Red Tuesday

On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at the fortress prison of Acre for their part in the Buraq uprising of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron. Twenty-seven Palestinians had been sentenced to death after the events of 1929; twenty-four sentences were commuted and three were carried out. Dozens of elegies were written. The one that named the day was Ibrahim Tuqan’s, and the name stuck: al-Thulatha’ al-Hamra’, Red Tuesday. Tuqan was twenty-five and teaching at An-Najah in Nablus. He died in 1941, and the poem has been in the public domain for decades; the text below is the one carried by the Palestinian news agency WAFA in its ninetieth-anniversary account of the executions.

The poem opens on the morning itself — when your ill-starred planet stood exposed, and heads swayed in the nooses of the ropes, the call to prayer keened and the church bell wailed — and then does something stranger than lament. It puts the day on trial among other days. Red Tuesday calls out across the centuries asking whether any day has been more bitter, and the days answer in turn: the day of the Inquisition’s tribunals, the day of the slave markets, a day black-cloaked and reeling. Each concedes it has seen nothing to match this one. Out of that procession comes the poem’s hardest line, and the one least often quoted: a homeland walking toward extinction, without hope — and the sickness has no cure but refusal. The translations here are the archive’s own.

The central movement is called The Three Hours, and it is the reason the poem is structured the way it is. The executions were carried out one after another, and Tuqan gives each man an hour that speaks in its own voice. The first hour claims precedence — I am the hour of the disdainful soul; mine is the merit of going first — and swears by Fuad Hijazi’s soul rising pure from his ribs. The second is the hour of the steadfast man, whose hero breaks his chain, a sign of the breaking of all chains, and who swears by Muhammad Jamjoum and by his mother, calling out a song at his death. The third is the hour of the patient man and the great heart, which swears by Atta al-Zir and by his small children weeping for the lion in floods of tears. A closing section, The Three Heroes, sets the account straight in a single couplet: their bodies in the soil of the homeland, their souls in the garden of God’s favour.

What Tuqan wrote was a classical qasida in the elevated Arabic of the educated class, and it is a major poem. But the Palestinian Museum makes an observation about it that is worth keeping: it is not Tuqan’s lines that Palestinians sing. The verses that travelled were those of Nuh Ibrahim, a printer’s apprentice from Haifa’s Wadi al-Nisnas who composed only zajal — colloquial folk verse, half-recited and half-sung — and whose lament for the same three men became the song from Acre prison that has never stopped being performed. Two poems, one event, two registers of the same grief. Tuqan’s was printed and studied; Nuh Ibrahim’s was memorised, and outlived its author by a century.

Both were right about what the gallows had done. Hijazi, permitted to write home the day before, sent his testament to the newspaper al-Yarmuk, which printed it on 18 June 1930: the day of his hanging, he wrote, should be a day of gladness, and 17 June should be marked every year with speeches and songs. The archive’s account of the executions themselves is at Red Tuesday, 1930.

Sources

• الثلاثاء الحمراء: تسعون عاما على إعدام جمجوم والزير وحجازي — WAFA (Palestinian News and Information Agency), 16 June 2020
• From Acre prison, with love: the life and times of Nuh Ibrahim, poet of the 1936 Revolt — The Palestinian Museum
• Samih Shabeeb, “Poetry of Rebellion: The Life, Verse and Death of Nuh Ibrahim during the 1936-39 Revolt,” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (2006) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• Martyr Fu’ad Hijazi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)