By Filippomaria Pontani

In 1878, at the mouth of the River Tyne in South Shields near Newcastle (just a few kilometers north of The Old Oak pub, which in Ken Loach’s film of the same name becomes the setting for the cultural clash between the dwindling inhabitants of a declining mining suburb and a group of Syrian refugees in 2013), an ancient funerary plaque from the third century AD was discovered. It bore an inscription in a mixture of Latin and Palmyrene Aramaic, commemorating a man who had been freed from slavery.

This story of intercultural love would have fascinated a poet: it was a Damascus-born poet living in London, Nouri Al-Jarrah, who took up the theme in his reflections on the relationship between Syria and the Mediterranean. In his work A Boat for Lesbos (L’Arcolaio, 2018), he revisits the idea of Syrians as people born not on boats, but in the foam of the sea—pure gold transformed, fused, and infused with a deep fragrance.

Two years later, in Exodus from the Abyss of the Mediterranean (Le Monnier, 2023), the exiled Al-Jarrah returns to Italy with The Stone Serpent, a delicate poetic collection translated by Gassid Mohammed.

In his Elegy for Regina, the exiled poet Barate retraces his life: his perilous arrival on English shores, the archers of Palmyra guarding Hadrian’s Wall, the melting pot of people and goods in the heart of Britain, the memories of Queen Boudicca’s anti-Roman revolt, and the establishment of a Syrian dynasty on the imperial throne (Septimius Severus and Julia Domna). All of this unfolds against the backdrop of his love for Regina, tragically cut short by death. Here, the dark-skinned Middle Eastern foreigner and the fair native woman in chains reverse the weight of civilization, while nostalgia, fog, and humanity take center stage.

The gods shift and transform—Atargatis becomes Ishtar, then Aphrodite, Zeus turns to Baal, then to Odin—in a syncretism that today’s Europe seems increasingly unwilling to acknowledge.

In the appendix, poems like The Elegy of Antinous and The Edict of Caracalla echo the spirit of Cavafy, listing the various nations present and the unease of “barbarian” citizens before symbols of power. However, Al-Jarrah’s refined historical references are lighter than the grandiose allusions of Adonis or Nizar Qabbani. His work is softened by notes of tender nostalgia, a memory both personal and collective.

Another exile, another voice from Syria: Widad Nabi, a young Kurdish woman from Kobane, fled to Germany in 2015 after a dramatic escape.

TWO POEMS

Nouri Al-Jarrah, from Elegy of Barate to His Beloved Regina

The cloud-bearer guided my steps

From the blue of summer to the dark winter.

The daughters of dew, the maidens of mist,

Who once laid Baal in my fields,

Have now left me here, disoriented.

The sky prepared for the first rains,

The stars made the artemisia bloom,

Filling the air with its fragrance.

I led you to the source of the two rivers,

Made you wander in the sun of my days.

Why did you accept my vows,

Only to later allow the earth

To take from me the last thing

A stranger can ever possess in this world?

***

Widad Nabi, from Scenes of Imperfect Happiness

I will always sound like a sad woman

As I race like an untamed horse toward love

Clutching my empty hands.

A sad woman

Who weaves out of nothing

The omens of a house

Built from an ancient lament.

I will always sound like a sad woman,

No matter how my photographs hanging on the walls

May appear to be those of a woman

From a happy land.

A woman in a colorful dress

Worn for twenty years,

And a war from whose pockets

Spills the salt of the Aegean—

That salt that settled in her body

When she boarded the boats of death.

That salt embedded in the gaze

Of her empty eyes—

The gaze of someone

Who gave everything to death!

Just to survive.

Widad Nabi fled the dark abyss of war but refuses to be confined by the stereotype of the “refugee poet,” a label often used to marginalize literary work of this nature. She chooses to write in her fragmented, foreign-acquired German, seeking to escape easy classifications. Her poetry, infused with the scents of a lost homeland—the city, the minaret, the Kurdish landscape—transcends mere nostalgia.

As Aleppo and Berlin merge in her consciousness, and her last name (“prophet” in Arabic) evokes an interplay between “kiss” (qubla) and “prayer direction” (qibla), Nabi embraces a direct and determined style, avoiding obscurity. Her work, though deeply rooted in personal trauma, aspires to a universal dimension.

