Double Agent in Hebrew
What does a poet gain when he loses himself in the world? – A unique creative privilege. Omri Herzog hails Salman Masalha’s first book in Hebrew, In Place, as a masterpiece.
. . . I asked myself, what poetic and political task is given to someone who writes in a language that is not his mother tongue. In 1975, the French intellectuals Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari coined the term “minor literature” in the context of their study of Franz Kafka. They argued that the major effect of a ‘minor’ text, i.e. one that is written in a language that is not the original language of the writer’s culture, is of de-territorialization, meaning a physical shift or change of direction that the text undergoes from the original language to the language of exile or the language of the new territory. The minor text does not have a place of its own; it functions in a space that is between given spaces – the space of the source language and the space in which the work is a visitor.
The first book in Hebrew by poet and literary scholar Salman Masalha, In Place, presents this movement:
I write in the Hebrew language
which is not my mother tongue
to lose myself in the world. He who does not
get lost, will never find the whole
and this movement in turns creates a poetic experience that is rare in the complexity of its language, emotion and consciousness. This slim book of Hebrew is, to my taste, a masterpiece.
The unique language status of Masalha’s poetry allows the conduct of negotiations with the fluid political relations that define the rules of belonging to the communal landscapes that are inherent in the Hebrew language. These are relations of negotiation that constitute a political burden – which can sometimes overwhelm certain minor works – but also afford a creative privilege, because the poetic manipulation is carried out not on stable and pre-known language materials, but rather on the fact of their permanence and familiarity.
Masalha’s poems devote themselves to a double alienation effect: that which is inherent in the poetic medium itself and that which is inherent in the use of every routine of description or grammatical construction that sets it in motion. Masalha, the double agent of the speaker in the language, exploits it in a finely tuned, self-aware and sophisticated way, and enlists extraordinary creative and expressive freedom. He writes:
As I have no government, with
or without a head, and there is no
chairman sitting on my head, I can
under such extenuating circumstances
sometimes allow myself to be human, a bit free.
Translated by Vivian Eden
Published in Haaretz, June 18, 2004.
