Revenge

At times … I wish I could meet in a duel…

(opening lines, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)

About this poem

“Revenge” begins by naming exactly what was done — a man killed the speaker’s father and razed his house, expelling him into a narrow country — and then proceeds by a series of disqualifications. If the killer turned out to have a mother waiting for him, the speaker would not kill him. If he had a father who put a hand to his chest whenever his son was a quarter of an hour late, he would not kill him. If he had a brother, or sisters who longed to see him, or a wife, a child, a neighbour, a colleague, a friend — each is considered and each removes the possibility.

Only in the last case, a man entirely alone, cut off like a branch from a tree, does the poem allow the killing to be possible. And at that point it declines it, on the grounds that a man with no one is already suffering enough: the speaker resolves instead to ignore him if they pass in the street, and to count the not-looking as a kind of revenge.

The construction is the argument. Taha Muhammad Ali does not refuse revenge on moral grounds, or forgive; he simply follows the logic of family attachment outward until it covers everyone, and the enemy dissolves into a person with relatives. Nothing in the poem is abstract — the quarter of an hour, the hand on the chest — and nothing in it is forgiving in the sentimental sense. It is among the most widely read Palestinian poems in English, and it was written by a man whose own village, Saffuriyya, was destroyed in 1948.

Sources

• “Revenge,” a poem by Taha Muhammad Ali — Literary Hub (full text, trans. Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)
• So What: New and Selected Poems — Copper Canyon Press