Read: The Exiled Memories

_____________

Courtesy: The Silk Road Today, Cairo, Egypt 

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Ana S. Gad

Sheikh Mohamed Belkhair (1830–1898) stands as one of Algeria’s most renowned folk poets, celebrated for his profound contributions to Algerian resistance poetry during the French colonial era. His life and work epitomize the spirit of resilience, cultural identity, and defiance against oppression. Born in Wadi Al-Maleh, near Ain Temouchent, his life mirrored the tumultuous history of Algeria, beginning with the French occupation in 1830.

Early Life and Cultural Influences

Belkhair hailed from the Rizeigat tribe, a nomadic community known for its horsemanship, poetry, and love of freedom. Growing up in the rugged landscapes of eastern El Bayadh, he imbibed the values of generosity, loyalty, and perseverance that became hallmarks of his character and poetry. His upbringing in a nomadic environment shaped his poetic voice, infusing it with vivid imagery of the desert and its people.

Emergence of a Poetic Talent

By the age of 20, Belkhair’s poetic talent had blossomed. His early works praised religious figures, particularly Sidi Al-Sheikh, the founder of the Sheikhiyya method, which was rooted in the Shadhili Sufi order. His verses celebrated monotheism, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and the beauty of the Bedouin way of life, marked by dignity and chastity.

Belkhair’s exposure to the poetic traditions of Tlemcen further refined his craft. He drew inspiration from renowned poets such as Ibn Masayeb, Ben Triki, and Al-Akhdar Ben Khalouf. These influences merged with his unique voice, making him a prominent figure in Algerian folk poetry.

A Voice of Resistance

Sheikh Mohamed Belkhair’s poetry transcended personal expression, becoming a powerful tool of resistance. During the Revolution of Ouled Sidi Sheikh in 1864, he joined the ranks of revolutionaries fighting French colonial rule. His poems celebrated the courage and sacrifices of the revolutionaries, serving as a unifying force and a means of communication among the resistance.

Belkhair’s unwavering defiance of French colonialism continued even after the signing of the Brezina Peace Treaty in 1883. His refusal to accept truces led to his exile to the island of Corsica in 1887. This forced separation from his homeland did not silence him; instead, it deepened his resolve.

“Slak Erased From the Wasteland”: A Poem of Exile

While in exile, Belkhair composed some of his most poignant works, including the iconic poem Slak Erased from the Wasteland. This poem encapsulates the anguish of exile, the yearning for freedom, and unwavering faith in divine justice. It resonated deeply with the Algerian people, becoming a symbol of their collective struggle against colonial oppression.

The poem gained immense popularity, spreading through oral tradition and later being sung by Bedouin sheikhs and artists. It found new life in the 1970s with the rise of Rai music, as artists like Cheb Khaled, Houari Benchenat, and Guider Ben Said brought it to contemporary audiences. Its enduring relevance underscores its universal themes of resistance, faith, and hope.

Legacy

Sheikh Mohamed Belkhair passed away in 1898, but his legacy lives on. His poetry is not only a testament to his artistic genius but also a historical record of Algeria’s resistance against colonialism. His works continue to inspire Algerians and remind the world of the enduring power of words in the fight for freedom and justice.

Belkhair’s life and poetry exemplify the unyielding spirit of a nation and the timeless role of art in shaping cultural identity and resistance. Through his verses, he remains a symbol of resilience, faith, and the quest for liberty.

Read – ALGERIA: ECHOES OF A MILLION MARTYRS

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Ana S. Gad is a pen name of the Dubai-based, internationally acclaimed and multi-awarded-winning Serbian writer, researcher, media professional, digital artist and humanitarian ambassador Dr. Ana Stjelja. She has published more than 30 books across various literary genres and languages.

Courtesy: Enheduana

The post Sheikh Mohamed Belkhair: A Poet of Resistance and Exile first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Virginia. Fernández Collado

I

Tebrae by Malian poet, philosopher and historian Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, who is exiled in Spain, has just been published by the Editorial Libros del Aire in Spanish, with a preface by the poet and journalist José Manuel Suarez. Tebrae contains 1203 poems, in addition to the preface, it has a prelude by the poet, followed at the end of the book by a glossary, a thematic index and a chronology, which is necessary to understand the life and work of the author. In this work, Ismaël D. Haïdara likens his philosophy of life and his poetic to that of Japanese Ikkyu whose work has about 1056 poems, and the poet E. Dickinson whose complete poetry is made up of 1789 poems. Tebrae represents not the work of a lifetime but of ten years of writing in exile, from 2011 to 2021.

