab world, Palestinians are second-class residents who are not entitled …show more content…
In this poem, Mazen depicts himself as a bird and describes his immediate community as a cage that restricts his freedom. He points out that people do not recognize that they are imprisoned by their own belief system. In this poem Mazen, did not lose hope that someday a stranger will liberate his inner soul and set him free. In his poem Downtown, Mazen wrote: My portion of sleep is four hours and eleven minutes. I roll my pierced heart on the bedcover. It barges into the door leaving a line of mud behind. I believe that a tree will arrive one night to stand beside the line. A second tree will follow a third a fourth a ninth . . . etc. One night the line will grow bigger becoming a street. One night friends will flow out of my head while I sleep. They will come on the street take a nap under the trees. And I will wake up one night afraid of solitude and follow them (Maarouf, 2012, ¶ …show more content…
He implies that his people live in terrible conditions that degenerate life and degrade one’s body and soul. He views heaven as the promised savior that will uplift their souls, take away their sins, end their loneliness, overcome self-imposed limitations, and eliminate community-imposed restrictions. Finally, in his poem Solitary Confinement on the Seventh Floor, Mazen wrote: One day, I’ll tear off my lips and eat them like candy. One day, I’ll rip out my chest because I’m not an orphanage for gathering angels. One day, I’ll remove the door and stand in its stead to stop myself from leaving for the hole in the world (Maarouf, 2015, ¶ 1). In this poem, Mazen implies that happiness is the product of misery. Also, he expresses his discontent with the unjust circumstances that forced him to leave his memories behind. At the end of the poem, Mazen explains that all places are terrifying except home, and therefore makes a promise that he will return back to his home and never leave again to what he describes as “the hole in the
Naomi Nye was born to a German-American mother and a Palestinian-American father. However, she normally writes from her Palestinian-Arab perspective. In several of her poems within The Heath Anthology—“Ducks,” “My Father and the Figtree,” and “Where the Soft Air Lives”—Naomi Nye reminisces about her Muslim heritage and childhood as it correlates to her present identity. In addition, she incorporates the effect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on herself and on Arab culture in her work. Ultimately, Naomi Nye’s poetic work should remain in The Heath Anthology as her style demonstrates how historical events and a deep-rooted heritage can enrich a sense of identity and culture.
Elias Chocour’s novel, Blood Brothers, represents his point of view on the contemporary Palestinian position regarding the holy land of Israel. The book traces the transformation of Chocour’s life, from a Melkite Christian Palestinian boy into a powerful spiritual leader and innovative agent in facilitating better race relations in the region. He shows how Palestinian’ needs were left out during the formation of the State of Israel, and how their plight is highly misunderstood, and often grossly distorted because of ignorance. Chocour’s depiction of the problem facing non-Jews is highly illuminating, and Blood Brothers will dispel many illusions and fallacies that cloud the facts surrounding the status of Israel’s inhabitants.
Joyce, James. “Araby”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 427 - 431.
... freedom in the dream, but in the real world, he was still deaf, unloquacious, lonely and being a social outcast. While he realized the truth, he became furious and chopped the necks of pine trees. The pine trees represent the people around Jamie. Jamie wanted to kill them because he thought they were mocking him, because he is deaf. The last line of the poem shows Jamie’s anger and frustration in being deaf.
Most people think Israel always belonged to the Jews but it wasn’t always a safe, holy place where Jews could roam freely. Along with Palestine, it was actually forcefully taken from the Arabs who originated there. The main purpose of this novel is to inform an audience about the conflicts that Arabs and Jews faced. Tolan’s sources are mainly from interviews, documentations and observations. He uses all this information to get his point across, and all the quotes he uses is relevant to his points. The author uses both sides to create a non-biased look at the facts at hand. The novel starts in the year 1967 when Bashir Al-Khairi and his cousins venture to their childhood home in Ramallah. After being forced out of their homes by Jewish Zionists and sent to refuge for twenty years. Bashir arrives at his home to find a Jewish woman named Dalia Eshkenazi. She invites them into her home and later the...
This marked the beginning of the Palestine armed conflict, one of its kinds to be witnessed in centuries since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War 1. Characterized by a chronology of endless confrontations, this conflict has since affected not only the Middle East relations, but also the gl...
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian.” Stated former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir after three fourths of one million Palestinians had been made refugees, over five hundred towns and cities had been obliterated, and a new regional map was drawn. Every vestige of the Palestinian culture was to be erased. Resolution 181, adopted in 1947 by the United Nations declared the end of British rule over Palestine (the region between the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River) and it divided the area into two parts; a state for the Jewish and one for the Arab people, Palestine. While Israel was given statehood, Palestine was not. Since 1947, one of the most controversial issues in the Middle East, and of course the world, is the question of a Palestinian state. Because of what seems a simple question, there have been regional wars among Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, terrorist attacks that happen, sometimes daily, displacement of families from their homes, and growing numbers of people living in poverty. Granting Palestinian statehood would significantly reduce, or alleviate, tensions in the Middle East by defining, once and for all, the area that should be Palestine and eliminating the bloodshed and battles that has been going on for many years over this land.
