The Prison Songs

The Palestinian prison song is a specific thing, not a mood. It is a song that carries the names of imprisoned or executed people in its own lines, so that singing it is an act of naming. The tradition has a datable beginning: 17 June 1930, when the British Mandate hanged Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir at the fortress prison in Acre. Out of the funerals came a lament whose opening — from Acre prison a funeral went out — puts two of the three men into the second line. It was written by Nuh Ibrahim, a printing-press worker from Haifa who composed only in colloquial zajal, and it is the most widely known Palestinian song of the twentieth century. The archive holds it at From Acre Prison.

Seven years later Nuh Ibrahim was himself in Acre prison, for five months, and wrote there the song that fixed the form. “Mr Bailey” is addressed directly to a British district officer — your rule is too harsh, when it should have been just — and works through the machinery of colonial detention item by item: deportations, exile, personal guarantees, charges assembled from fantastical reports, men brought in from Haifa and Nazareth and Tiberias and Baysan and Safad and Ijzim and al-Tira, scholars and old men and boys. It became the anthem of political prisoners, men and women alike, for the rest of the Mandate. The British press censor eventually banned Nuh Ibrahim’s collected poems by name, which is the surest evidence of how far the songs travelled.

They travelled because they were not printed. A zajal has no definitive text; it exists in performance, with lines added and dropped, and a banned book is no obstacle to a song that lives in people’s mouths. That property is exactly what made the form useful again later. The Palestinian prisoners’ movement, which its own historians date not from 1967 but from the Mandate — from Acre, from the three men of 1930, from Farhan al-Saadi executed in 1937 and Yusuf Abu Durra after him — turned Israeli prisons into what its members call an academy, and the singing went with the rest of it. Prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s communicated with the outside by writing on the foil of cigarette packets with smuggled pens; the songs needed no paper at all.

The best-known modern recording of the Acre lament belongs to Firqat al-ʿAshiqin, the ensemble founded in Damascus by refugees of 1948, who put the Mandate-era prison repertoire in front of the revolution’s generation and performed it from Palestine to Algeria and Yemen. It is still sung at solidarity vigils. When the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs marks 17 June each year, it names Jamjoum, al-Zir and Hijazi in the same statement as the hundreds of prisoners who have died in Israeli custody since 1967 — which is the argument the songs have been making, wordlessly, for ninety years: that this is one prison system with two administrations.

Sources

• Samih Shabeeb, “Poetry of Rebellion: The Life, Verse and Death of Nuh Ibrahim during the 1936-39 Revolt,” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (Winter 2006) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• From Acre prison, with love — The Palestinian Museum
• The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: History and Experiences — Palestinian Prisoners’ Solidarity Network
• In commemoration of executing Muhammad Jamjoum, Fuad Hijazi, and Atta Alzeer — Commission of Detainees’ Affairs, State of Palestine, 17 June 2023