The library of the Kati Fund, was reunified in 2002 by Ismael Diadié Haidara. It is made up of manuscripts from the imperial collection of the Askia, his maternal family, and those of his paternal family, brought by his ancestors, the poets Es-Sahili and Ali b. Ziyad al-Quti de Toledo.

After the reunifying of the library Ismael Diadié Haidara stripped off his possessions and retired to his parents’ land in Kirchamba, on the banks of the Niger River. Here he managed to have a hut and an orchard where he lead a life of voluntary simplicity.

In 2012, the war waged by Islamists and independence fighters against the Malian state drove him out of that retirement. Since then he has led a wandering life. In his wanderings through various towns and cities, he has written these short poems called Tebrae – in his land of birth, – leaving the French language for the Castilian of his ancestors and adopting the name Lélé.  The name his mother and childhood friends called him.

II

If the five-line tanka have their poet in Takuboku, the four-line quartets in Khayyam, their great creator, and the three-line haikus in Bashô, their most representative poet, then we can say without exaggeration that the tebrae, two-line poems, the most brief so far, have their creator in Ismael, he gives us a new genre in short poetry whose roots are the songs of the African women of the Sahara.

Ismael’s maternal ancestor, Es-Sahili al-Gharnati, is the creator of the so-called sahiliyya in Arabic poetry. According to Basanta, in a poem of 118 lines, written from al-Tugramiyya or Lamiyyat al-`ajam of the secretary of the Seljuks of Mosul, alchemist and poet, Mu ‘helps al-Din al- Isfahani al-Tugra ‘i (d. 1121).  Basanta says: “This famous composition, then, written by our teacher, extends over 59 verses, and the method followed by Abu Ishaq to comment on it consisted in adding a second hemistich to each of the first verses of al-Tugrâ ´î (ta`yiz), and a first hemistich to each of the seconds (tasdir), converting each verse of two hemistichs into a quartet and, therefore, doubling the total number of verses of the original poem.”. Following the steps of his ancestor, Ismael revolutionizes the theory by giving us the Ismaelian theory.

Tebrae are love poems made and sung by women. At night, on the dunes or around tea, African women meet and sing these tebrae.

According to the Mauritanian scholar Ahmed Bâba Miské in his work Al Wasît the tebrae (singular tebria) are poetic compositions of two verses that rhyme together and have the same meters. In “Hassaâni love poetry is exclusive to women: ət-təbṛāˁ, Ahmed Salim Ould Mohamed Baba indicates that “From the formal point of view, ət-təbṛāˁ is composed of a single gāf (of two hemistichs), in which they are expressed very “condensed” love feelings using a tropological style, with abundant metaphors, similes, metonymies.”

Tebrae are love poems made and sung by women. At night, on the dunes or around tea, African women meet and sing these tebrae. One composes a tebria and the other answers with another tebria. In general, Aline Tauzin says, they take the first verse of a classic poem and compose a second verse, creating a small universe between the two verses. They are an exclusively feminine genre of poetry, sometimes, as A. B. Miske has pointed out, lovers have been able to dialogue, composing tebrae, forced to give the maximum meaning in just two verses. The theory always leads to expressing the maximum with the minimum of resources. There is a certain parallelism between these brief compositions and certain minimal pieces (some of them the thickness and size of a pin) made by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti in the 1940’s and 1950’s who said: “I do it to enlarge the space.” This way of seeing the universe from the small is the same, from my point of view, as what happens with the composition of the tebria. For example, in this one cited by A. B. Miske:

Man-darti kân, man-darti kân:

Ragg-elmahshar, vîh assebyân

Who will tell me, who will tell me

If we will love each other in paradise?

III

As I point out in the introduction to the anthology that I edited: ‘Woman, world and death’ feminine poetry existed in different places and at different times. In the Heian era (10th century) in Japan some classes of the nobility, instead of writing letters, wrote wakas, which means poem in Japanese. There was a whole typology of poems that were included in what were called wakas; one of them is the tanka, or short poem. It is a poetic composition similar to haiku, but a little longer. If two friends missed each other, they always wrote a tanka with figures of nature as a metaphor for the emotion or feeling they were going through. Not only lovers, they could be two friends, but also when a man spent the night with a woman the next day from his bachelor house or from his workplace, he had to write a tanka to her. If she answered, it was a sign that the relationship could continue. The wakas had to be written in kana, literally the writing of the emotions.

