Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet who has published several works of poetry, including ‘Hunter of Daffodils’, ‘Land of the Sad Passiflora’, ‘Verses The Poems Forgot With Me’, ‘Where is my Mom?’ and ‘A Letter From The Last Man’. His poems have won several awards and appeared worldwide in Arabic publications and translated into many languages.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Liam Carson, with Poetry Ireland and IMRAM, initiated a project with translations of more of Marwan’s poems into Irish, and a ‘Listen To The Birds’ tour of Ireland. These multilingual events blended Arabic, English, and Irish versions of his poems, with his English translator Raphael Cohen, and Irish poets Eibhlis Carcione, Liam De Paor and Aine Ni Fhoghlu. And I’m delighted to have two of these translations by Eibhlis Carcione for this episode.
‘That poem was written 10 years ago. It’s exactly the same details. The world just keeps quiet, you know. The war keeps repeating itself.’- Marwan Makhoul on ‘Portrait of Gaza’
Marwan reads ‘Portrait of Gaza’, ‘Verses The Poems Forgot About Me’ and ‘On The Train To Tel Aviv’, and Raphael reads the English translations.
We talk about many things, including why it’s so important that artists speak out about what’s happening right now, and how to prevent poetry from slipping into sloganeering while also engaging with political issues.
‘The artist through the creative process, they try and give a new image of the personal and the national…Politicians, they put makeup on the truth. Whereas the role of the artist is to wash away that makeup, and actually expose some kind of reality.’
Eibhlis Carcione is an award winning bilingual poet and children’s author. She’s published three poetry collections in Irish, Tonn Chlíodhna (2015), Eala Oíche (2019) and Bean Róin (2023) – published by Coiscéim. And won numerous awards for her poetry including Duais Fhoras na Gaeilge (Listowel Writer’s Week), Comórtas Filíochta Fhéile Raifterí and Comórtas Filíochta, Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, Belfast. Her debut children’s novel, ‘Welcome to the Dead Town, Raven McKay’ was published by Everything With Words in 2023.
Raphael Cohen grew up in South London. His father was born under Ottoman rule in Haifa. And after spending some time in Israel and Egypt, he was active in the London branch of the International Solidarity Movement and visited the West Bank and Gaza. In 2006, after being refused admission into Israel, he returned to Egypt. And there he worked for Dar Elias and also as a freelance translator, including, among many others, novels by Mona Prince and George Yaraq, poetry by Ahmed Morsi and Hala Mohamed, and recently, the non fiction book, ‘The Jewish Agency in Syria During the Arab Revolt in Palestine’, by Mahmoud Muhareb. He was also a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine, for which he first translated Marwan Makhoul.
Marwan Makhoul Transcript:
[00:00:00] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Hi, how are y’all doing? Hope you’re all keeping well and welcome back to this new season of Wander with me, Bairbre Flood, and with a massive thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their continued support.
[00:00:11] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks in Arabic – recites lines from his poem ‘Verses The Poems Forgot With Me’]
[00:00:14] RAPHAEL COHEN: In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds.
And in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.
MUSIC
[00:00:28] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet born in 1979 in a village in Upper Galilee to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He works in engineering as a managing director of a construction company and for his first play, This Isn’t Noah’s Ark, he won the Best Playwright award at the Acre Theatre Festival in 2009.
[00:00:51] He’s published several works of poetry, including Hunter of Daffodils, Land of the Sad Passiflora, Verses The Poems Forgot With Me. Where is my Mom? And A letter from the last man. His poetry has won several awards and appeared worldwide in Arabic publications and translated into many languages.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Liam Carson, with Poetry Ireland, initiated a project with translations of more of Marwan’s poems into Irish, and a tour of Ireland, including at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork World Book Festival, and a Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign event.
[00:01:46] These multilingual events blended Arabic, English, and Irish versions of his poems, with his English translator Raphael Cohen, and Irish poets. Eibhlis Carcione, Liam De Paor and Aine Ni Fhoghlu.
[00:01:56] I’m delighted to have some of these today for this episode, along with a great talk with Marwan and Raphael. We talk about many things, including why it’s so important that artists speak out about what’s happening right now, and how to prevent political poetry from slipping into sloganeering.
MUSIC
[00:02:12] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks in Arabic]
[00:02:19] RAPHAEL COHEN: Being true to yourself makes you closer to others. It makes you like other people. It makes you closer to other people. And at the same time, he’s also interested in difference. What makes things different about people.
