A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography

Fadwa Tuqan’s account of her own making begins with a fact she had to reconstruct: she did not know the date of her birth, and worked it out later from the inscription on the grave of a relative who had died while her mother was carrying her. That is the register the whole book keeps. It is the story of a girl in a prominent Nablus family whose education was obstructed until she left school altogether, and who was rescued from that by her brother — the poet Ibrahim Tuqan — who taught her at home.

What makes the memoir unusual among Palestinian books of its kind is how much of it is interior. The national catastrophe arrives, and arrives brutally, but Tuqan’s steadiest subject is the society she came from and the constraints it placed on women, which she criticises without softening and without pretending they were imposed from outside. She is as unsparing about the occupation of a household as about the occupation of a city. After 1967, when Nablus fell under Israeli military rule, her poetry turned decisively to national subjects, and she became known across the Arab world as the mother of Palestinian poetry.

Olive E. Kenny’s prose translation carries the life; Naomi Shihab Nye’s translations of the poems are set into it, so the verse arrives at the point in the life where it was written.

About the author

Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) was born in Nablus and is among the most important Arabic poets of the twentieth century. Her early work is lyric and personal; from 1967 it was given over to the occupation of her country. Her brother Ibrahim Tuqan (1905–1941), who taught her, was a leading poet of the Mandate generation.

Details

• Arabic original: رحلة جبلية، رحلة صعبة (Riḥla jabaliyya, riḥla ṣaʻba). An Arabic edition from Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida is dated 1990; the date of first Arabic publication is not established here.
• English translation by Olive E. Kenny; poetry translated by Naomi Shihab Nye; edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi
• Graywolf Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1990 — xiv + 241 pages, ISBN 9781555971380
• The Women’s Press, London, 1990 — ISBN 9780704350564
• The jacket reads A Poet’s Autobiography; the title page and the library cataloguing read An Autobiography. Same book.

Where to find it

• Borrowable free through the Internet Archive’s lending library: A Mountainous Journey.
• Held by many university libraries, and available secondhand; the English edition is not currently listed by Graywolf Press.