The No - Man ’ s - Land of Language

What does it mean to write when you inhabit the fraught borderline between Hebrew and Arabic? Well, it depends on whom you ask. In a Hebrew poem insisting that strangers can be friends, the Palestinian Israeli poet Salman Masalha infuses the statement “Ani kotev ‘ivrit,” “I write Hebrew,” with myriad shades of wonder and possibility.3 In an opposing poetic maneuver, Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Moroccanborn Jewish Israeli, challenges his readers by declaring (in Hebrew), “Ani kotev lakhem shirim/belashon ashdodit/ shelo tavinu mila”: “I write you poems in Ashdodian,” a nonexistent language, “so you won’t understand a word.”4 These antithetical gestures, that of the Palestinian Arab who embraces Hebrew and the Moroccan Jew who disavows it, are mirror images of one another, at once equal and opposite. Both are provocative in their unexpected disruption of the norms defining language, identity, and belonging in the State of Israel. More subtly, the two poetic declarations are tempered by the muteness of the other language, Arabic— the mother tongue of both poets, concealed but not absent. What is the place of Arabic in these two Hebrew poems, with their crisscrossings