Hamza
حمزة
A man from Touqan's own town, ordinary as bread, tells her in the years after 1967 to be patient and not to weaken — the land, he says, will remain alive and will not die.
Hamza was one from my town, like the others, who eats his bread nicely…
(opening lines, in translation)
About this poem
“Hamza” is a portrait poem, and its subject is deliberately unremarkable: a man from Fadwa Touqan’s own town who works with his hands and eats his bread like everyone else. The poet meets him while she is, in her words, stumbling in the maze of defeat — the atmosphere of the years after 1967 in Nablus — and it is he who tells her to be patient and not to weaken. The land that the fire of crime is reaping, he says, shrunken now in sadness and silence, will remain alive and will not die.
The poem then turns the abstraction into flesh. This land is a woman, Hamza says: the secret of fertility is one, and the power that grows palm trees and ears of wheat also grows a fighting people. It is a metaphor Palestinian poetry has used to exhaustion; what saves it here is that it is put in the mouth of a labourer rather than the poet, and that the poem goes on to test it.
Touqan (1917–2003) is the major Palestinian woman poet of the twentieth century, and after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank her work shifted decisively toward the political. “Hamza” belongs to that turn. Its argument is not that resistance is heroic but that it is ordinary — carried by people whose names would otherwise never be written down, which is precisely what the poem does with his.