Sleeping in Gaza
Darwish addresses the Portuguese fado and proposes to sleep the way people sleep when the shells are falling — a poem about exhaustion rather than defiance.
Fado, I’ll sleep like people do when shells are falling…
(opening lines, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)
About this poem
“Sleeping in Gaza” comes from Nothing More to Lose, Najwan Darwish’s first book in English, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by NYRB Poets in 2014. The poem opens by addressing fado — the Portuguese song form built on longing and fate — and proposes not resistance under bombardment but sleep: the particular sleep of people who have learned to sleep while shells fall.
That is the register of the book as a whole. Darwish writes a Palestine in which heroism has been used up, and what is left is fatigue, irony, and an obstinate refusal to perform the emotions expected of a Palestinian poet. The tenderness in the poem is directed at a song, not a cause, and the effect is to make the bombardment ordinary — which is the accurate description, and the more damning one.
Abu-Zeid’s translation gave the poem a wide English readership after 2014, and it has been read aloud repeatedly during the assaults on Gaza since. The book was named one of the year’s best by NPR.