The women banished by their sex and formation of the study of the kanji (literary vehicle proper to an exclusive academic status of men) used the kana as a sanctuary and literary medium of expression of the emotions of the heart. So associated was this type of writing with women that a Ki no Tsurayuki writer pretended to be a woman in 935 to write his Tosa nikki in Kana, in which he expressed grief for his dead daughter . This anecdote is reminiscent of Ismael and his use of tebrae as a form of writing.

In a first book of poetry, Las lamentaciones del viejo Tombo , published in Malaga by Aurora Luque and Jesús Aguado, Ismael already included six tebrae  in the chapters called “Tebrae de un cirenaico” with a quote from Omar Khayyam that says “Since you ignore what tomorrow holds for you, strive to be happy today. Have a jug of wine, sit by the light of the moon and drink thinking that tomorrow the moon may search for you uselessly’ and in Tebria,  ‘the ground millet is enough for me’.

The poems are very similar in content to the book presented here. In 2001, with the death of his mother, he wrote ‘Tebrae for my mother’, later published in Malaga. It is composed of 151 poems of two verses and uses this genre of women to sing the pain for the death of his mother. Why adopt the feminine gender to cry? Already in the year 935, as I have pointed out, the writer Ki no Tsurayuki did it. Two writers from two different eras and cultures have adopted this genre to mourn, love and sing about the pain of their dead women, one his daughter, the other his mother.

Today in Tebrae published by Libros del aire, we are offered a copious volume of 1203 two-line poems.

Without ceasing to sing love as in the tebrae of the women of Walata, Shinguetti, Wadan, Arawan or Timbuktu, Ismael reinvents a literary genre and universalizes it.

IV

In Tebrae, from the formal point of view, Ismaël changes the poem of a verse of two hemistichs, in one of two complementary or independent verses, and does it in free verse. It should be remembered here that, as noted by Ahmed Salem: “From the point of view of metric, each təbṛīˁa has five mutaḥarrik “feet” in the first hemistich (sometimes 6) and 8 mutaḥarrik “feet” in the second, but generally it is not subject to any metric norm  ”. Ismaël frees the tebrae from the metric limitations and, without leaving the composition in two verses, opens the poems to multiple subjects, often taking them out of the single love theme of the classic tebrae of Hassaniya literature.

The first verse expresses his thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the moment. In the second, the poem takes its matter from phenomena of nature. In some cases, the two lines of the poem are complementary, in others, there is a disjunction. In one verse he expresses his states of mind, in another, the states of nature. The first verse reveals the self and the circumstances in which the poet is totally submerged. The second verse opens the poem to a vision of natural phenomena, thus bringing the poet’s experiences to a certain relativism.

Thus, the verse about the anxieties of the self is opposed by another about the stillness of nature, giving rise to an ironic way of taking on human affairs. Nothing human is absolute. While the poet suffers, cries, enjoys life, heaven and earth follow their course. That relativism reduces the power of the poet’s feelings, takes away their universal character. The second verse, or sometimes the first, when it is this that speaks of nature not only relativizes the self and its circumstances, it, also shows an unbearable insignificance of man in the world and, also refers to his intrinsic loneliness. It is this contradiction that gives rise to a bitter irony that runs through the entire book.

Ishmael’s poetry has been until now, a poetry of testimony.

The irony is more evident in the poems in which a tragic circumstance of the first verse is opposed to another of a distant, indifferent private life. This form of irony is also found in Kafka’s Diary, see: “August 2. Germany has declared war on Russia. – Afternoon, swimming school”. It mixes the serious and the almost frivolous. Tebrae is a book whose poems show a certain indifference to history and the world, poems in which laughter chokes in the face of the tragic or, on the contrary, the tragic dissolves in laughter.

