Re: (Not) Capitulating
by Samuel E. Martin
We mustn’t be numbed, cowed, or tricked into an inability to feel the life that breathes and glows in these poems.
I arrived in Scotland for a week’s stay on Saturday, March 8, hours before ICE agents abducted Mahmoud Khalil from the lobby of his New York apartment building. When the news came through the next morning, it shredded the sense of relief that had enfolded me ever since my plane lifted off the tarmac in Philadelphia. The warm sunshine in the Borders felt incongruous enough without my trying to visualize some windowless, soulless detention center in which Khalil might be holed away, unable to get word to his loved ones. My plan had been to spend a few days sifting through the archives of W. S. Graham in the National Library of Scotland; Graham’s poems, which hum and crackle like Morse transcribed in mild delirium, had buoyed me no end during the days of COVID isolation, but now they seemed to map eerily onto other dystopian configurations of the twenty-first century:
Dear Pen
Pal in the distance, beyond
My means, […]
I know you well alas
From where I sit behind
The Art barrier of ice.
(“Yours Truly,” NCP 159)
To my knowledge, Graham had never written a word about Palestine in his life. The locales of his poetry – the Scotland of his boyhood, the Cornish coast of his mature years, an Arctic hinterland of the imagination, the occasional Greek taverna – present a very different topography. On the ideological front, meanwhile, whatever Graham’s working-class political sympathies, he showed no interest in writing the sort of engaged poetry characteristic of an Auden or a MacDiarmid. In a 1967 letter to his close friend Ruth Hilton, he expressed deep admiration for Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal; it’s tempting to picture him equally swayed by Prisoner of Love, Genet’s audacious account of his time spent among the Black Panthers and the Palestinian fedayeen. But both Graham and Genet died in the early months of 1986, before the latter’s final opus had been published either in French or in Barbara Bray’s English translation.
It was with another translation in mind that I entered the NLS’s Special Collections Reading Room in Edinburgh that Monday. I’d had a stab at producing a French version of the first poem in Graham’s cycle of “Seven Letters,” in many ways a companion sequence to his major 1955 poem “The Nightfishing,” and I hoped to find materials that would give me a sense of how these texts had taken shape. The first document I requested to view was a workbook dated September 1950, which the library inventory identified as containing “mostly drafts for ‘Seven Letters.’” As my eyes eagerly scanned page after page of Graham’s handsome blue cursive, I had to force myself to slow down. Many of the pages had been divided into two columns, filled with rhythmic experiments and variations on the three-beat line of verse that Graham would make into something of a personal hallmark. Then, in the upper right quadrant of one such page, the last line in a tercet of apparent non-sequiturs leapt out: “Kneecapless in Gaza (Glasgow).”
My shock soon gave way to utter bewilderment. What on earth were those words doing there? The coincidence seemed almost too monstrous not to be some kind of prank. I thought I knew Graham better than to suppose he was making a political statement; besides, there was nothing in the way of meaningful context to suggest any such interpretation. Even so, the chronological proximity of the September 1950 workbook to the Nakba of 1948 was difficult to ignore. And whatever the phrase “kneecapless in Gaza” may have meant to the poet seventy-five years ago, it could only carry a sinister, sickening reverberation for a library visitor in March 2025, almost a year and a half into an Israeli genocide that had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and maimed untold thousands more.
I tried to clear my head of wild hypotheses. Given everything in the surrounding workbook pages and Graham’s penchant for wordplay, the line in question must be a pun on something. I could account for “kneecapless,” at least. In the same month inscribed in the workbook, Graham had broken his knee falling from a roof and subsequently had his patella removed in hospital. The accident had occurred in Cornwall, however, not on his native Clydeside, so “(Glasgow)” appeared in this instance to have been suggested by “Gaza.” But why Gaza in the first place, Gaza of all places? Throughout the rest of my week in Edinburgh and in the days that followed, this one line from Graham’s workbook gnawed at me like a shameful secret beyond my understanding.
Keener students of English literature than I will have lost no time spotting the allusion to which I was oblivious. It took another coincidence for the fog to lift. Barely a week after my return to the US, reading an essay by Victoria Ocampo plucked almost at random from the shelf, I happened on a footnote referencing a 1936 novel by Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza. There, surely, lay the explanation to the macabre riddle. Yet I remained troubled by this new (old) phrase and perplexed that I didn’t recall Graham ever mentioning Huxley. The former had done a stint as a visiting lecturer at NYU in 1948, teaching texts by James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, but not Huxley, so far as I knew. A quick online search, however, revealed that “eyeless in Gaza” was in fact a quotation from John Milton’s 1671 dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. At last I felt I stood on firm ground. Graham had read Milton assiduously in the 1940s, and even if this particular three-word phrase owed its new notoriety at the time to Aldous Huxley’s novel, the poet was more likely, I thought, to have had a Miltonian frame of reference in mind.
