Palestinian Feminist Poetics of Resistance: Reviving Phantomized Political Prisoners

Fadwa Touqan is an influential figure in the history of Palestinian resistance art and literature, and throughout her lifetime, she became known as the “Poet of Palestine.” In her poem “From Behind the Bars,” Touqan presents five thematically interconnected poems that represent the innumerable amount of Palestinian political detainees that Israel illegally and often secretly captures and imprisons without charge or trial. For the purposes of this post, I will be looking at the third section, “3. From the Diary of “_”.” In this section, Touqan embodies and re-narrates the voices of phantomized political prisoners across Palestine whose stories and lives are destroyed and obscured by Israel in their attempts to safeguard their settler colonial regime, as “Israeli carceral policies are not solely intended to incarcerate prisoners’ bodies and minds, but also to reshape the Palestinian subject and force it into submission.”^[1]

Touqan begins “From Behind the Bars” with “A salute to our sons and daughters, the fighters that have been swallowed up by Israeli prisons,” immediately emphasizing the depths of Israel’s detainment of political prisoners and its predication on phantomizing them to the broader world.^[2] Under an administrative detention, the Israeli military can hold a detainee for up to six months without a charge, and, as a result, Israel has detained over 800,000 Palestinians since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.^[3] In Israel’s perspective, these are peoples that must disappear for the sake of their settler colonial project and, as such, an essential part of Palestinian resistance literature is refusing this act of disappearance and re-narrating the phantoms left in the shadows of these detention centers, regardless of whether their physical bodies are still there or not.

In “3. From the Diary of “_,”” Touqan begins with a note in parentheses, stating, “(There in Israel, our prisoners whom we know nothing about).”^[4] In this moment, I understand Touqan enacting what Saidiya Hartman coined “critical fabulation”: the creation of a counter narrative that is not technically factual but is informed by the author’s interpretation of historical records and archival materials.^[5] What is absent in those records? What has been discarded or not entered? How has a colonial and racialized archive impacted the material available, and the histories told within those documents? In the poem, Touqan embodies an unknown and unnamed phantomized political prisoner and critically fabulates an affective image of what their detention does to their mental and physical state. Touqan writes:

From the ravine pours silent angry darkness
and night spreads its large sails here
the light of the stars and the dawn
cannot sneak in
A night without light
where our voices are lost
and the echo dies
and time cannot move (lines 1-8)^[6]

Touqan’s imagery in this stanza places the audience into a negative affective space through her embodiment of the phantomized political prisoner in solitary confinement. A common torture tactic by the Israeli military, political prisoners are detained in a cell as narrow and dark and silent as a ravine, where any access to the light of the day and the night are denied, which in turn denies temporal regularity to them. As Touqan emphasizes at the end of this stanza, the detainee is completely isolated. There is no one to talk to or listen to, and so the physical loss of the detainee’s voice can be the literal loss of their voice gone hoarse attempting to fill the void through their speech which echoes back at them, mimicking a conversation that mitigates their feelings of isolation and reaffirms their sense of identity and time in space until their voice was lost. The lost voices of the detainees can also represent the metaphorical loss of their voices, in that, though they do not lose the physical ability to speak, the emotional toil of being detained and isolated leads them to losing their sense of purpose. They do not have the mental voice nor emotional strength to voice themselves in ways that affirm their existence in a space that wants them to become a permanent phantom and disappear. Touqan’s embodiment of this voice, be it a layered amalgamation of multiple phantomized political prisoners in different spaces or one meant to symbolize the many, offers a mode of re-narrating and revitalizing the detainee’s personal and political identity in the face of the temporal constraints of the detention center.

Touqan continues to illustrate this theme of temporality in the second stanza, writing:

Time has lost its shoes here
Its stood still
turning around the axis of the stillness and boredom
Confusing days and seasons
Is it the season for planting?
Is it the season for harvest?
Is it — who can say? No news
and the jailor stands, his face a stone
his eyes a stone
Robbing from us the sun, robbing the moon (lines 9-18)^[7]

Time is frozen in this cell, just as the detainees are; there is nowhere to go and nowhere to hide from the mental and physical violence that defines their detention. There is no way to know or keep track of the seasons, which also means there is no way to keep track of the outside world, and what stage the families, friends, partners, etc. of the detainee are at in their life. Are they getting ready to plant or to harvest? These questions, just like all questions would be, are left unanswered. No news is ever received, furthering their isolation from the real world and what life outside of the cell can look like; pushing them further into the darkness and further into becoming a disappeared phantomized political prisoner as the physical space and temporal limbo of the cell consumes them. This consumption is completed by the Israeli jailor who only extracts from the detainee and is responsible for his entrapment in the cell, and subsequently, his loss of the light of the sun and the moon.

While the poem does not include a miraculous escape or direct affirmations of the detainee’s strength, Touqan’s critical fabulation and embodiment of this narrative begins to re-narrate and revitalize the image and tangible actor of the phantomized political prisoner in Palestine whose life is similarly constricted by space, temporality, light, touch, smell, etc. in reality. The re-narration and revitalization embodied in Touqan’s revolutionary poetics hails us to bear witness to these colonial violences and search for the absences of these disappeared and obscured lives in the archive and the current moment, both for the sake of the originary life itself and also what can be learned when community sources of knowledge, strength, and steadfastness are recovered alongside the phantomized political prisoner.

^[1]Basil Farraj. “Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing from Captivity.” CLCWeb, vol. 25, no. 1, 2025, pp. 14. ProQuest, https://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/palestinian-prisoners-smuggling-freedom-writing/docview/3270298356/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4877.

^[2] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[3] Yara Hawari, “The Systematic Torture of Palestinians in Israeli Detention,” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, 2019. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-systematic-torture-of-palestinians-in-israeli-detention/

^[4] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[5] ​​Saidiya V. Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019.

^[6] Fadwa Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[7] Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun, pp. 40.