Books and publications
Index / Activities / Books and publications / Palestine/48: The Nakba and poetry
Palestine/48: The Nakba and poetry
May 16, 2024 7:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
7:00 p.m.
Free entry upon registration, until the event’s capacity is reached.
Sign up using this form.
In Spanish and Arabic.
On Thursday, May 16 at it Madrid headquarters, Casa Árabe has organized this event to commemorate the Nakba upon its seventy-sixth anniversary, with the presentation of the work “Palestine/48” by Luz Gómez. The event will include a reading of poems in Arabic and Spanish, as well as a musical tribute with the Arabic oud and vocals. Please sign up to attend.
It has never been more pertinent to speak of catastrophe in Palestine. “Catastrophe” is the meaning of the word Nakba, though that is not all it means. As it does every year, Casa Árabe has organized an event around May 15, 1948, when the State of Israel declared independence over almost eighty percent of historical Palestine. In the process, more than 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands, while 531 Palestinian villages were wiped off the map. The trauma it caused is known as the Nakba. However, the Palestinians also refer to al-nakba al mustamirra, the “ongoing Nakba”: beyond just a historical event, it is a continual process of plundering and ethnic cleansing. Over the last seven months, the world has witnessed the intensification of this process, at unsuspected levels of violence and impunity, a new unabashed Nakba right in the middle of the twenty-first century.
However, Palestinian voices and those defending their cause have not ceased to be heard; in the streets of the great capitals of the world and on university campuses the struggle to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and make Palestinian culture visible continues. Luz Gómez’s book Palestine/48: Poems from the interior, published by Ediciones de Oriente y Mediterráneo, offers a selection of works by three of the main Palestinian poets from the Interior, who after the 1948 Nakba stayed in the territory that became Israel: Rashid Hussein (1936-1977), Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014) and Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011). These poets’ voices awakened in Palestinians from the Interior an awareness about their identity and a demand for equality and compensation. They eventually also gave an account of the failure of their dreams and sang about the common struggle for Palestine.
The book’s presentation will be given by the author, along with a reading of poems in Arabic and Spanish, performed by different voices, making up a sort of choral poetics for Palestine. As a culmination and as part of this choir, singer Linda Al Ahmed and the Arabic oud player Hames Bitar will be joining a brief musical tribute to the Palestinian people.
You can watch the event live on our YouTube channel.
Luz Gómez is a professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her books include Entre la sharía y la yihad. Una historia intelectual del islamismo (Between Shari’a and Jihad: An intellectual history of Islamism, 2018), Diccionario de islam e islamismo (Dictionary of Islam and Islamism, 2019) and Salafismo. La mundanidad de la pureza (Salafism: The mundaneness of purity, 2021), as well as editing BDS for Palestine: Boycotting the Israeli occupation and apartheid (2014). She has translated the work of various contemporary Arab poets into Spanish, such as Abbas Beydoun, Sargon Boulus and Gibran Khalil Gibran, and especially Mahmud Darwish, of whom in 2023 she published the volume ¿Por qué has dejado solo al caballo? / Estado de sitio (Why Did You Let the Horse Out Alone? / State of Siege) and an anthology of her reflections on poetry, El poeta troyano. Conversaciones sobre la poesía (The Trojan Poet: Conversations on poetry). In 2012, she won the National Translation Award of that year for In the Presence of Absence, by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. She is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País.
However, Palestinian voices and those defending their cause have not ceased to be heard; in the streets of the great capitals of the world and on university campuses the struggle to stop the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and make Palestinian culture visible continues. Luz Gómez’s book Palestine/48: Poems from the interior, published by Ediciones de Oriente y Mediterráneo, offers a selection of works by three of the main Palestinian poets from the Interior, who after the 1948 Nakba stayed in the territory that became Israel: Rashid Hussein (1936-1977), Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014) and Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011). These poets’ voices awakened in Palestinians from the Interior an awareness about their identity and a demand for equality and compensation. They eventually also gave an account of the failure of their dreams and sang about the common struggle for Palestine.
The book’s presentation will be given by the author, along with a reading of poems in Arabic and Spanish, performed by different voices, making up a sort of choral poetics for Palestine. As a culmination and as part of this choir, singer Linda Al Ahmed and the Arabic oud player Hames Bitar will be joining a brief musical tribute to the Palestinian people.
You can watch the event live on our YouTube channel.
Luz Gómez is a professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her books include Entre la sharía y la yihad. Una historia intelectual del islamismo (Between Shari’a and Jihad: An intellectual history of Islamism, 2018), Diccionario de islam e islamismo (Dictionary of Islam and Islamism, 2019) and Salafismo. La mundanidad de la pureza (Salafism: The mundaneness of purity, 2021), as well as editing BDS for Palestine: Boycotting the Israeli occupation and apartheid (2014). She has translated the work of various contemporary Arab poets into Spanish, such as Abbas Beydoun, Sargon Boulus and Gibran Khalil Gibran, and especially Mahmud Darwish, of whom in 2023 she published the volume ¿Por qué has dejado solo al caballo? / Estado de sitio (Why Did You Let the Horse Out Alone? / State of Siege) and an anthology of her reflections on poetry, El poeta troyano. Conversaciones sobre la poesía (The Trojan Poet: Conversations on poetry). In 2012, she won the National Translation Award of that year for In the Presence of Absence, by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. She is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País.
