A Date With Literary Scholar

Today, for our class of BBL3406 Analysing Prose and Poetry, our lecturer invited a poet who by chance was in Malaysia recently to give a talk to all of us. When I first heard about the talk I was a bit confuse about how the poet will give his talk. One of my friends told me it will be through skype. However, when I arrived at the class at 12.05, I was shocked to see a foreigner was giving a talk. Apparently the talk, I believe started on time which was at 12, while I and my friends arrived a bit later because we got out late from our previous class. Thankfully he just started the talk, so I hope that I won’t be missing a thing from his talk.

About Our Poet

Name: Refaat Alareer

Birthplace: Gaza, Palestine

Occupation: Lecturer of English Literature and Creative Writing at Islamic University Gaza

Education Level: Master in Comparative Literature from University of London

The Talk

Our poet, Mr Refaat firstly shows 4 maps of Palestine. The 4 maps show the progress of how Israel occupied Palestine land from time to time. He told about the hard life in Palestine. How the people there cannot travel freely from one place to another. If they need to go to another place, they have to go pass many checkpoints in order to arrive there.

Then, he started to show few names of Palestinian poets that is famous in their writing. For the famous Palestinian poets writing in Arabic are Mahmoud Darwish and Tamim Bargouti. For the famous Palestinian poets writing in English are Rafeef Ziadah (We Teach Life, Sir), Susan Abulhawa (Wala!), and Remi Kanozi.

The Palestinian-Israeli War in 2008/2009 was called the cast lead. Tamim Bargouti was the one who they called the revolutionist to other poets to start writing poem in blog. Tamim Bargouti is very good in using metaphor, imagery in his poems.

Ater the war in 2008/2009, Mr Refaat started his blog and write his poems in the blog to relate it to other people. He wanted to relate the condition of what happen in Palestine and his birthplace, Gaza to the people outside from Palestine.

Mr Refaat, shared how he started to be involve with poetry.

Poetry. How It All Started.

1. Read a lot of good and high quality poetry.

2. Believe that you can write good stuff.

3. Have the will to do so.

4. Scribble your thoughts. Always.

5. Imitate.

6. Be yourself.

Mr Refaat started to write poetry after he learned from his students. The students wrote poems and show it to him. From there he decided to write poem since he believes that if his students can write it, why can’t he. His students learnt things from him and he learnt how to write poetry from his students. His students also gave ratings to his poems which helped him to improve on it more. The most important thing is to like poetry. He also said that we must have a goal to write. When we already have a goal, we will start to notice everything that happens around us. We also will be able to observe people, their reaction and other things which will be the material that we can use to write. Mr Refaat also mention what J.K Rowling said one time about not to be afraid of failure. Imitate is also acceptable in the first stage in starting to write poem. By imitating, we try to be there in what we write in our poem. But we still need to relate it to ourselves in the poem. His poetry mostly will include dialogue, performance or drama, and Palestine. In his blog, he has a collection of pictures about olive and he also wrote a poem about olive. He said that Palestine’s olive is the best among all. Olive also is said to be the best medicine if they are not feeling well or hurt.

Q & A Session

Q: Who is your favourite poet and why?

A: My favourite would be John Donne. I like his poems’ layer style. I also like some other Romantic poets. They used simple language which makes their poems became easier to understand.

Q: What was the style of poetry before the war and how does it changes during the war?

A: They still use the old themes until now. But the war causes the poet to write about what happen in Palestine and about the occupation of Israel to show resistance. It is their way of resisting the occupation.

Q: What is the level of education in Palestine? Did the women or children receive equal rights in education?

A: The level of education is the same as other country. However for Master’s program, the university only offered selected courses such as engineering, education, syariah and few others. There is no women bias in education in Palestine. In fact, the number of female students exceeded the male students.

Q: What is it like in Palestine, especially in Gaza before the war?

A: We led a simple life before the occupation. We depend on agriculture to support our life. The Israeli state that there is no Palestinian even though Israel was established about 50 years ago. Basically before the occupation, we had no university before, maybe a small a college. If we want to continue studies in university, we had to go overseas for it. Basically the life at that time was simple.

Q: How do you relate to other people’s experience which you are able to show the emotions in your writing?

A: We don’t have to be the person who is suffering in order to write about suffering. We have to be creative and create it on our own. If I want to write about “Mom”, do I have to be a mom? You don’t, since you see your own mom, other’s mom, so you can write according to yourself.

-          Before Mr Refaat end his session with us, he read his poems which he had finished while he was in Malaysia which he hasn’t published yet. It is quite an honour to listen to the poem recited by the poet himself.

Comments/Remarks About the Session

Listening to Mr Refaat stories made me realize how lucky I am to be living in a peaceful country. Even though there is dispute in the country here and now, but the environment in Malaysia is still peaceful. We do not suffer from being held to travel to another place. The Palestinian had to suffer a lot in their country. Some of them do not feel anything even though they had lost their home for the second time. They are so strong to survive in this world. They made me want to follow their strong will to live in this world.

Reading the poem and listening to how Mr Refaat tell us how to write poem made me realize that anyone can do it, as long as they have passion in it. In order for us to find our style of writing, we can imitate other poets’ style of writing, but we still need to be ourselves. This made me realize that I should jot down what comes to my mind in order for me to be able to write poems.