Connotations of Home in Contemporary Palestinian Poetry – ʿAbd Allāh ʿĪsā’s Texts as an Example

Summary

The notion of “home” in modern Palestinian poetry has special implications, expressing the peculiar situation of the Palestinian people scattered in the cities and villages of the Occupied Territories, and in the diaspora camps where millions of Palestinian refugees live, after they were expelled from their homes in 1948 and then in 1976. ʿAbd Allāh ʿĪsā belongs to a family that lived in the Galilee region, and was forced to seek refuge in Syria in the course of the 1947–1949 Palestine war and the establishment of the State of Israel. Perhaps that is why this Palestinian poet, born in 1964 in Babbīlā near the Yarmūk refugee camp in Damascus, attaches so much importance to the home, which is mentioned in most of his poems. ʿAbd Allāh ʿĪsā, who holds a PhD in arts from Moscow University – is a poet, journalist, political analyst, film producer, and winner of several literary awards. He worked as an editor for cultural affairs at Voice of Russia radio (broadcasting in Arabic) since the early 1990s, and then as the director of the Arab News Agency. In 2015, he became the First Secretary of the Embassy of Palestine in the Russian Federation and received the highest award of the State of Palestine for “Achievement in Culture, Art and Science – The Degree of the Creator.”

It can be said that in ʿAbd Allāh ʿIsā’s poetry, the word bayt (home/ house) and its synonyms have significant semantic meanings due to their different symbolic, historical and socio-cultural connotations. ʿĪsā not only repeats the word bayt and its synonyms (manzil, dār), but also lists words that are associated with it – such as, a fence around a house, a garden, a well, and the like. Moreover, these expressions appear in different linguistic and rhetorical contexts, creating meditative meanings, including multiple perceptions of the home in various forms – such as: family home, homeland and sacred places, and so forth. Since most of ʿĪsā’s texts contain words associated with home, this study will be limited to analysing poems published in three collections of poetry, namely: Qiyāmat al-aswār (The Resurrection of the Walls), Ruʿāt as-samāʾ, ruʿāt ad-diflā (Shepherds of Heaven, Shepherds of Oleander) and Waṣāyā Fawziyya al-Ḥasan al-ʿašr (The Ten Commandments of Fawziyya al-Ḥasan).