When blind Samson, in the long opening monologue of Milton’s poem, despairs at finding himself “eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,” he has yet to realize – in the fullest sense – the meaning of a prophecy, which foretold that he would deliver his people from the hands of their oppressors (SA 8). Later, once he has regained his strength and brought the temple crashing down on his Philistine captors, a messenger arrives to give Samson’s father (and the reader) the news:
MESSENGER. Gaza yet stands, but all her sons are fallen,
All in a moment overwhelmed and fallen.
MANOA. Sad! but thou know’st to Israelites not saddest
The desolation of a hostile city.
(SA 50)
Others have already noted how deeply unsettling it is to read these lines in light of the appalling desolation that Israel continues to wreak on Gaza today. Strangely, this wasn’t the first time in my own family’s experience that a poem by Milton had loomed up out of nowhere to resonate with an event of epochal violence. My father still remembers attending Professor Alan Grob’s lecture on the elegiacal poem “Lycidas” at Rice University in Houston on November 23, 1963, the day after the Kennedy assassination. The ongoing genocide doesn’t permit the same kind of “where were you on the day…?” Rather, it has overwhelmed Gaza’s sons and daughters “all in a moment” that has stretched out past six hundred and fifty intolerable days – so far. Gaza yet stands, though for how much longer if the current madness goes unchecked?
As for W. S. Graham, recovering from surgery in Cornwall in September 1950, the handwritten line “Kneecapless in Gaza (Glasgow)” made no deliberate comment on the recent mass violence that Zionists had inflicted in Palestine. Nor did it seek to draw a parallel between harsh conditions in the two cities; it fell to Graham’s countryman, the poet and translator Edwin Muir, to recall the industrial inferno of early twentieth-century Glasgow in his sonnet “Milton”:
There towards the end he to the dark tower came
Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone
Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown
From a great funnel filled with roaring flame.
Shut in his darkness, these he could not see,
But heard the steely clamour known too well
On Saturday nights in every street in Hell.
(“Milton,” SP 60)
Where Muir’s poem is earnestly allegorical, Graham’s line is mock-heroic, sending on a hobbled poet to strike an absurd Samsonian pose. The sound that inspired it was neither the roar of furnaces nor the cracking of temple pillars, but the simple echo of one name in another: “Gaza (Glasgow).” Yet the resulting image now points to something terrible that the poet himself could not possibly have seen.
The thirty-first of seventy-four fragments that make up “Implements in Their Places,” the eponymous sequence in the final collection of new poems that Graham would publish in his lifetime (1977), has often sprung to mind of late:
How are we doing not very well?
Perhaps the real message gets lost.
Or is it tampered with on the way
By the collective pain of Alive?
(“Implements in Their Places,” NCP 247)
I’m hardly alone in reflecting that the past couple of years have taught us far more about “the collective pain of Alive” than we ever wished to know. In March, I went to Edinburgh expecting – hoping – to find something that might take the edge off for a few days, but an urgent message somehow filtered through in the unlikeliest of places, as if it had been slipped in under my nose. “Kneecapless in Gaza (Glasgow)” served as an implement out of place, reminding me that even in the comfort of a Scottish research library, I mustn’t lose sight of what was still happening in Palestine. As Edward Said wrote in After the Last Sky, “We [Palestinians] are a people of messages and signals, of allusions and indirect expression” (ALS 53).
In 1956 – the year of Edwin Muir’s “Milton” sonnet, the year after W. S. Graham’s “Seven Letters” – Ghassan Kanafani published his short story “Letter from Gaza,” later translated into English by Hilary Kilpatrick. The unnamed letter-writer explains his decision not to fulfill a promise made to his childhood friend Mustafa to follow him to a life of academic sanctuary and prosperity in Sacramento. Central to the story is the dreadful injury recently suffered by the narrator’s thirteen-year-old niece, Nadia, during an Israeli bomb attack. In the retrospective build-up to his own discovery of the tragedy that has led to his change of heart, he refers enigmatically to Gaza as an “amputated town,” one that he imagined himself desperate to leave behind (LG 112). Only when he recounts his unassuming visit to Nadia’s hospital bed does the foreshadowing device become apparent: his niece has lost her leg from the top of the thigh down. Reeling with horror, the narrator emerges from the hospital into “blinding sunlight” that nonetheless marks a moment of new awareness and clarity: “Everything in this Gaza throbbed with sadness, which was not confined to weeping. It was a challenge; more than that, it was something like reclamation of the amputated leg!” The letter ends by entreating Mustafa to make the return journey to Palestine “to learn from Nadia’s leg […] what life is and what existence is worth”; the narrator wagers that the prestige and safe haven of an American university will not have blinded his comrade to the lessons of a profounder education. “Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you” (LG 115).
