Witness, Wail, and Resistance in Abigail George’s Songs for Palestine: Struggle Poems
Book: Songs for Palestine: Struggle Poems
Author: Abigail George
Pages: 144
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing
Reviewer: Hillary O. Anfofun
Abigail George’s Songs for Palestine: Struggle Poems is a collection that effectively reflects its title in the poet’s dedication to mourn, decry, and document the brutal realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through a deeply elegiac and stirring diction, the South African poet paints a stark portrait of the brutal and unlivable conditions endured by the victims, particularly children, in the wake of Israeli state-of-the-art military strikes.
As is the case with the art-for-function’s sake ideology, George abandons fixed rhythmic patterns and rhyme schemes, opting instead for a free verse style that privileges the uninterrupted flow of emotional and political reflections. This stylistic choice then makes the collection read like a series of elegies—raw, haunting, and steeped in both memory and imagination. Employing the free verse, George’s poetic oeuvre foregrounds motifs of sorrow and protest with a raw spontaneity unfettered by rigid structure. Through arresting, at times surreal, imagery reminiscent of J.P. Clark’s “Casualties,” George captures the unfathomable anguish of a people whose lives have been fractured by war, loss, and occupation.
Unlike many other poetry collections of recent times, Songs for Palestine does not present a formal categorisation of its poems. It should be noted, however, that this absence of an explicit categorisation does not imply a lack of structure. On the contrary, one can observe a latent structure of organisation in the thematic and tonal variations of the poems. This open-ended arrangement affords the readers the liberty of their own interpretive taxonomy. In my own reading, the poems appear to fall into three broad interrelated categories, and they are as follows: poems of lamentation, poems of interrogations, and poems of emancipation.
The poems of lamentation include chilling titles such as “It is time for me to hide now” the first poem in the collection, “Open your eyes, a genocide is taking place,” “I, future,” “Dear wife and mother,” “A funeral wreath for Gaza,” “Don’t cry for me,” “Just an empty space,” “The frequency of gulls,” and many others. In these poems, the piteous, gruesome, and stomach-churning nature of the Israeli-Palestinian war is illustrated. An example of this is the image of a father weeping at his son’s grave in “It is time for me to hide now.” This gives us only a glimpse into the bereavement, grief, and untimely death suffered by the casualties of the war. In many of these poems, the poet strikes up a comparison between the normalcy of her life and the tragic incidents happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She bemoans the safety of her normal life as people die hopelessly in a vicious war elsewhere. An example of this is expressed in these lines from the poem titled, “Open your eyes, a genocide is taking place”:
Tension above death camps
What I call refugee camps
while I live in suburbia
safe as houses
as safe as the ocean (p.47)
The portrayal of the effects of the war on the people gets even darker in the lines of “I, future,” which describe the erosion of human rights of people and images of children getting “blown to bits” This suggests that the war has ceased to become an international conflict. Rather, it has morphed into a cold-blooded genocide targeting innocent civilians and helpless children. Apart from death, the poet also does well to mention the collapse and desolation of a once happy environment. Employing an often deadpan tone tinged with frustration and resignation to fate, the poet laments the all-encompassing impact of war—how it erodes comfort, joy, social life and learning. Perhaps, this is best captured in the lines of “Just an empty space”:
Where a house stood once
Where a child laughed once
Where a professor taught
an English Literature class once
Just an empty space now (p.109)
Beyond lamenting the war, George’s poetry also turns to interrogation, where she asks difficult, often unanswerable questions about war, complicity, justice, and memory. These poems do not offer resolution; instead, they trouble the reader’s conscience and demand uncomfortable reflection on the war and its reportage by Western media. In “The sea,” for instance, the speaker questions the emotional and moral intelligence of the natural world: “What intimate knowledge / of rich vein and blood does / this sea have of war crimes…” Here, the sea becomes both witness and silent accomplice, evoking the idea that even nature cannot remain neutral in the face of brutality.
Similarly, in “The day I found a fibula in my dream,” the poet’s voice fractures under the weight of historical memory of the Holocaust. In asking whether the Holocaust is “in the history books,” she points out the futility of war and the ensuing destruction of lives and property. By this, the persona expects those who call the shots for war to be more reflective of the need for war—if there is ever any. In the poem, “God, why are You, the Creator of the known universe, letting Palestine die,” the interrogation is directed to God. Here, George dares to question not only human complicity but divine silence in the face of people’s suffering.
Interestingly, the tone of the poetic persona shifts from melancholy and interrogation to one of protest and defiance in several poems that I categorise as poems of emancipation. A poet, George seems to suggest, is more than a scribe writing flowery words to show mastery of language. A poet is an activist, a conscience of society, a lamp that sheds light on the hidden things of the world. In an essay preceding the poems in this collection, George writes that: “a poet has no country, a poet belongs to the world, and they speak on behalf of humanity, for the generation that came before, and the one that will follow” (p.6). She demonstrates this assertion in the poem “I want a free Palestine,” in which her persona demands an end to the war, calling on leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, to prioritise diplomacy over war.
This demand for freedom resounds through other poems as well, including “I taste Kafka, and burn this lighthouse down” “I want a free Palestine,” “I did it for Yasser,” “What honey and milk taste like during war,” and “The lone Palestinian swimmer.” Another thing noteworthy about George’s collection is her allusion to freedom writers and activists such as Nelson Mandela, Ari Sitas, Franz Kafka, Derek Walcott, Anna Akhmatova, Charles Bukowski, to mention a few. It seems she is calling these names to evoke a sense of collective struggle in the fight for humanity.
Away from the political and humanitarian concerns that the collection largely touches on, George also gives us an inkling of her personal war as an unmarried middle-aged woman living under the pressure of a society that dictates marriage and childbearing as the hallmark of womanhood. In poems like “This is what it feels like to be rejected,” “Finding years in summer days,” and “Don’t speak without seeing,” the persona talks about her struggles with her mental health. While reading the poems, one is drawn by the poet’s earnest despair in the verses and her desire for peace, not only for Palestine, but also within herself.
Finally, whether conveying the blood-stained tides of the Mediterranean, the echo of a child’s laughter erased by bombs, or the unbearable loneliness of a “lone Palestinian swimmer,” the poems in Abigail George’s Songs for Palestine: Struggle Poems create a cadaverous record of suffering and resilience. George’s diction is alternately lyrical and disjointed. This, I believe, is employed to mirror the psychological fragmentation of a people caught in cycles of violence. Her poetic voice oscillates between the intimate and the political, embodying both witness and wail, and in doing so, Songs for Palestine becomes not just a poetic account of conflict, but a spiritual archive of silenced histories and enduring resistance.
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Image: Teena Lalawat unsplash
The poet Abegail George hounds and haunts us out of our false sense of peace into open visibility and confrontation with our denial borne of fears seeing that people and nations who could militate against this weak side of humanity for reasons beyond human comprehension are actually endorsing the spillage of the soul tissues humanity over that theater called Gaza. The spillers are hellbent on sowing doubt and conviction that you cannot appeal to the milk of human kindness for such things exist only as figments of imagination. She is also pushing to seriously wonder why Gaza is selected and scapegoated as a cause of the Holocaust? Simultaneously why the African Holocaust is a thing never spoken of and finally what it has taken to make Africans not only to forget their fate in the face of its slaughter which finding it in itself to believe that the same people who murdered it can still turn around and profess to be its savior against its own sons like Ibrahim Traore who empty handedly stand up to pronounce enough is enough. They do this knowing they are gambling their lives away.