Joyce, James. “Araby.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Eighth Edition. Eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W.Norton.
Feelings of isolated darkness are something everyone is acquainted with sometime in their life, no matter how drastic the situation is, everyone experiences dark struggles. In the poem, “Acquainted With the Night,” Robert Frost illuminates how difficult, lonely hardships affects people. In “Acquainted With the Night,” a man, or the speaker, is on a night walk, pondering his life. Everywhere he walks, he feels disclosed from everything and everyone around him. The speaker in “Acquainted With the Night,” is an average person describing his personal numerous miseries. Because of these hardships, he feels lonely and detached from his life, yet he knows that time must go on and he must carry his struggles with him. During his walk, the speaker
Critics have already begun a heated debate over the success of the book that has addressed both its strengths and weaknesses. The debate may rage for a few years but it will eventually fizzle out as the success of the novel sustains. The characters, plot, emotional appeal, and easily relatable situations are too strong for this book to crumble. The internal characteristics have provided a strong base to withstand the petty attacks on underdeveloped metaphors and transparent descriptions. The novel does not need confrontations with the Middle East to remain a staple in modern reading, it can hold its own based on its life lessons that anyone can use.
The graphic novel Palestine written by Joe Sacco is a trustworthy description of different stories in the heart of the century-long conflict between Arabs and Israeli. Sacco produced the graphic novel after spending two months with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in late 1991 and early 1992. Things certainly have changed since thenThe story is all about what happened in that part of the Middle East at the beginning of the 1990s. In this respect, a critical viewpoint should be applied in order to discuss the main topics in detail. Thus, Palestine is actually a guide for a Westerner willing to know what occurs in the Middle East each time the conflict between Israeli and Palestinians takes place.Excellent contemporary graphic novel. The characters convincingly portrayed. Sacco has a journalist eye and a storyteller’s heart.
The beat-up Arab minivan slowed tentatively under the scrutinizing gaze of the Israeli soldier on duty. The routine was simple. About halfway between Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, the West Bank commercial center, the driver, blaring Arabic music on his radio, maneuvered around the dusty slabs of concrete that composed the Beit Haninah Checkpoint. He waited for a once-over by the Hebrew-speaking 18-year-old and permission to continue. Checkpoints-usually just small tin huts with a prominent white and blue Israeli flag-have become an integral and accepted part of Palestinian existence under Israeli occupation. But for me, a silent passenger in the minivan, each time we entered the no man's land between Israeli territory and the West Bank, my hea...
Joyce, James. "Araby." 1914. Literature and Ourselves. Henderson, Gloria, ed. Boston, Longman Press. 2009. 984-988.
In 2005, the Palestinian director and writer, Hany Abu-Assad, released his award winning motion picture, “Paradise Now.” The film follows two Palestinian friends, over a period of two days, who are chosen by an extremist terrorist group to carry out a suicide mission in Tel-Aviv during the 2004 Intifada. The mission: to detonate a bomb strapped to their stomachs in the city. Because the film industry seldom portrays terrorists as people capable of having any sort of humanity, you would think the director of “Paradise Now” would also depict the two main characters as heartless fiends. Instead he makes an attempt to humanize the protagonists, Khaled and Said, by providing us with a glimpse into their psyches from the time they discover they’ve been recruited for a suicide bombing operation to the very last moments before Said executes the mission. The film explores how resistance, to the Israeli occupation, has taken on an identity characterized by violence, bloodshed, and revenge in Palestinian territories. Khaled and Said buy into the widely taught belief that acts of brutality against the Israeli people is the only tactic left that Palestinians have to combat the occupation. In an effort to expose the falsity of this belief, Hany Abu-Assad introduces a westernized character named Suha who plays the voice of reason and opposition. As a pacifist, she suggests a more peaceful alternative to using violence as a means to an end. Through the film “Paradise Now,” Abu-Assad not only puts a face on suicide bombers but also shows how the struggle for justice and equality must be nonviolent in order to make any significant headway in ending the cycle of oppression between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Although “Araby” is a fairly short story, author James Joyce does a remarkable job of discussing some very deep issues within it. On the surface it appears to be a story of a boy's trip to the market to get a gift for the girl he has a crush on. Yet deeper down it is about a lonely boy who makes a pilgrimage to an eastern-styled bazaar in hopes that it will somehow alleviate his miserable life. James Joyce’s uses the boy in “Araby” to expose a story of isolation and lack of control. These themes of alienation and control are ultimately linked because it will be seen that the source of the boy's emotional distance is his lack of control over his life.