John Berger recorded a reading of Kanafani’s story for the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. Since it was reposted online early last year, the video has accrued almost a hundred thousand views. Berger speaks directly to camera with his incredible magnetism and warmth, his bright blue eyes riveting us over the top of his reading glasses – and suddenly we are Mustafa, receiving the letter, being enjoined to come to Palestine and contemplate life anew. It may seem facile to say that in this video, Berger, through Kanafani, is proposing Gaza as a way of seeing, but that is effectively what it amounts to.
Berger, through Kanafani… through Hilary Kilpatrick. Whether he had made notes in his script or was extemporizing in the clutch of the narrative, I’ll never know, but at several points Berger tampers artfully with Kilpatrick’s English translation. Here, he repeats a sentence for emphasis; there, he inserts a prepositional phrase for precision (“as you wrote in your last letter”; “the frenzied motor of the plane,” LG 111). The most notable intervention occurs when the speaker quotes Mustafa’s own remarks from their recent parting at Cairo airport. While readers of the story can see the quotation marks, Berger wants to make sure his viewers understand that a second voice has been interpolated in the text, so after uttering Mustafa’s words, speaking as the narrator once more, he insists: “I hear you saying that to me. I hear you.” This is the letter-writer addressing Mustafa, but at the same time it feels like Berger addressing Kanafani, Kanafani’s translator, and the Palestine Festival audience together. Even in the midst of a story (and a performance) of unabated intensity, it is an arresting moment.
In a way – or maybe two – it also reminds me of W. S. Graham. Sam Buchan-Watts’s recent monograph on Graham explores how the poet manages to speak within and about his words in the same breath; Berger’s multilayered “I hear you” in Kanafani’s story achieves a comparable effect. Still more striking, though, is Graham’s ability to dramatize the listening experience in his poetry, to make the page a receptive membrane through which he and his reader are alert to one another. This sense of contact and anticipation held me in thrall as I bent over his manuscripts in the library; yet even in the absence of handwriting’s intimacy, Graham’s printed poems maintain their grip. “Clusters Travelling Out,” first published in 1968, imagines a prisoner tapping and receiving covert messages in his confinement (and could that be Mustafa’s return flight passing overhead?).
High
On the wall I have my blue square
Through which I see the London-Cairo
Route floating like distant feathers.
I hear their freezing whistles. Reply
Carefully. They are cracking down.
Don’t hurry away, I am waiting for
A message to come in now.
(“Clusters Travelling Out,” NCP 195)
By the time I entered the reading room in Edinburgh on March 10, Mahmoud Khalil had already been flown by ICE to the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, where he would spend the next three months. Among the messages that came in to him during his incarceration were the sounds – not the news, the sounds – of the birth of his son, to whom he addressed an exceptionally moving letter on Mother’s Day two weeks thereafter: “In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line.” Like Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza,” Khalil’s letter from Jena looks to the future as much as to the past, awaiting and willing Palestine’s long-overdue deliverance.
Batool Abu Akleen, too, is expectant in the poems of 48Kg. (one of which was included in this year’s Letters from Gaza anthology), yet the images of motherhood that she projects are perhaps even bleaker than one might anticipate from a young woman whose world and people are being destroyed all around her. “Milad-birth,” co-translated with Cristina Viti, foresees a medical anti-miracle: “the nurses will tell me I gave birth to death” (KG 67). Whereas Kanafani’s narrator urges Mustafa to nurture the feeling that had made him hesitant to leave Gaza in the first place (“this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you,” LG 115), the speaker of Abu Akleen’s poem “Lucifer” is consumed by an insatiable fear that “squats in [her] stomach” and “spreads among [her] cells” (KG 73). And from the cell – or, rather, the cemetery – that Gaza has become, the poet strains to listen in the dark with the attentiveness of W. S. Graham or Mahmoud Khalil, but the harrowing soundscape only hems her in further:
I have always been blind to their death
but I hear it clearly
I feel it in the death that surrounds me from every side.