Ishmael’s poetry has been until now, a poetry of testimony. Une cabane au bord de l’eau , is a book of 215 prose poems inspired by the poetic genre of the Lelewel  in which he speaks as a witness of the famines, wars, epidemics that he knew from his childhood and, at the end, of the war and his exile. In the foreword, he says that he writes to testify. In Sahel, he cites Primo Levi as an epigraph, who says in a letter to Jean Samuel of April 1946: “Que nous le voulions ou non, nous sommes des témoins et nous en portons le poids “. The commitment that he has with himself as Primo Levi or Celan had, he continues to keep in Tebrae but, in this latest book, he takes an ironic distance from the drama of his existence and the tragedy that his land of birth has known for decades.  He puts before this tragedy the events that trouble the heart, the calm of the universe, reducing everything that makes his unbearable daily life – made of burned peoples, severed hands, exiles – to relative events in a world in which there is also a rising sun, a cricket that sings, herons that fly and waves of the sea that come and go. The testimony, the driving force behind Une cabane au bord de l’eau and the Sahel, takes a back seat. Without disappearing altogether, the intrinsic irony of some Tebrae attenuates their drama so evident in these latest books.

In fact, Tebrae is a rare bird in the literature of Spanish expression as pointed out in his preface by José Manuel Suárez and also, it must be added, in African poetry.

In front of these poems are those that are of love and follow in the wake of the traditional tebrae. There is less humor in these classical poems, not so common in African literature of the last century and this one.

In fact, Tebrae is a rare bird in the literature of Spanish expression as pointed out in his preface by José Manuel Suárez and also, it must be added, in African poetry.

Whilst the African poetry championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor in the 20th century is characterized by the struggle for the freedom of peoples, their independence and their dignity, Ismael’s poetry transposes that struggle to that of an “I” that jealously guards its freedom and fight without drama for his independence towards everything and everyone. He does not fight for a country or for a truth, he has no cause outside himself. Said S. Zweig speaking of Montaigne: “Montaigne would have smiled at the idea of trying to transfer to others, and less to the masses, something as personal as inner freedom, and from the depths of his soul he hated the professional reformers of the world, to the theorists and dispensers of ideologies. He knew well enough that it is already a colossal task in itself to preserve one’s inner independence.

So, he restricts his fight exclusively to defensive action, to the defense of that most remote fortress that Goethe calls the “citadel” and access to which no one allows anyone. His technique and tactics consist of keeping outwardly as discreet and as unobtrusive as possible, in going around the world with a kind of hood to find his way to himself”.  Ismael shifts the struggle for independence from the exterior to the interior. Free from any homeland in which to shut himself up, he reveals himself to be wandering, without a cause in this world. Where homeland is spoken, Ismael speaks of the body as the only territory; where he speaks of people, of color, he speaks of himself in front of everyone, and where poets sacrifice themselves for noble causes, he lends himself, smiles and walks away without ever giving himself, like Montaigne.

In all times of fanaticism and human madness like ours, so similar to Montaigne, Khayyam or Zhuang-zi, recurring readings in Ismael, the questions of the man who does not want to lose his humanity is the same. Stefan Zweig who formulates it like this:

“How can I stay free? How do I preserve myself despite all the threats and all the dangers, in the midst of the fighting gangs, the unflinching clarity of the spirit, and how to preserve the humanity of the heart unscathed in the midst of bestiality? How can I escape the demands that the State and the Church or politics want to impose on me against my will? How can I defend myself so that my words and actions do not go beyond where my most intimate self wants to go? How to preserve that unique and particular part of my self, which in a unique corner reflects the universe against me against submission to the measures regulated and decreed from outside? How to preserve my own individual soul, and its matter, which only belongs to me, how to remove my body, my health, my nerves, my thoughts, my feelings, from the danger of falling victim to madness and foreign interests?”

Tebrae, a book written in times of uncertainty, fanatical madness and blindness of all kinds answers these questions, which are Zweig’s and Montaigne’s. Poet of a disenchanted laugh, of wandering, of a pleasure that does not ignore that the bells will toll for all.  Ismael in Tebrae gives us an ephemeral peace in nature where we see our human fragility. Tebrae leaves us in the end more fragile and helpless, but freer, more human.

Tebrae is not a linear book. Tebrae’s poetics somehow brings us closer to that of the Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky in his short film work. There is no linear argument, only sequences of time are followed that end up forming before the reader’s gaze, a relative set, necessarily different from that of another reader.

The book does not begin, it can end at any point, at any time, like life itself. As in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, the reader has different ways of reading the book. Julio Cortázar in his “Board of Directors” says that Hopscotch is many books, but above all two. In the case of Tebrae, the reader can read the book from the first poem to the last according to their preference.

Since I was born, I have never had a place of my own.

