Rage Against the Dying of the Light: The Living Stones of a Poetry Class

By Brother Patrick White

There were 18 Palestinian faces. Young faces, mainly, people who have known only the oppressive and punishing Israeli military occupation of the past 25 years. Men, women, Muslims and Christians from both the Eastern and Western traditions were in this university class. They came from towns, refugee camps and rural villages of the West Bank and Gaza; from as far north as Tulkarem and Jenin; from Nablus, Ramallah and East Jerusalem in the center of the West Bank; from Bethlehem and nearby Beit Jala and Beit Sahour; and from Hebron and its neighboring villages of Beit Ummar and Dura in the south. These Palestinian faces belonged to my poetry class for the 1992 spring semester.

These are the oppressed and marginalized, the living stones of the Holy Land. Through the poetry course E 314, I felt some of their hopes and aspirations, their deep frustrations and pain, their very humanness.

A Spiritual Experience

Cold, unheated stone-paved classrooms, often darkened during power cuts, metal study chairs, a large blackboard along the front wall, a simple teacher's table, this was Room 206. I like to think we shared a spiritual experience in this room through the intensely cold winter of January 1992 into the new warmth of spring and the heat of summer.

''Like living stones, be yourselves built into a spiritual house." (1 Peter 2:5)

A presumptuous claim? Yes, but true, nevertheless. Through the intensity, the economy of language, the beauty and music, through the personae within the poetry, we drew on our experience of life, our shared values, common feelings, emotions. Together we explored the love of land and nature, the search for meaning and beauty, the spiritual dimensions of our lives, the struggle to survive—all disclosed and exposed through the poets' sensitivities.

To my surprise, I learned that more than a third of my class were married, and several others were engaged. The remainder were unattached; a student status I was more used to. Numerous marriages, intifada marriages, we called them, took place during the three years Bethlehem University was closed by the Israeli authorities. Sami and Amro were young married men. Ismail and Mutesan each had a wife and two children. They were supported by their fathers in Tulkarem and Jenin, and lived in lodgings in Bethlehem. They had started their studies in 1987 and now were desperate to complete their degrees.

Reem, Salwa, Samia and Nadia were young mothers. Married to a professional man in Ramallah, Reem struggled each day to negotiate the road blocks, curfews and frequent controls that prevented Palestinians from moving from one place to another. Despite a permit she had acquired from the Israeli military occupation authorities allowing her to pass through East Jerusalem to attend classes in Bethlehem, she frequently was late for class and occasionally did not arrive at all.

Salwa had married and moved with her husband to the Gulf. When Bethlehem University reopened, she came back to complete her degree. She brought her baby and lived with her in-laws in Beit Jala. She missed her husband and was frequently tired and frustrated.

Samia was pregnant with a second baby that arrived about Easter time. In her white veil and long traditional dress, with her wonderful young mother's face, I imagined Mary, mother of Jesus, to be like her. She gave birth to a little boy and returned to classes a few days later.

Nadia was strikingly beautiful and very bright too. She had a baby boy and came from a Christian family in Bethlehem. I had taught her three years earlier before she was married. I kept forgetting her name and jokingly called her Elizabeth Taylor. She didn't mind.

The oldest student in the class, Husni, was a teacher from Hebron with a family of six children. He was a part-time student in the university's teacher's college.

Of the unattached students, many had to work to survive or to support their families. Seventy percent of Palestinian families live below the official poverty line of the state of Israel, and 40 percent of Palestinians are unemployed.

Hanna helped in his family's shop in the Old City of Jerusalem. Amman, who had to leave the Hebrew University because of the intifada, was a librarian and also worked in the family gift shop near the Via Dolorosa. Salim worked long hours as a dairy man on a farm in Beit Sahour, supporting his sick parents.

All found it difficult to cope with a full academic program and the necessity to earn a living. Among those who did not need to earn a living, Adel, a sincere young man, had tried his vocation at the local Latin seminary. These, then, were the lives behind some of the 18 faces. These Palestinian students felt keenly the love of the land and nature, as encountered in the lines we studied.

"Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why cost thou thus, Through windows and through curtains call on us?"

John Donne's metaphysical poetry came close to their own experience of the Middle East sun rising over the Mountains of Moab in Jordan and setting west over the hills of Beit Jala.

The Palestinian imagination also responded strongly to the deep love and association with the land expressed by William Butler Yeats:

''I will arise and go now, and go to Innis free, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made. "

Terraced vineyards in the hills near the village of Beit Ummar came to Ahmad's mind. Manal and Alia recalled quiet evenings on verandas in Beit Jala, sitting with their families listening to distant voices drifting across the Cremisan valley as dusk fell, "and evening full of linnets wings."

