Poetry and the Politics of Resistance and Revolution: The Route to Resistance as Transformation in Tamim Al-Barghouti’s “In Jerusalem” and “In the Arab World, Live”

This interdisciplinary study highlights the interdependency between poetry and political activism. Reviewing resistance, the researcher develops her literary criticism of the two poems in the light of the views of Steven Duncombe, James Scott, Charles Tripp and David Jefferess. A study of cultural resistance maintains a perspective of Gramsci’s war of position/ war of manoeuver and shows that opposition can be elaborated into political activism. Resistance as opposition attacks colonial capitalism and economic fascism which foster a Manichean dualism of the social divisions between the othered poor and the dominant rich. Examining undeclared resistance, there is a discrepancy between the hidden and the public records of the text, therefore the researcher should be aware of the techniques of infrapolitical writing so as to understand the messages written between the lines. Being intertwined with revolutions, resistance art intensifies traumatic pain so as to lead to its redemption. Resistance as transformation advocates a change of the policies which do not maintain human equality such as colonialism and state capitalism, thus defending human liberation. In the two poems, a poetics of insurgency and transformative revolution emanate from an experience of suppression. The poet’s rebellion against the colonial existence motivates a decolonial transformation paradigm. Similarly, cultural hegemony and class stratification encourage a counter-hegemonic action against the institutionalized oppression of civil society.