The heron flies in silence and no one says that he is going into exile

Outside of this beginning-to-end reading, you have multiple ways of reading it by theme. You can take in the following index of love, exile, war, dragonflies, or flowers and by reading, compose a different book dealing only with these chosen themes. The reader can also combine themes such as love and war, exile and homeland, flowers and wandering. Each combination creates a new book within the book, forms a cartography according to their own concerns. The formation of new maps according to the themes makes Tebrae an infinite book. This is also the case in Montaigne’s Essays, which is basically a book made up of multiple books, according to the chosen theme.

A serious reading of the book from the percentages of the words used shows us the poet’s real concerns, his philosophy of life and the central themes around which this philosophy of life is expressed. At a glance, the reader can see these main entries in the index that follows.

Blue:

52

I forgot my bowl and my wool blanket in Timbuktu.

The dragonfly only has its blue wings.

247

Those blue days start in your eyes.

They are like the tracks of white geese on snow.

297

Everywhere I feel at home.

I was born among the birds, the growing wheat and the blue of the sky.

304

At first it was silence.

The verb came later with your blue-sky eyes.

1077

Blue night blue.

Extend your hand to me.

Laughter:

1163

I still have dreams that I have not dreamed.

That is why, beloved, I sleep despite the world to laugh with you.

1187

Truth, Good and Evil have died in me.

I only have my laugh left.

1191

I have no more time to live than this.

I can’t let a day go by without laughing and loving you.

1193

Only those who have the strength to forget can laugh.

Beloved, in your arms I still miss you.

1203

One day the grass will grow on my grave, but do not cry.

Floating cloud, I have laughed at everything.

War:

15

I belonged to a country that does not know spring.

There were only seasons of famines, wars, and epidemics.

21

He had a library, a garden, a turtle.

The war has arrived, and I wander between memory and the roads.

36

I have known peace and then war.

Everything happens like a lightning bolt.

37

In the war I was fighting to live.

Now I am fighting not to kill myself.

73

The war came, the doors closed.

I went into exile.

Exile:

131

My country is exile.

I wipe the dust off the roads with my sandals.

148

The years pass and the exile does not end.

Among the ruins of our house there are spider webs.

191

The great exile begins in contemplation,

Its nights, its cracks, and illuminations.

192

Exile saves.

I want to be a butterfly among the epitaphs of heroes.

213

Since I was born, I have never had a place of my own.

The heron flies in silence and no one says that he is going into exile.

I would not like to end without thanking Ismaël Diadié Haidara for the invaluable clarifications and help that he gave me, in the different interviews and meetings in which we were able to address all the issues raised here.

________________

About the author

Virginia Fernández Collado is a recipient of the 1st Prize (poetry mode) at the XII Young Creation Competition, Ciudad de Almería in 2011. She has collaborated in the magazine “Axarquia”. Some of her poems have appeared in joint books. Her published books are Predator (2015), and Poems 2006-2016 (2017), Bosque/Forest, Fondo Kati (2020), Rain, Poems 2006-2016, Fondo Kati (2020), etc. She has also coordinated several poetry anthologies. She is a Professor of Business Administration in Secondary Education and holds a Doctorate in Applied Economics besides a Master´s degree in “Fiscal Consulting” from the GADE Business School, Madrid.

The post Mapping a Book: About Tebrae by Ismael Diadié Haidara first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Andry-Andreja Jakuš

Mahmoud Darwish did not express the experience of exile with words directly connected to place after it had become an existential state for him, intimately connected to an important motif in his poetry, namely absence.

This is a motif that one does not find in the first state of Palestinian poetry.

As for places of exile, they are places and times that change their kin.

As if existentially exile had become the fundamental principle and everything else was secondary.

This dialectic is confirmed:

“O martyrs, you were right.

For the home is more beautiful

Than the road leading to it,

Despite the flowers’ betrayal.

But the windows do not look out

At the sky of the heart ….

And exile is exile, here and there.

We never went into exile in vain.”

When exile resides in the poet’s mind then place is no longer the only defining characteristic in the exiled person’s identity.

“Now in exile, yes at home

At the age of sixty quick years

They light candles for you.”

The relationship with place in Darwish’s works has become metaphysical.

“My wing was small on the wind that year

I figured that the place would recognize

The mothers and the smell of sage. No one

Told me that this place was called a land

And that beyond the land there were borders.

And that beyond the borders there was a place called dispersion and exile,

Ours.

I was not yet in need of an identity

But they, those who take us on

A tank move the place on trucks

To a ravenous region.

The place is compassion.”

