My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness
A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century
This first biography of a Palestinian writer also provides a moving account of the ways “ordinary” individuals are swept up by the floodtides of both war and peace
Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged.
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today.”
As it places Muhammad Ali’s life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as “among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy.” In an era when talk of the “Clash of Civilizations” dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human.
Reviews
?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, John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature in the Divinity School, The University of Chicago -- Michael Sells
?Adina Hoffman's portrait of Taha Muhammad Ali brings to life character after character, each one viewed with the author''s singular humanity. The poet himself is a figure of great originality and integrity, and his life becomes a mirror of a world which we have glimpsed, until now, largely in broken fragments. I hope this landmark book will be widely, and carefully, read. W.S. Merwin -- W.S. Merwin
"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, courageous, and deeply honest."?Gerald Stern, National Book Award?winner for This Time: New and Selected Poems -- Gerald Stern
"Reading Adina Hoffman''s remarkable book we are consoled that, in the face of terrible brutalities and sufferings, the enduring power of poetry might restore in words?and celebrate?a measure of what has been lost in reality."?Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran -- Azar Nafisi
"Adina Hoffman's portrait of Taha Muhammad Ali brings to life character after character, each one viewed with the author''s singular humanity. The poet himself is a figure of great originality and integrity, and his life becomes a mirror of a world which we have glimpsed, until now, largely in broken fragments. I hope this landmark book will be widely, and carefully, read."-W.S. Merwin -- W.S. Merwin
"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."-Mara Rosa Menocal, author of The Ornament of the World -- Maria Rosa Menocal
"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, John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature in the Divinity School, The University of Chicago
