Palestine Advent 1: I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada

Anthony Wilson, , , ,
A metal grill covers a window, obscuring the view of the city outside.

Welcome to this series of Palestine Advent blog posts.

Each day for the next twenty-four days I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian poet.

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada.

I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada, translated by Huda Fakhreddine.

Hiba Abu Nada was a novelist, poet, and educator. She wrote this poem on Oct. 10th, 2023. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She was 32.

Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative nonfiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time Under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), Come Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021), and the translator of The Universe, All at Once (Seagull Books, 2024).

With thanks to Natalie Jabbar and Chris Rose for inspiring this idea.

You can donate to the Amos Trust Gaza Christmas appeal here
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Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, is available now from Blue Diode Publishing. My current research project, funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

12 Comments

  3. Dear Anthony

    Thanks for this creative and compassionate use of your page over Advent.

    My daughter Elinor is deeply involved with Palestinian families whom she’s ‘adopted’ during this time of crisis, and I will be making a donation to the Amos Trust this week.

    Advent and Christmas blessings to you and your family, Patricia Holgate

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      2. Thank you for your kind comment, Joe. I have blogged the Yehuda Amichai poem you mention in a previous series of blog posts (Advent Poems) from a few years ago. You can find it here: https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2019/12/06/advent-poems-6-an-arab-shepherd-is-searching-for-his-goat-on-mount-zion/ I’d like to think I could post links to Israeli poems another day – but this was the year for something else. With grateful thanks, Anthony

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      3. Thanks for getting back to me. Apologies re the Amichai. An (embarrassing) oversight on my part.

        All the best-

        -Joe.

        Liked by 1 person

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