NABLUS, West Bank, 14 December 2003 — The best-known Palestinian poetess, Fadwa Tuqan, 86, died Friday night in Nablus, the West Bank, her family said. She died in hospital, where she had been in a coma for several days following a stroke.
Born in 1917 to one of Nablus’ leading families, Tuqan, whose work has won several international prizes, knew Palestine under British rule, the creation of the state of Israel, the occupation and Palestinian autonomy. In an insert published in main Palestinian newspapers, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization presented their condolences to her family, referring to her as “Palestine’s great poetess.”
The refined poet started her career writing about nature, love, loneliness, and sadness before turning to nationalist themes after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
One of the rare feminine voices in Palestinian poetry, her works tell of the struggle of her people stripped of their land and liberty, describing the cruelty of the occupation. Although she grew up in a environment favorable to artistic ferment — her brother, the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, introduced her to poetry — she suffered in her ultra-traditional family as an unwanted child, with a despotic father, a submissive mother and not allowed to go to school. In “Mountainous Journey”, she tells a moving story of her childhood and adolescence enclosed by family rigidities and rules. The power of her vocation as a poet and the help of her brother enabled her to find personal freedom and ultimately express her solidarity with her torn people.
Among her most famous poems are “Self-portrait” and “Martyrs of the Intifada”.
“It would be enough for me to die in my country, to be buried, to dissolve and be annihilated,” she wrote in one of her poems. She will be buried today afternoon in Nablus.