‘Drawing Class,’ by the Late Gazan Poet Salim Al-Nafar

Drawing Class

Salim Al-Nafar

Translated by Danielle Linehhan Kiedaisch and Lorna MacBean, as appeared in A Bird Is Not a Stone, with permission from editors Sarah Irving and Henry Bell.

If we stopped

would the endlessness stop too?

Screaming from the fire,

I shout into darkness.

Did you hear me?

Did you answer?

 

The children dipped their bread in my tears

while we wrestled the chains of time

drawn to drag war onto beauty.

A child told me

‘They took my father…can you see them?’

I looked, but could not see.

 

But I am tired

from seeing

from journeying

from anxious days

Mother, I am tired.

Delirious our joys: delirious our sorrow

And the travel nips, nips, nips, nips…

 

When we stop

life becomes memory.

When we sleep,

with time

to talk.

 

At drawing class

time is mapped onto the contours of our homeland

and on takes of knights who kick time with their souls.

Our teacher tells us the story

And colours our minds.

Putting place into heart into the question:

What happened to our teachers?

 

My teacher was made absent.

No drawings, no stories, no beautiful dreams.

Tired from my travel and my question

and from a life lived in pain,

I wander.

Who will see these footsteps?

Denied in love, exhausted of anger,

they stood on clouds and took

the stars from the sky and changed

the rhythm of time.

 

If we stop,

will time walk on?

Never thought we would lead the young into the waves.

 

…

What happens to us?

Are we to learn from the absent?

That wilderness does not protect life?

 

I battered the door of death

and found no answer.

From this small land, we grew.

From the water came our life.

Argue with this:

The skies crush our land:

our song sings on.

The Arabic original of this poem is available (here, here, and here.)

Saleem Al-Naffar (1963-2023) was a prominent poet in Gaza, killed under Israeli bombardment along with his family in December 2023. Poet Mosab Abu Toha has translated his poem “Life,” which is available on social media. Poet Najwan Darwish recalled recently, in The Guardian, “There’s a poet, Saleem al-Naffar, who I first met in Edinburgh where we read poetry together, maybe 20 years ago. He was a wonderful, good man and very funny.” Salem Al-Naffar was born in Gaza in 1963, exiled with his family to Jordan in 1968, and returned in 1994. He published his first collection of poems in Gaza in 1996, and went on to become one of Gaza’s most prominent poets, publishing more than a dozen books.