TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI, POET

“A Palestinian Muslim whose own village, Saffuriyya, was obliterated by Israel in 1948 ... and who has managed to distill from that devastating experience not slogans, not hatred, but art of the highest order.” —The Boston Globe

A charismatic personality and a writer of remarkable gifts, Taha Muhammad Ali has lived through the many stages of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and his poetry and fiction emerge directly from the crucible of that tragedy. He is the author of four books of poetry in Arabic and a book of short stories. So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was published in September of 2006 by Copper Canyon Press.

One of the leading poets on the contemporary Palestinian scene, Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, he was forced to flee to Lebanon, together with most of the inhabitants of his village.  A year later he slipped across the border with his family and, finding his village destroyed, settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. The Saffuriyya of his childhood has served as the nexus of his work, which is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a story-teller’s vivid imagination. A self-educated poet, in his youth he spent nights studying classical Arabic poetry, as well as the works of American and European poets, while he supported himself (and still does) by selling souvenirs from his shop near Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation.

Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and unflinching, at times painful, honest—the poetry’s apparent simplicity and homespun truths concealing the subtle grafting of classical Arabic and colloquial forms of expression. His poetry opens a window onto the Palestinian experience, allowing us to see the lives of people just like ourselves, navigating through ongoing suffering with dignity and perseverance. What emerges is a poetry that translator Peter Cole describes as “radically human.” In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, in Europe, and in the US audiences have been powerfully moved by Taha Muhammad Ali’s poems of political complexity and humanity.

Link to Taha reading his unpublished poem, Revenge, at the Dodge Poery Festival, September 2006, for which he received the only standing ovation of the festival.