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- Country of residence: Palestine
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Palestinian poet Jihad Al-Hanafi: We need criticism that delves into the depth of the word and rises above formalities
The dream does not precede him, and the factors do not stop him from devoting himself to the message. He works hard to highlight the beautiful poetic identity by combining childhood, love of the homeland, and true love. He is drawn to everything around him, he spreads hope and love whenever he comes, he lives in the center of truth and faces it, he writes it, he flows without selfishness, but rather he flows with all humility and depth.
He was born from the womb of the Palestinian Nakba, so he lived in changing places and times. Life wrestled with him and he fought against it. Circumstances opposed him and he ran over them. He was able to shine and stand out in the distinguished poetic field, and to date he has created five collections of poetry. The Palestinian poet Jihad Al-Hanafi was born from the clutches of the Nakba, and shaped his life through the word, but the word is sometimes not enough in light of injustice and deprivation.
Jihad Al-Hanafi is a Palestinian poet who was born in Lebanon in 1979. His childhood was a long birth from the womb of suffering and displacement. This childhood was a journey through refugee camps in Lebanon. As for his study trip, he was in UNRWA schools between Tire and Sidon. He graduated from the Siblin Institute, Teachers’ House Department, then completed his university studies and obtained a degree in Arabic Language Arts.
For him, writing is the lung through which he breathes life, and the sky from which he breathes light. His beginning with her was in school, specifically the intermediate stage. This was the beginning like all beginnings, in which the experience was the master of the event.
But the real beginning was in the secondary stage, where his writings began to mature and take their balanced, vertical form, and his poems also took on clear content features.
During this stage, his poetic experience was embraced by the eyes of teachers and jealous people, who gave him attention and care.
“I will not write the last line,” is the title of a poem in Al-Hanafi’s last collection. This poem summarizes Al-Hanafi’s struggle in all its ideas and dimensions, and the unity of the angle of his emotional, perceptual, and realistic tendencies, thus summarizing the poet’s spirit in its lines.
“For your eyes I will carry the range,” his most profound collection of poems, because it is the summary of a more mature experience. It differs in the diversity of its poems, differs in its boldness, especially in the poems of love, and differs in new features at the level of national poetic discourse.
Some poets consider that the sincerity of the writer’s feeling is the most prominent work in the poem, while others believe that the feeling itself is capable of reaching the reader in various ways. As for Al-Hanafi, he believes that the writer’s feeling is the prominent characteristic that distinguishes him from others, as he cannot extract it from his “ego”, and if he did, he would live in a black alienation from himself and his words. The reader, regardless of his cultural level, can sense honesty and live the word if he believes in it based on what he reads. Therefore, it is very useful for the poet to keep his “ego” on his paper so that it can express to every “ego” other than himself.
Al-Hanafi says that poetry is broader than the concept of literary schools, and that it belongs to the human being and expresses him, his feelings, his pains and his dreams. He extracts an idea from his imagination, sculpts an image from his tears, picks a garden from his mouth, and formulates colorful possibilities from his silence.
Al-Hanafi believes that the components of writing today are no longer the same as the intuitive components of the writer known previously, because these components differ from time to time, with different circumstances and appearances, but the same human, emotional, social and national motives remain. The writer takes his breath to create a song and a song based on the elements of his era, which differ in their appearance but not in their essence.
The Syrian crisis has generated artists in various fields, as Al-Hanafi believes that this harsh crisis was a real incitement to reignite talent because the Arab world is very dear, just as the Palestinian Nakba generated wonderful poets and artists. He believes that wounding the nation ignites talent and stimulates energies to rise to the glory of the nation.
Naturally, poetry affects the human self, love and peace, as well as its ability to create a revolution. In the beginning, the word was, and still is, the starting signal for humanity and is its distinguishing feature. When we abandon our faith in the word, we lose our faith in God. The word is the interpreter of hearts and the map of the steps on the paths that rise. With souls and creates its civilization and distinction. Yes, it is capable of creating a revolution, capable of fortifying nations, capable of performing miracles because it simply creates a human being, according to what Al-Hanafi refers to in his talk about “building.”
Every poet has secrets, and every poetry has mysteries. Poems have doors and secrets. Al-Hanafi believes that what the poet hides may not be able to be expressed by him himself, and his stories remain buried in the folds of his soul. There is a storm of madness, a revolution sweeping through the veins when an idea casts its shadow over the poet's imagination. The night is an oasis of secrets in which poets immerse themselves, and the constant dream is a gateway to the unseen and the impossible.
He added: If one of the secrets I reveal is that when I write on the page I do not need the lines and I write in italics to get through the organization of the lines, then I simply hate restrictions.
Poetry is born as a result of a stormy psychological state such as extreme sadness and great happiness. For him, poetry is the product of a moment, the product of storage, the product of coincidence, the product of experience, the product of reading. All of these labors create the literary text, from a whisper, a kiss, a look, ah, bleeding, pain and a smile. All of this and more brews in the poet’s soul to form the poem. The most beautiful poems are those that are a basket of shadows, dimensions, colors, hopes and dreams. The most beautiful poems are those that the reader considers to have been written for him alone.
Al-Hanafi views the dialectics of criticism and creative writing currently as a basis for evaluating the poet’s performance in the space of lines, and he sees it only as a motivation for the best because it deters frivolity and evaluates experiences.
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