A Small Song for Despair
by Fadwa Tuqan
As found in Aisha Odeh’s second memoir, A Price for the Sun
Translated by Fatme Abdallah
While Aisha Odeh’s first memoir, Dreams of Freedom: Part One of the Prison Experience of a Palestinian Girl is concerned with the transitional phase of arrest, interrogation, and torture, Odeh’s second memoir, A Price for the Sun, negotiates both imprisonment itself and what it means to forge a life out of constant confinement. In one particularly resonant segment of this memoir, Odeh reflects on how an engagement with poetry found in Palestinian newspapers enabled the transformation of prison into a space of community both within and outside of the prison.
After reading an unnamed poem by Fadwa Tuqan, Odeh recalls that she “sensed a spirit of despair within her poem; I refused and thought, ‘we refuse despair despite our imprisonment, despite life sentences—so how dare the poetess Fadwa Tuqan emulate despair?’” Though she did not know Fadwa Tuqan’s address, she decided to pen her a letter of objection: someone as renowned as Fadwa Tuqan did not need an address. Sometime later, Odeh and the rest of the women in prison were pleasantly surprised to receive the following response from Fadwa, in the form of a short poem, “أغنية صغيرة لليأس,” dedicated to “the prisoner Aisha Odeh.” Though she was pleased by Tuqan’s response, Odeh was also “pinched by the dedication” (205) and poses the following question: “Aren’t we, Our Poetess, munadelat [freedom fighters] and aseerat [captives]? Have you missed the distinction?” Odeh’s argument is thus: by framing the women as “prisoners,” Fadwa Tuqan had unknowingly legitimized Israel’s tactics of mass incarceration, and Odeh, by her pointed epithet “Our Poetess,” is quick to opine that such linguistic slippages on Tuqan’s part are unacceptable and unforgivable. Despite this, “A Small Song for Despair” asserts a necessary element of struggle: it is human to despair, but with despair comes hope.
A Small Song for Despair
(dedicated to the “prisoner” Aisha Odeh)
Blessed is despair.
When it stretches, pulls, and grinds,
it jolts me
plants palm trees within me,
and plows the orchards of my soul.
There it steers the clouds
to rain over it;
And within my soul trees blossom,
And I know then that life remains a friend
And the moon,
Though it may stray, shall always find its way.
Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003) was an acclaimed poet and memoirist whose autobiography, A Mountainous Journey, was translated to English by
Fatme Abdallah (Fatima) is a PhD Candidate in Western University’s Department of English and Writing Studies. Her research interests encompass multiple aspects of postcolonial feminism, but currently centre on collective memory in Palestinian women’s prison writing. She was recently featured as one of London, Ontario’s emerging writers.
