On Taha Muhammad Ali

Having found Taha Muhammad Ali's store on Casanova Street in the old quarter of Nazareth empty, sat on one of the small, wicker-topped stools and let my eyes roam about the shop. The shelves running up to the high, vaulted ceiling were crammed with imitation pearl-studded scabbards, ceramic bowls of various shapes and sizes, colorful kafiyehs, olive-wood camels, inlaid boxes, nargilehs, postcards of the Crusader church rising above the shops at the end of the narrow street. This wasn't exactly what had expected. Some months earlier, when I'd first tried to translate two of Taha Muhammad Ali's poems, had been told by friend, who was then editing an anthology of Palestinian poetry, that the poet was dealer in antiquities. Ali was born and raised, my friend had explained, in the village of Saffuriya, located on the site of what had once been the ancient town of Sepphoris, and at the age of seventeen was forced to leave with his family for Lebanon after his village was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A year later he and his family slipped back across the border and eventually settled in Nazareth. Ali, now realized, was the proud owner of souvenir shop. The only objects that might have passed for antiquities were some old farming implements and, leaning against the wall in one corner of the room, the waist-high jug once used by villagers for storing grain. A slim young man entered the shop and introduced himself as Nizar, the poet's son. Taha would soon arrive, he announced. For some time now he and his younger brother had run the store. Their father, Nizar added, would show up on occasion only to disappear into the nearby shops to sip Turkish coffee with his old friends. wondered whether one of the shopkeepers wasn't the friend Ali had spoken of several weeks earlier in Jerusalem, at the city's Third International Poetry Festival. Ali had prefaced the reading of his poems by telling us, in halting Hebrew, a little story. Many years ago, he said, he had started up small stand along the street leading into the Old City market in Nazareth where he would display small, lacquered camels made of olive wood and sell them to tourists who came from all parts of the world to visit the holy city's Church of the Annunciation. A certain friend of his used to visit him at the end of his workday and sit on the wooden stool he'd set out for him, so he could enjoy looking at the foreign passersby. I would ask him to listen to poem had written the previous night, Ali told us, and he would refuse loudly: I don't want to hear it! I'm tired and want to rest. One day it occurred to me that might bribe him, by offering him one of the small wooden camels in exchange for his listening to my new poem. When stretched out my hand to offer him the camel, not unmysterious smile came across his face, and he took the camel, put it in his pocket, and offered me-of his two ears-only half an ear, with which he listened to my poem, all the while directing his eyes and his other ear-and-a-half to the people who were coming and going on the street before him, without there appearing on his face any indication that he was listening to me at all. Time passed, and continued to give my friend camels in exchange for his listening to each new poem that wrote. On one of these afternoons, wanting to save myself camel, announced to my friend that Jean-Paul Sartre had visited Nazareth, and that the city council had invited me to participate in reception for him where met and spoke with him at length. My friend cut me off abruptly and said: I know all about it, and read in the paper that you talked to him about his play `The Respectful Prostitute.' I've also been told that the municipality asked you to participate in the reception for Arthur Miller.... But what has this got to do with our topic? Sartre isn't poet. Arthur Miller has absolutely nothing to do with poetry and poets. …

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