Fadwa Tuqan: From Societal Suppression to Poetess of Palestine
By Lama Obeid | On June 30, 2025 | Comments (0)
Despite the challenges and pressures that Palestinian women writers have historically faced from displacement, occupation, and societal pressures, prominent writers have emerged steady and strong, whether in Palestine or exiled in the diaspora. Poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917 – 2003) was one of these women.
Palestinian women writers, like other women writers across the globe, did not have it easy, especially those who lived through the Nakba. This was the 1948 catastrophe when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from historical Palestine (modern day Israel) to Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Added to this displacement were societal pressure and cultural norms that put women at a disadvantage compared to their male peers.
Early life in Nablus
Fadwa Tuqan is now known as “the poetess of Palestine.” She was born in Nablus, a city in northern Palestine, in 1917, into an affluent family who lived in a large home inherited from their ancestors.
Fadwa grew up in a male-dominant household and society, and was shunned by her father — he was hoping his newborn would be a boy. Her mother tried to abort her and threw the “burden” of raising Fadwa onto their housemaid. Her mother took away all her dolls when she was eight, and when Fadwa shared stories using her imagination her mother would brush them off as “nonsense.”
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House of Al-Bayk Tuquan, courtesy of Yalla Falasteen
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Many of her writings described the environment and male-dominated society she grew up in, where “women were prisoners between walls.” Though her family was wealthy and could easily afford her schooling, her brother Yousef removed her from the education system while she was in elementary school due to “societal pressures;” he found out that a boy who was fond of Fadwa was following her home from school.
Her brother Ibrahim went off to study literature at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. After his graduation in 1929, he was determined to help his sister continue her studies. He taught Fadwa the art of rhyming in Arabic poetry. She began submitting her poems to literary magazines in Cairo and Beirut under pseudonyms, gaining self-confidence as her work was accepted and published.
Ibrahim Tuqan, who became a reknowned Palestinian poet in his own right, writing the Arab national poem “Mawtini” (now the national anthem of Iraq), was the only one of her brothers that fully supported her.
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In Jerusalem and London
In 1939, Fadwa left Nablus to live with Ibrahim in Jerusalem, where she finally broke free of the walls in which her family had confined her for so long. In Jerusalem, Fadwa was introduced to a society of poets, writers, and politicians, became active in literary and cultural clubs, and started going to the library and cinema.
In A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography, Fadwa wrote about her difficult and unfair life, including how she contemplated suicide multiple times. In Jerusalem, she began taking English lessons at an evening school at the YMCA so that she could begin reading and self-studying English Literature.
In 1962, Fadwa moved to London for two years where she took courses in English and Literature at Oxford University continuing her self-development and learning journey.
Upon returning from London, Fadwa decided to claim her autonomy, away from the confines of her family and the society in which she had grown up. She built her own house in the west of Nablus, where she continued to live independently.
As with her poetry, she knew her family would never accept her marriage to a stranger from another country. Her first love was Egyptian lyricist and poet Ibrahim Naja, about whom she had written some of her best poetry. Their relationship remains alive through her poetry for him and the love letters they had exchanged.
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Stamp commemorating Fadwa’s centenary
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EXISTENCE
Translated by Michael R. Burch
In solitary life, I was a lost question;
In the encompassing darkness,
my answer was concealed.
You were a bright new star
radiating light from the darkness of the unknown,
revealed by fate.
The other stars rotated around you
—once, twice —
until it came to me,
your unique radiance.
Then the bleak blackness broke
And in the matching tremors
of our two hands
I found my missing answer.
Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
Don’t you remember the coalescence
Of your spirit in flames?
Of my universe with yours?
Of the two poets?
Despite our great distance,
Existence unites us – Existence!
Grieving a beloved brother; and the Nakba
Fadwa witnessed the Nakba in 1948 and didn’t remain silent. She was part of the Jordanian delegation for a peace conference organized by the World Peace Council in Stockholm and later delegations to Holland, the Soviet Union, and China. After the death of her beloved brother and mentor Ibrahim in 1941, her father urged her to write political and national poetry to steer her away from the emptiness she was feeling after losing Ibrahim.
But she resisted and instead published her first poetry collection in 1946, My Brother Ibrahim, as a way to grieve her loss. It was only after her father’s death in 1948 that she start writing nationalist and resistance poetry without anyone’s influence.
Her resistance poetry had such an impact that Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war said that Fadwa’s poetry was the equivalent of facing twenty enemy fighters.
MY SAD CITY
translated by Charlie Huntington
“On the day of Zionist occupation”
The day we saw the death and deception,
The floods fell back,
The windows to heaven closed,
And the city held its breath.
Day the waves retreated, day that
The ugliness of the abyss
Exposed its face to the light.
Hope burned
As an agony of misfortune strangled
My sad city.
Gone are the children and songs;
Not a glimpse, not an echo
The sorrow in my city crawls shamefully,
Staining her steps.
The silence in my city –
Silence like mountains at rest,
Like a dark night, a painful silence
Burdened with the weight of death and defeat.
Alas! Oh, my sad, silent city
Are you thus at harvest time,
Your crops and fruits aflame?
Alas! Oh, what an end!
Alas! Oh, what an end!
Fadwa is considered a feminist of her time; although she was forced to leave elementary school and never completed her education with a degree, she fought her way through her life and career becoming the first Palestinian female poet, publishing eight poetry collections between 1946 and 2000.
Selections of her poetry have been translated into more than five languages, including Hebrew, and her two autobiographies, A Mountainous Journey and The Most Difficult Journey, were translated and published in English in 1990 and 1993 respectively.
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A Mountainous Journey is a compilation of all her journal entries until 1967. In The Most Difficult Journey she speaks of her life under the occupation after the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the 1967 Naksa. A documentary of her life was produced by Palestinian Novelist Liana Badr titled Fadwa: A Poetess from Palestine. Her life was featured on Al Jazeera Documentary, and Ilam Media also produced a short film about her after her death. You can watch it here with English subtitles.
On December 12, 2003, Fadwa passed away in her hometown of Nablus, leaving behind a legacy of political activism, literature, and a new path for Palestinian women writers to follow.
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Contributed by Lama Obeid, a writer from Palestine. Her poem “My Father a Refugee” has been published in the anthology To Lay Sun into a Forest, published by Sidhe Press. Lama enjoys experimenting with poetry and fiction, and hopes to become a published author of an anthology and a memoir in the future. Lama also publishes her writing on her Substack, I Come From There.
Further reading
- 7 Poems by Fadwa Tuqan
- Fadwa Tuqan’s Legacy as a Feminist Icon
- A Romantic Feminist Poet and Reluctant Political Witness
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