Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus"

This week's poem is Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus."

Last week I was thinking a lot about how I come to poems by Palestinian and Israeli poets with an expectation that I'll find traces of the conflict. If I don't find them, as in last week's poem, then I mark the silence. In Amichai's poem, this silence can be seen as privilege. But of course all poets write about many things; while it's safe to assume that a poet may speak to his/her own oppression or specific historical situation, it's not required. What's more, every trace of conflict in a Palestinian poet's poem may not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When reading Taha Muhammad Ali's poem, it seems safe to assume that those who refuse to leave are Palestinians. And this may be true. But there are interesting complicating factors. The poem's title, "Exodus," has a particularly Jewish cast to it, at least to me, Exodus being the name of the book of what most people think of as the great Jewish story in the Torah/Bible -- the story of Passover, the most important holiday in the Jewish year. (Probably most Jews will agree that Passover is most important; but not all. After all, two Jews, three opinions!) At the same time, the Biblical story of Exodus was a story of leaving, not of refusing to leave, not cleaving to the land. But then there's the interesting date at the end of the poem "5.11.1983." When I look up May 11, 1983, I don't see anything. Maybe this has personal rather than political significance. But when I look up November 5, 1983, inverting the month and day as people in the Middle East do (I remember this from when I lived for a short time in Cairo), I see that's the date when a truck loaded with explosives crashed through the entrance of an Israeli compound in Tyre, Lebanon, setting off a bomb, killing 39 people and injuring more. Muslim Jihad claimed responsibility. Israel responded by striking Palestinian targets on the Beirut-Damascus Highway. So if we bring the specifics of this particular set of events into our reading of the poem, as may be suggested by the date, then who is refusing to leave? Is it the Palestinians? Is it the Israelis?

I don't know. But the poem is bigger than these answers. Enjoy!