(“Blindness,” KG 113)
We mustn’t be numbed, cowed, or tricked into an inability to feel the life that breathes and glows in these poems. Sun-blind and shattered by his niece’s wound, the narrator of Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” still senses the entire city throbbing around him like a “challenge,” a “reclamation of the amputated leg”; likewise, the body of Batool Abu Akleen’s book is a reclamation of her Gaza, the vitality of her language a challenge that her readers are called to meet. In my earlier review of 48Kg. I emphasized the ominous reverse numbering of the poems – but of course the countdown is simultaneously an accumulation, as the book assembles itself like the mosaic shown in one of the photographs at the start. “As much as I was trying to find my body,” writes the author in her preface, “at least I could write these poems; glue them up and together through self-translation” (KG 21). Forty-eight poems, forty-eight kilograms, reconstituted and whole: the number is no coincidence. The second of the book’s preliminary photographs shows the Old Town of Gaza as it looked well before 1948 – almost a century earlier, in fact. The caption, so faint as to be scarcely legible, reads “SAMSON’S GATE, Gaza”; a note in the back matter confirms that Francis Frith’s picture originally appeared in an 1863 volume printed in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.
Albumen Print, ℅ the Library of Congress.
At the end of May this year it was announced that the Irish rap trio Kneecap, long outspoken in their support for Palestinian rights, had been barred from filling their July performance slot at the TRNSMT music festival in Glasgow, on the grounds that police could not ensure public safety at the concert. (I didn’t know whether to be more alarmed by the rapid escalation of events or by the thought that I might be the only person in the world who knew that the cancellation had been foretold by a Scottish poet seventy-five years ago.) Undeterred by a terrorism-related charge against their singer Mo Chara, the band played to a rapturous crowd at Glastonbury in June and released a typically brazen single, “The Recap,” full of bilingual jibes at the Tories and accompanied by a video that ends with footage of a crowd chant from the Glastonbury gig: “Free, free Palestine!”
Kneecap’s staunch refusal to cede the terms of their language is reminiscent of a now-famous interview that Ghassan Kanafani granted to Richard Carleton in 1970, just two years before his assassination by the Mossad. To each of the hapless journalist’s prompts, Kanafani, in his official capacity as spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine but always with a writer’s care, patiently offers a corrective:
CARLETON: It does seem that the war, the civil war, has been quite fruitless.
KANAFANI: It’s not a civil war. It’s a people defending their self against a fascist government which you are defending […]. It’s not a civil war.
CARLETON: Or the conflict?
KANAFANI: It’s not a conflict. It’s a liberation movement fighting for justice.
CARLETON: Well, whatever it might be best called…
KANAFANI: It’s not “whatever,” because this is where the problems start.
[…]
CARLETON: Why won’t your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
KANAFANI: You don’t mean exactly “peace talks.” You mean capitulation, surrendering.
This exchange seems to me a supreme example of what W. S. Graham, albeit in a wholly different context, called “translating English into English” (NCP 300). And for my part and purposes, I think I’ve settled on a recontextualized translation of the line that I stumbled upon in Graham’s workbook in March. To call it a reclamation feels somewhat grandiose; the phrase would make no sense on a banner, and I’m not about to go shouting it in the street, but I am persuaded that it says, or sees, something about our present moment. In September 1950, “Kneecapless in Gaza (Glasgow)” was a private, self-deprecating pun from a poet reveling in the sound of words and looking to cheer himself up from a recent injury. In July 2025, I take it to mean that with every act of this genocide in Gaza, however far away we imagine ourselves, it is our collective humanity that is maimed. In Glasgow, Philadelphia, and beyond, the message is Gaza, to be transmitted as loudly and as long as we are able.
Sincere thanks to the National Library of Scotland for their hospitality and to the Estate of W. S. Graham for permission to quote from the materials above.
Recap of Sources
ALS: Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, with photographs by Jean Mohr (Columbia University Press, 1999).
KG: Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg., translated by the author with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher (Tenement Press, 2025).
LG: Ghassan Kanafani, “Letter from Gaza,” in Men in the Sun & Other Palestinian Stories, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).
NCP: W. S. Graham, New Collected Poems, edited by Matthew Francis (Faber and Faber, 2004).
SA: John Milton, Samson Agonistes: The Poem and Materials for Analysis, selected and edited by Ralph E. Hone (Chandler Publishing Company, 1966).
SP: Edwin Muir, Selected Poems, edited by Mick Imlah (Faber and Faber, 2008).
Samuel Martin teaches French at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated works by several contemporary writers including Jean-Christophe Bailly and Georges Didi-Huberman; his translation of Didi-Huberman’s Bark was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
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