Alia Malek is not the only one to bookend the Egyptian revolution to the 1967 war, but she does a better job (at Guernica) of explaining the shift than others we’ve read. The Nizar Qabbani poem she mentions we excerpted here last week.
The June 1967 War, which saw the Israeli military vanquish the combined Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces, buried beneath the sands of the Sinai, the soil of the Golan, and the banks of the River Jordan, the hopeful promises of Arab nationalism, of which Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser had been the most seductive proponent.
At the same time it birthed a defeatism and despair that nurtured the notion (amongst others) that the many talents of Arabs everywhere would be most rewarded and put to best use outside of the Arab world, where Diaspora populations longed for home but contributed instead to their adopted nations.
Agency seemed elusive for many who felt they lived lives pawn to a variety of players: oppressive regimes; the whims of American foreign policy (which preached democracy but backed dictators); Zionism’s appetite for land; the world’s appetite for oil; and fundamentalists who screamed so loud about who is authentically Arab and authentically Muslim, that our own valuable pluralism—a thriving living part of us—some would have seen needlessly amputated.
When the US re-opened itself to immigration in 1965, those that came from the Arab world in those years brought with them the heartbreak of 1967, the kind of ache that only disillusioned love can cause. Many of their children—my generation—were nursed not only on their longing and nostalgia, but also the lingering discontents and curse of that loss.
So yesterday, from heartbreak to heart explosion!
That era of defeatism and despair, so well captured in the angry verses of this Nizar Qabbani poem, seems over and the poem’s hopeful lines which have gone unanswered for so long, received a thunderous reply from Tunisia in January and Egypt yesterday.