MUSIC
[00:02:30] BAIRBRE FLOOD: But just before that, a little bit about Raphael Cohen. I think he’s got a very interesting background. He grew up in South London. His father was born under Ottoman rule in Haifa. And after spending some time in Israel and Egypt, he was active in the London branch of the International Solidarity Movement and visited the West Bank and Gaza.
[00:02:49] In 2006, after being refused admission into Israel, he returned to Egypt. And there he worked for Dar Elias, the renowned Egyptian publishers, and also as a freelance translator, including, among many others, novels by Mona Prince and George Yaraq, poetry by Ahmed Morsi and Hala Mohamed, and recently, the non fiction book, The Jewish Agency in Syria During the Arab Revolt in Palestine by Mahmoud Muhareb.
[00:03:17] He was also a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine, for which he first translated Marwan Makhoul.
This is Marwan Makhoul, with Raphael Cohen interpreting and reading, and Eibhlis Carcione with her translations into Irish a little bit later in the program.
MUSIC
I start off by asking Marwan why he thinks there’s such support for Palestinian autonomy from the Irish people?
MUSIC
[00:03:46] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:03:58] RAPHAEL COHEN: In terms of the relationship between the Palestinians and the and the Irish people, it’s a natural relationship which comes out of a shared experience of occupation. And even though occupation and racism itself can have different forms of – different faces – that ultimately it’s the same experience.
[00:04:18] And that’s led to a sympathy from the Irish people for Palestinians, for the Palestinian people. And the experience of oppression has brought out the Irish people’s humanity more strongly, hence the connection.
[00:04:35] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Do you think it’s very important or why do you think it’s important that artists especially are speaking out at this time?
[00:04:42] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:04:45] RAPHAEL COHEN: To raise world consciousness.
[00:04:49] The artist through the creative process, they try and they give a new image of the personal and the national. And there’s a contrast between the politician and the artist. And artist here obviously includes musicians and visual artists, not just literature. Unlike the politicians, politicians are, are not all, they don’t always speak truth.
[00:05:11] Whereas the artist is trying to represent truth. And what Marwan said is that politicians, they put makeup on the truth. Whereas the role of the artist is to wash away that makeup, and actually expose some kind of reality.
MUSIC
[00:05:26] Portrait of Gaza.
[00:05:28] MARWAN MAKHOUL:
[Recites ‘Portrait Of Gaza’ in Arabic.]
MUSIC
[00:06:28] MARWAN MAKHOUL: I think I wrote this poem before, I think 10 years. The same war.
[00:06:37] RAPHAEL COHEN: Yeah, no, and I read it again, and that’s exactly what I thought. Ten years ago.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
RAPHAEL COHEN: [00:06:44] That poem was written 10 years ago. It’s exactly the same details. The world just keeps quiet, you know.
The war keeps repeating itself.
[00:06:54] RAPHAEL COHEN:
Portrait of Gaza.
The bitter ruins of Gaza
sprouted the arm of a child.
It waved at God two days ago
but the heavens were overcast
as their symbolic resonance had been rented to jets
to render that hand,
pregnant with the phoenix
of the ashes, and so-called hope,
invisible.
Last night I convinced myself to sleep
and not watch television.
I saw beyond the imagination of one with wounded dreams:
The dogs in Rafah
were tasting pain.
Our wounded childhood
was begging a dog:
“Kill me,”
so feelings might have a reprieve from the jackboot.
Death, who sent you?
Who swept away the clouds of deepest winter, so their
vultures could be seen swooping down to the brink of life?
Death,
seek not the children,
depart.
They’ve gone on their own to the chilled compartments of the morgue.
All their loved ones are there, staying up late.
On the top level, their mother Hasna
dies hurriedly
to stake a place in the graveyard for her little ones.
Death, who recommended me?
Death …
How long have you been looking out for your children at school?
You know they’re not there.
Didn’t your amateur wildness tell you it’s a holy day?
Let me ask you …
Where are the prophets of old
to deliver the victims from the guileless bullet?
The house next door has no room for salvation…
By the God who made grief a joke
before my eyes,
and who made my assailant laugh at me,
I can see the unseeable.
Bewail the slaughtered my truce-seeking heart, and take note
of the calibre of the gun and the world’s silence.
Forget atonement,
time and again you have slaughtered me tolerantly
and howled at nothing.
The Gospels are meaningless not wiping away the tears of the wound
on the day the butcher endlessly flays my skin.[1] So I continue
in agony, the mystique having fallen away.
Merciful one, tell me
are you ignorant of the modern warmonger?
Do you equate the sword of tribesmen to the bomb?
By God, speak!