FEW NOTES MORE

Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority.

National identity always involves narratives (historically based and generated) — of the nation’s past, its founding fathers and documents, major, seminal events, and so forth.

Perhaps the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been over the right to a remembered presence, and with that presence, the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality. Their Reality.

A similar battle has been fought by all colonized peoples whose past and present were dominated by outside powers who had first conquered the land, and then re-wrote history so as to appear in that history as the true owners of that land.

The fate of Palestinian history has been a tragic one, since not only was independence not gained, but there was little collective understanding of the importance of constructing a collective history as a part of trying to gain independence.

 Palestinian people have remained scattered victims of barbarous Zionism that continues to take more and more of Palestinian land and its spiritual and physical history.

__________________

Andry-Andreja Jakus, a Professor at Hacettepe University, Zagreb, Croatia, is Academic Writer, Bibliographer, Lexicographer, Translator, Language Tutor and Reviewer. In her columns, she writes on poetry, philosophy, cultural studies, history of religions etc.

Courtesy: Andry-Andreja Jakus/LinkedIn – Published with permission of the author

The post Literary Notes: The Exile first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Chief Minister Khuhro imposed a permit system on 15 February 1948, whereby no Hindu could leave his or her town of origin without a permit issued by the local authorities.

By Nandita Bhavnani

Exodus from Sindh

…Narayandas Malkani was then a 57-year-old Congress worker, who had worked closely with Gandhi in Delhi’s Bhangi Colony. He had narrowly escaped being attacked during the Karachi pogrom. After this, he and Govardhan Vazirani, secretary of the Congress, were deputed to fly to Delhi to convince the Congress high command to evacuate Hindus from Sindh. Narayandas Malkani recalls:

“On arrival, I met Gandhiji and other senior leaders and I told them face to face about the Karachi riots. I was there for a week, and I met everyone about two or three times. Pandit Nehru told me to go meet Bajpayee, the secretary general in the main office. I met him, and I briefed him about the conditions in Sindh; I told him that the time had now come for the Hindus to be evacuated from Sindh and resettled in India by the government. He listened to everything attentively and then I took his leave.

“Finally Vazirani and I came to the conclusion that our work was done and that we could return to Karachi by air the next morning that is 31 January. Before returning, I went to meet Gandhiji for the fourth and last time, to take his leave. It was about four in the evening, and he was sitting outside Birla House in the sun, with a straw hat on his head.

“His voice was not weak any longer, and his bare body shone, burnt in the sun. When I rose to touch his feet and take his leave, he clapped me firmly on my back. This clap on the back used to be his blessing. He said, ‘Now you go and evacuate people from Sindh. You leave only after evacuating everyone else. Make sure you don’t leave before that. Give Mr. Khuhro a message that I will come to Sindh and make efforts towards securing peace in Sindh. But for that, he will have to take Mr. Jinnah’s permission and send me a telegram.’”

Malkani used to stay with Gandhi’s son, Devdas, whenever he visited Delhi. Shortly after he returned to Devdas Gandhi’s home, they were informed of Gandhi’s assassination. A grieving and distraught Malkani flew back to Karachi the next day, where he was astonished to find that staff from the Indian High Commission had come to receive him in a car, and that he had been appointed additional deputy high commissioner in Karachi, specifically for the purpose of evacuating Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. Malkani supervised the work of evacuation in Karachi and Hyderabad, by turns, and also toured other towns in Sindh, to assess the situation of the Hindus there.

Special trains were run from Hyderabad and Mirpur Khas to Pali and Marwar Junction in present day Rajasthan, where refugee camps were set up. These trains went directly – and safely – from Sindh to Rajasthan and had no need to traverse Punjab, with its history of violence. Moreover, the organized evacuation of Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab by rail had been completed by the first week of December 1947, and now the Indian government could divert its attention and resources towards refugees from Sindh.

Owing to the determined intervention of the Indian government, and the assistance of Sri Prakasa, the Sindh government was obliged to facilitate the relatively smooth departure of non-Muslims from the province. The Sindh government announced that there would be no more searches of women among the departing Hindus and Sikhs.

Also, a large number of Hindu government employees now wanted to either resign or to go on leave. The Sindh government relaxed its rules, permitting these employees to withdraw advances from their provident fund, and granted them long leave, thus enabling them to escort their families to India.

