Radi Abdeljawad This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Haaretz - Israel News - Alas the smiling homeland

   www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/4 - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/16/2004   Last Visited: 7/21/2004

   At the end of the evening at Alma College, one of the participants in the workshop - Radi Abdeljawad, 50, of Umm al-Fahm, a sculptor and teacher by profession - stands on the stage and invites everyone to a meal at his house. It was not easy for him to arrive at this moment. He came to the poetry class with mixed feelings, accompanied by suspicion and strong resistance.
   
   "I almost dropped out of the class. I even thought they had set a trap for me," he says. "I was very hurt when I discovered that in the class there were poets who were just starting their careers. I wrote my first poem 34 years ago and I published my first volume of poetry in 1981. I feel that I am a veteran, and then they tell me that I have to learn how to write poems from the beginning. But at the second and third meetings, I had already gotten into the atmosphere and I began to love the people there."
   
   Abdeljawad has started to write poems in Hebrew, and saw that it was easier than writing poems in Arabic "because of the exemption from the obligation to meter and rhyme," he explains. He was born and grew up in the Askar refugee camp near Nablus, studied English and education at Amman University and returned to live in Ramallah. After he married, he moved to Umm al-Fahm. At the end-of-year event, he chose to sing Lebanese singer Marcel Khalifa's song "Kite," accompanied by oud player Eitan Baruch. "It was moving to sing a song that is sung by Khalifa, who is considered the singer of the Palestinian revolution, but to my mind he is a singer of humanity," he says.
   
   The poetry class, say the poets, was "an island of sanity" in the midst of the political crisis. On the backdrop of the Jewish-Arab conflict 16 people met to write and translate poems together. During the workshop, did they talk about the political situation? Yes. Abdeljawad recalls something that one of the poets, Anat Zakaria, told him: I'd rather be on the side that's getting shot at than on the side that is doing the shooting.
   ...
   Radi Abdeljawad: "They say that in art there are no borders.