They explained how the fig and the olive trees are symbolic of the attachment of Palestinians to their land. This closeness and association was enhanced by their sense of loss as they saw Jewish settlements ever encroaching on their land. Experience of occupation was something they held in common with Yeats.

Now, after the Gulf war, depressed at the increasing oppression and the lack of security and freedom, we sought signs of beauty and light in the life around us, inspired by the poets' eyes. The Romantics affected us, Wordsworth particularly:

"Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. . . "

reminding us of the bright delicacy of the spring flowers in the desert. We talked also of lost innocence, of individuality, of revolt against authority, all themes threading through Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Shelley's Ozymandias, tyrant from an antique land, appealed to their sense of casting off the oppression of a military occupation:

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. "

The theme of death and resurrection caught the students' imaginations when, at the same time we reached it in class, Yasser Arafat was reported missing in the Libyan desert and later discovered alive.

Atta came late for his class. He and a graduate friend were forced by the Israeli military (passers-by they may have been, but they were Palestinians after all) to climb the roof and tower of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem to take down a Palestinian flag daringly hoisted there when the news of Arafat's safety was made known. They risked their lives climbing onto the tower in a strong wind. The flag, a symbol of their yearning for freedom, was burnt by the soldiers in the street. Atta used this fearful experience to compose a short, cathartic poem which he pushed under my door the next day.

Youth Gone Up in Smoke

The sonnets of Shakespeare, Spencer and Sidney have recurring themes of love and the passage of time. Bitterly, students expressed how they felt old, their youth gone up in smoke. Jamal, a victim of almost total paralysis, was confined to a wheelchair, but composed brilliantly with a pen in his mouth. Writing for the English department magazine, he revealed the weariness of eight years of reliance on the help of others for transport and negotiating stairs while trying to complete his degree: "I want some rest. I can bear no more mocking eyes, twisted smiles and harmful remarks. "

For Salim, the death of his close friend and fellow student, Anton Shomali, murdered by the Israeli border police on his way home in Beit Sahour a few days before, was a shattering experience that left him speechless and moved by Wilfred Owen's bitter lines at the wretchedness of it all:

"Move him into the sun Gently its touch awoke him once. "

Professor Maurice Harmon's poetry, written in Bethlehem during the first years of the intifada, also touched the sensibilities of the students.

''Listen Soldier, three days in a row, You've made me stop, checked my ID. " and:

"Those killed today tonight will shine Above the land of Palestine."

Singularly significant for the mothers in the class, particularly Samia who had just given birth, was Maurice Harmon's poem Independence. This poem narrates how one of the university secretaries, Muna Kattan, gave birth to her baby on the day "the governor closed the West Bank tight."

Although the curfew imprisoned everybody when the State of Palestine was proclaimed from Tunis on Nov. 5, 1988, Harmon says to this baby girl: "But you would not be cowed. The very thought set you in motion. You kicked your heels about.

Your father had to face the checkpoints and the guns.You found your way proclaiming as you came

That man is free. We must rejoice. '

Babies know nothing of continuous 24-hour curfews. The Israeli soldiers let Muna, advanced in labor, and her husband leave their house for the maternity hospital where the child was born.

Jehad, just released from prison without trial, was moved by lines from Harmon's poem Cats.

"The cats patrol the fields, The birds are terrified, The birds they catch they put in cages out of sight."

Angrily Jehad described to me conditions in prison during the harsh winter and he expressed his hatred of the Israelis. Nevertheless, he pondered more lines from the poem:

''No one quite knows why cats Have such a hate for birds. Some say that they themselves Were once controlled by dogs. "

Living Another Reality

Suhair had shared her despair about her own society and its apparent breakup and disintegration with me. She found a distressing affinity with the poems of Emily Dickinson, discovering more in these poems than I could ever feel. Beneath their bright faces, their graciousness and their smiles, Palestinians, particularly the women, live another reality.

They say that poetry is emotion recalled in tranquility. I write this in the summer green abundance of the Wiltshire countryside, listening to the news. On television I hear about Mr. Rabin's new government and of the Israeli army surrounding the Palestinian university in Nablus, and summer school classes being suspended.

Fortunately, my poetry class for 1992 had ended at the beginning of June. I could not claim the power of Robin Williams in the splendid film The Dead Poets' Society, nor the impact on his class when he cried "Carpe Diem!" (Seize the day!)

Nevertheless, I believe that, in our class, we were enriched by each other. There took place, I think, a quest for goodness and truth, a search for meaning to our lives in an environment of injustice and suffering. Most of those 18 faces I shall not see again, for they were due to graduate this summer. I only hope that they,

'Do not go gently into that good night.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. " —Dylan Thomas

Brother Patrick White teaches at Bethlehem University on the West Bank.