The Sindh government was keen to avoid congestion in Karachi of Hindu emigrants from the interior of Sindh: by the end of January 1948 there were about 40,000 Hindus in the city waiting for passage to India, and many more in the hinterland. In order to control and slow down the passage of Sindhi Hindus through Karachi, and so minimize chances of renewed violence, [Chief Minister] Khuhro imposed a permit system on 15 February 1948, whereby no Hindu could leave his or her town of origin without a permit issued by the local authorities. While this was meant to preserve law and order, it only caused greater distress to the Hindus, impatient to leave.

More often than not, local officials demanded bribes in order to issue permits. Sri Prakasa [India’s High Commissioner in Pakistan] recalls the flood of Sindhi Hindus who came to his office, requesting permits to travel to India:

“In the office of the High Commission, we had to encounter heavy crowds. It was difficult to regulate them. Everyone wanted to get a permit as soon as possible so that he could go away. Everyone wanted to reach India […] as soon as possible.

“The High Commission, however, had to act warily and to keep all practical considerations in view. We could give permits at a time only to as many persons as could be provided with trans-port. Even this tragic scene was not without its lighter side.

“One day I was looking after the arrangements myself. A woman came up to me and quietly told me that a particular young lady of her family was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. The child may be born any day. In these circumstances, would I think of giving priority to her? I did so; but the very next day, a strange scene presented itself before me. I found that all women suddenly found themselves in an advanced stage of pregnancy!

“They came to know that the High Commissioner was partial to women in that condition, and was willing to treat them with particular consideration. They thus found a good opportunity of saying that all of them were in the self-same condition. It was obviously impossible for the High Commissioner to get them medically examined!

“I had smilingly to tell them that I did not think it was possible that all of them would suddenly find themselves in such a delicate condition, and I was therefore compelled to give these permits in the ordinary course without making any distinctions between one person and another.”

Sindh emptied of minorities

By the middle of June 1948, 1000,000 Hindus had been able to migrate to India; 4,00,000 more remained in Sindh. In August 1949, there were incidents of renewed communal violence in Shikarpur and Sukkur, giving new impetus to the exodus. Evacuation continued for three whole years, finally tapering off in 1951. By this time, the transit camp set up at Karachi still had 644 evacuees waiting to leave, but Sindh was largely emptied of its Hindus: It was estimated that a scant 150,000 to 200,000 remained in their home province.

Sri Prakasa tells us, ‘On my tours in the interior, I saw what appeared to have been flourishing townlets before, complete with houses, temples, fields, now entirely deserted, the whole of the population – evidently all Hindu – gone to the last man.’

Yet, it should be noted that the stream of Hindus fleeing Sindh only thinned down to a trickle by 1951, and never dried up entirely. There has been a continuous migration of Sindhi Hindus from Pakistan to India from the 1950s to the present day, varying in intensity over the decades.

Here is the narrative of a Sindhi Hindu’s departure in 1949, which depicts the large crowds still in the process of migrating to India. Kirat Babani, the prominent Sindhi author and journalist, was a young man of 25 in 1947, working with the Communist Party in Karachi. He and his other Communist friends decided not to migrate, but many of them were arrested in 1948. Babani was jailed for 11 months and released on the condition that he would be externed from Karachi.

Later, in 1949, he thought he would visit his family, which had migrated to India, and then return to Sindh. When he boarded the ship at the Keamari docks, government officials searched his belongings extremely roughly, and then served him a legal notice of exile from Pakistan. He recounts his departure from Sindh in his autobiography:

“Evening has fallen as I sit on the empty steel trunk. I have no idea when the ship weighed anchor and set sail towards its destination. My belongings are still scattered around me, and there, on the entire deck, people are scattered. Entire families, mostly from villages in the interior of Sindh, have been thrown here.

“They are from the poor and middle class, their dress and behavior is Sindhi. Some mothers also have suckling children with them, whom they are nursing, covered with their dupattas, and with their backs to the men. This transgression of custom must cause them mental agony. […]

As night falls gradually, and as the ship starts to careen up and down and sideways like a rocking horse, subjected to the blows of the forceful waves of the deep sea, the condition of the travellers on deck begins to worsen. Many begin to feel dizzy and their stomachs start to churn. Many are retching, and some are actually vomiting. The crying and wailing of the children has cast a pall of gloom everywhere.”

(Excerpted from ‘The Making of the Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India’ by Nandita Bhavnani)

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Courtesy: Scroll  (Published on July 26, 2014)

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