Has he who loves you won?
By God,
Answer!
MUSIC
[00:09:59] Eibhlis Carcione: [Speaks in Irish – recites her translation of ‘Portrait of Gaza’.]
MUSIC
[00:13:01] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Your poetry is very nuanced and very humane and very beautiful. How do you manage to not, you know, revert to slogans? When you’re talking about something that’s so highly political and can veer into that sloganeering. How do you do that in your writing?
[00:13:19] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:13:27] RAPHAEL COHEN: There are three things which Marwan emphasizes about being a poet.
[00:13:31] One is the fact that he’s trying to do something which is, which is art, which is creative, which is beautiful. And he said, that’s really, that’s the sacred duty of being a poet. Secondly, he has to be true to himself. Being true to yourself makes you closer to others. It makes you like other people. It makes you closer to other people.
[00:13:51] And at the same time, he’s also interested in difference. What makes things different about people and those three things. I mean, he’s trying all the time, trying to escape the idea of sloganising, of, you know, creating headlines, of creating that kind of, you know, language of the demonstration.
[00:14:13] And, you know, he’s living, he’s living the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian cause. And he’s a poet of that and not a poet of slogans.
[00:14:22] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Yeah, so it’s his, his lived experience that helps with that too?
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:14:28] RAPHAEL COHEN: I mean, yeah, the social conditions mean that there’s perhaps there is a demand from the audience. For that kind of material. And he says too, well, as a creative person, I’ve gotta be careful not always to listen to what the people want. I don’t wanna give them, kind of, slogans.
MUSIC
[00:14:48] BAIRBRE FLOOD: versus the poems forgot with me.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [In Arabic – Recites from ‘Verses The Poems Forgot With Me.’]
[00:14:50] RAPHAEL COHEN: The closest people are those. I love to ridicule. But never would. Maybe because I worry for them from the gloating of others.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:15:02] The whale thinks he’s so big, but in the sea, he’s tiny.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:15:08] Dear Sea, you really are great. You spit us out to our country. Whenever we drown in its love.
[00:15:19] Even so when the river commits suicide in the sea, the fish long for fresh water.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:15:29] The day we die, the death living within us.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:15:52] RAPHAEL COHEN: Because the shadow is truly faithful, when we are put in the grave, it no longer stands up, but sleeps next to us.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:15:59] My poems you too will inevitably die, but still I will write in the hope, albeit slim, that you will live after me.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:16:21] RAPHAEL COHEN: Enough, death says to the tyrannical, I’m full up.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:16:26] RAPHAEL COHEN: In every death, there is another life, but don’t let your ideas run away with you, Mr. Believer.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:16:35] RAPHAEL COHEN: What’s this obsession? I speak about death in all my poems, although it’s time will only really come in the final poem.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:16:44] RAPHAEL COHEN: To be a ’48 Palestinian means being the strangest citizen in the world. You beg all the world’s states to protect you from your state.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Recites.]
[00:16:59] RAPHAEL COHEN: Every cloud has a silver lining. In the light of the fire burning us, moths live at night.
MUSIC
[00:17:08] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Apart from writing for a Palestinian audience and for an audience that’s sympathetic, but how also do you present things that people don’t want to face? They don’t want to look at these issues. They don’t want to be uncomfortable, whether it’s what’s going on at the moment or what’s been going on for decades now.
[00:17:26] So, how would you advise other writers that are writing about issues that maybe the majority of people or a lot of people don’t want to look at? For example, writing about war and colonialism.
[00:17:39] RAPHAEL COHEN: Marwan says that actually it’s important to be organic, to be spontaneous, and it’s impossible to really have a program whereby you’re going to produce work which is about a particular issue. And I mean, he said, he says, for example, you know, you could write about love in the time of war, but you don’t know, and you don’t necessarily need a message.
[00:18:03] You know, he’s used the Arabic term, multazim which means ‘committed’, so ‘committed to a political cause’. And he says that the artist who’s multazim, I mean, they’re veering off into the world of politics and away from their – away from their creative art. There’s a tension between being creative and being committed.
[00:18:21] And as the Lebanese poet Ounsi el-Hajj said, you know, creativity is breaking all taboos. And commitment is kind of a linear process. Whereas creativity, it’s like this…
[00:18:32] BAIRBRE FLOOD: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
FYI, Raphael was waving his hands from side to side at this point, demonstrating to me.
[00:18:40] RAPHAEL COHEN: So creativity meanders, I think, because you can’t see me!
