Taha Muhammad Ali: among the world's great poetsTaha Muhammad Ali is an extraordinary man—a little-known but highly original poet whose work has captivated some of the world’s best writers. Some would describe him a self-educated peasant who takes nearly as much pride in his Nazareth souvenir shop as in his poetry—a survivor shaped by both the complete destruction of his childhood village and the unabashed delight he takes in his art.

Adina Hoffman is a Jewish American writer who has lived in Jerusalem for sixteen years. She is a respected essayist, critic, editor, and publisher whose sense of the world has been shaped by a life spent in both the U.S. and the Middle East.

Her new book My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness not only recounts Taha Muhamad Ali’s life story, but also reveals much about other Palestinian poets and writers of his generation, including Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Michel Haddad, Emile Habiby and Rashid Hussein. Very little of this information has been available in any language but Arabic until now.

New biography: recounts history of Palestinian poets in the 20th centuryIn April 2009, Yale University Press marks National Poetry Month with the publication of Hoffman’s remarkable biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, a book that defies both categories and stereotypes. The first biography of a Palestinian writer to be published in English, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century brings to light a fascinating literary world, captures with nuance and feeling a community scarred by conflict and yet brimming with life, and tells with honesty and courage a story whose vague outlines are known by all but whose human realities are often buried by politics and distance.

Adina Hoffman will read from and discuss her book at Levantine Cultural Center on Wednesday, April 15, 7-9 pm. Space is limited and advance RSVPs are suggested.

Call Levantine Cultural Center at 310.657.5511.

Ms. Hoffman will autograph copies of her biography, available for purchase at the center.

More About Taha Muhammad Ali and Palestinian Culture

Hoffman approaches Taha Muhammad Ali’s life with a novelist’s eye for detail and a detective’s fascination with getting to the bottom of dramatic events. She reconstructs with clarity and empathy his lost childhood village, Saffuriyya, his terrified flight by foot to Lebanon as the village was bombed during the 1948 war, the painful splintering of his family as borders hardened, and his efforts to build a new life without forgetting Saffuriyya. It is a story of loss and frustration, of hunger, death, and separation, but also one filled with wonder, grit, humor, and even joy.

Young poets and writers: Emile Habiby, Rashid Hussein, Mahmoud Darwish (l-r)Few Westerners are aware of the power of poetry in contemporary Palestinian culture. Overcoming harsh material and political conditions, Taha Muhammad Ali and his fellow writers have kept alive a passionate drive to forge art out of their predicament. The most popular Palestinian poets are famous throughout the Arab world, beloved for their public articulation of their people’s struggles—and while the late-blooming Taha Muhammad Ali is a poet of a more exuberantly idiosyncratic sort, Hoffman places his life in the dynamic context of the lives of his predecessors, friends, and peers. Her linked portraits of the leading Palestinian writers of the last century provide a startling panorama of a singular literary world that has, until now, remained basically unknown to English-language readers.

More essentially, Hoffman presents a tactile and often wrenching account of the ways “ordinary” individuals are swept up by the flood tides of history. The story that emerges is, like Taha Muhammad Ali’s own poetry, at once profoundly local and utterly universal. In an era when talk of the “clash of civilizations” dominates, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness offers something entirely different: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is layered, intimate, and above all else, deeply human. A challenge to entrenched beliefs, this profoundly original, moving, and thoughtful book is likely to shake the walls that divide individuals, cultures, and peoples.

For more background on Palestinian poets, writers and other important figures, see the Palestine Academic Society for the Study of Palestinian Affairs, based in Jerusalem.


Advance Praise for My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness


“From Adina Hoffman’s extraordinary book, I have not only learned about the life of that wise, sweet, cunning, superbly gifted and totally original Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, but I have learned——more than ever before——about Jewish and Arab history in Palestine. The book is heartbreaking, riveting, and beautifully written. Moreover it’s one of a kind.” ——Gerald Stern, National Book Award winner for This Time: New and Selected Poems


“Luminous…Hoffman is a perceptive reader of [Taha Muhammad Ali’s] work (which she places in the context of a dynamic Palestinian literary scene), appreciating its formal inventiveness, its dapplings of melancholy and exuberance, and its grounding in the pungent details and vernacular of village life. Looking past the usual strident politics, Hoffman presents readers with a subtle, moving evocation of the human realities of the Palestinian experience, rooted in land and memory.” ——Publishers Weekly, Starred Review


“Adina Hoffman’s writing is historical magic. She relates world-scale political history on a human scale, so that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ conflict is rendered, with clarity and fairness, the story of one family, one village, one exodus, one return. At the end of the day, the meaning of this history is explored and contemplated in the ways a great novel achieves that kind of contemplation. A series of brilliantly told and searing stories, this is at once a page-turner and a book to be savored.” ——María Rosa Menocal, author of The Ornament of the World


“Adina Hoffman has given us a superbly composed meditation upon memory, truth, and conflict in the Middle East. The texture of her prose, the improbable transformations of key characters, and above all their human depth and complexity, contribute to a luminous portrait of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali and of his world. I would place My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy.” ——Michael Sells, author of Approaching the Qur’an

Questions for Adina Hoffman

Q: Where does the title of your book come from?

A: It’s from the last two lines of a marvelous poem by Taha Muhammad Ali called “Warning.” In their simple yet somehow intricate way, these words go to the heart of both Taha’s exuberance and his melancholy. The balance he’s playing with there is a key both to his sly art and to his singular character. Though I’m not sure he intended this, the lines also quietly open out to describe the paradoxical situation in which many Palestinians find themselves—especially after 1948, and especially inside Israel.

Q: How did you become acquainted with Taha Muhammad Ali’s work?

A: I’ve lived in Jerusalem for the past sixteen years and am one of the editors and publishers of Ibis Editions, a small press that’s based there and that first published Taha’s work in English. It was clear to me immediately that Taha was a remarkable poet. Soon after meeting him, I came to realize that he was also a remarkable person with a remarkable story.

Q: Was there anything particularly exciting about your research?

A: It entailed a very dynamic kind of detective work: not surprisingly, the same events sound quite different when related in Arabic, Hebrew, or English, and I needed to piece these versions together. My role as historical sleuth continued as I attempted to connect the dots in the archival record with the memories of the dozens of people—peasants, poets, military commanders—I interviewed.

Q: Is the focus on Muhammad Ali alone?

A: Not at all. This is in all ways a Life and Times—the chronicle of a family, a village, a culture. It’s also the saga of many other Palestinian writers and of certain Jewish Israelis whose lives have intersected with theirs, for better or worse. Because this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first biography of a Palestinian writer to be published in any language, I felt strongly that I needed to offer up portraits of a whole range of poets and novelists. This was important not only to put Taha’s life and work in perspective but also because so many of these writers have led absolutely fascinating lives—lives the West, for the most part, knows almost nothing about.


Biographer Adina HoffmanAbout the Author

Adina Hoffman is the author of the widely praised House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood about which Publishers Weekly said “the writing is as poignant and layered as the subjects she writes about” and which Kirkus called “steadily perceptive and brimming with informed passion.” Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, the Boston Globe, and Raritan, among many other periodicals. She is also a former film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post and one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press that publishes the literature of the Levant. She lives in Jerusalem.