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:18:44] RAPHAEL COHEN: He says he’s got sympathy for the, for people who have to listen to us. I told him he loves the sound of his own voice! [laughts]
MUSIC
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic – Recites his poem ‘On the Tel Aviv Train’]
MUSIC
[00:18:49] On the train to Tel Aviv
I saw her…
a Russian signifying the essence of mint.
She had all of Moscow in her hand
and a child
who seemed Middle Eastern.
In the same carriage, an Ethiopian
stared at the faces of the passengers
stared until he grew bored of them
then looked out of the window
at a ruined Arab village that held no interest.
A worker and recent immigrant sat
lively, since he would shortly get off the train
for his shift at a factory
that had just laid him off.
To my right sat a Jew from Morocco
who told me his woes
until he twigged to my accent.
He kept on talking, but
with the person to his right.
I got off at the next station
because the poem terminated.
MUSIC
[00:19:51] Eibhlis Carcione:
MUSIC
[00:20:47] MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:20:51] RAPHAEL COHEN: A poet who’s working in the conditions which are created by events, I mean, there are good and bad things about it. The good thing is that your work becomes known simply because of the context it’s coming out of. At the same time, he doesn’t want his readership to be sympathetic because of his conditions.
[00:21:06] He’s interested in them relating to his work as something beyond the immediate conditions.
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [Speaks In Arabic]
[00:21:12] RAPHAEL COHEN: So Marwan is saying that it’s painful for him that it has to be like war and disaster for people to, for people to like communicate with each other, to be in contact with each other, to have, to have sympathy with each other. He hopes that the next time that we have that we meet, it’s less, you know, in circumstances less painful and less sad.
MUSIC
MARWAN MAKHOUL: [In Arabic – Recites ‘Verses The Poems Forgot With Me’ – with Raphael Cohen translating after each piece.]
RAPHAEL COHEN: The problem of man. The justice he sees others don’t see, and vice versa.
[00:21:49] Salafism – a beautiful idea, but terrible when adopted by fools.
[00:21:55] Apologies Ziad Rahbani, hunger isn’t a kaffir. Hunger is creative.
[00:22:02] Despite the sun’s action on the skin, the beggar’s hand stays pure white.
[00:22:09] In the past we opened the gates of Syria to gypsies. Let them return the favor and open their country to us now we are migrant gypsies.
[00:22:22] A black crow in the snow is more beautiful than every dove of peace in the speeches of politicians.
[00:22:31] The flu has benefits including gaining the sympathy and concern of your family.
[00:22:38] Excuse me, water. When I pour you in a glass, I don’t mean to trap you. In fact, I’m just like you. I want to live.
[00:22:58] Why do we fear weapons that do nothing without us?
[00:23:14] Sectarian, whenever the cross around your neck gets bigger, it gets smaller inside you. Same with the crescent.
[00:23:31] We may not change the world with what we write, but we may shame it.
[00:23:38] They partitioned my homeland into two states and it immigrated.
[00:23:44] Hyenas don’t assassinate hyenas, O, mankind.
[00:23:51] On board a boat in a gale. We strike the waves with the oars so they calm down.
[00:24:00] After a long absence, I see you and shed tears. Like after a long night, the sun rises and the ice sweeps.
[00:24:14] Even if Westerners really robbed Easterners, they would not be able to plunder the sight of the sun shining.
[00:24:34] Only before you, we aren’t ashamed to take off our clothes, O God.
[00:24:51] In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.
MUSIC
[00:25:04] BAIRBRE FLOOD: A huge thanks to Marwan Makhoul. It really was such an honour to talk to him and to listen to his beautiful poetry. A massive shukran. Walla shukran jazeelan. And to Raphael Cohen for his very patient interpreting and his soulful readings of Marwan’s poems.
And of course to Eibhlis Carcione, who I should say as well is an award winning bilingual poet and children’s author.
[00:25:31] She’s published three poetry collections in Irish, Tónn Clíona, Éile Aíche and Bean Rón. And her debut children’s novel, ‘Welcome to the Dead Town, Raven McKay’ was published last year.
[00:25:53] And thanks also to Anne-Marie Ní Churreáin for bringing Marwan to Ireland. For the connections and multilingual pathways that have opened up and for the continued spotlight on the struggle for Palestinian autonomy.
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their continuing support, and thank you all for listening.
[00:26:11] Next week, I have the fantastic Cork based South African poet, Neo Gilson, so see you all next episode. From me, Bairbre Flood, bye for now.
Listen to episode RIP Saleem Al Naffar Palestinian poet – one of the thirteen Palestinian poets killed by Israeli strikes in 2023/24.
