In Memory of Salma Khadra Jayyusi
With great sadness the SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies has received the news that the distinguished poet, scholar, translator, and anthologist Salma Khadra Jayyusi departed this life on 20 April 2023, having just celebrated her one hundredth birthday.
Born in 1923 in al-Salt, Jordan, to a Palestinian father from Safad and a Lebanese mother, Salma was educated in Jerusalem before proceeding to the American University in Beirut where she graduated with a degree in Arabic and English literature. Following her marriage to the Jordanian-Palestinian diplomat Burhan Jayyusi, her life took an international turn as she joined her husband on postings in Rome, Madrid, Baghdad, and London. Throughout this time, she remained actively engaged in the Arabic literary scene which was undergoing a period of crisis and self-renewal under the impact of colonialism and the Palestinian nakba of 1948. Salma participated in the ongoing debate with her contributions to leading literary journals such as ShiꜤr and in 1960 published her first collection of poetry Return from the Dreamy Fountain (Al-ꜤAwda min al-NabꜤ al-Ḥālim) which was composed in the newly conceived free verse form.
Her preoccupation with the development of Arabic poetry at this crucial time of transformation led her to embark on a hitherto unprecedented undertaking: to give a full account of what she called ‘the enormous changes in technique, form, tone, attitude, emotion, imagery, diction and theme which Arabic poetry had undergone since its revival in the 19th century’. This topic was to be the subject of her SOAS PhD which she completed in 1970 and which was subsequently published in two volumes under the title Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Brill, Leiden, 1977). It became a standard reference work and has been rated as ‘one of the best historical and analytical studies of Arabic poetry of the last hundred years’ (Issa J. Boullata).
Salma’s doctoral research marked the onset of a distinguished academic career which saw her engage in teaching positions and visiting professorships in several universities in the Middle East and the United States. In the process she came to notice how unaware the English-speaking world and the West in general were about Arabic literature and culture, and how widely her own Palestinian heritage was ignored if not altogether denied. As a result, she decided to devote her remarkable resources of energy and determination to another large-scale enterprise: to set up the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA) through which she aimed to make a representative selection of Arabic poetry and prose available in English, with focus on key works by individual authors and the production of anthologies on a range of different literary genres and geographical regions.
Founded in 1980, PROTA led to the publication of dozens of volumes which have become staples of university libraries and have served ever since to introduce generations of students, including those at SOAS, to the Arabic literary tradition. As if this was not enough, Salma in 1990 supplemented PROTA with ‘East-West Nexus’, a parallel bridge-building enterprise which aimed to make major Arabic scholarly works available to English readers. Establishing these two projects and running them successfully over several decades required a ceaseless effort of interaction with many quarters: poets, writers, academics, translators, publishers, as well as donors and sources of funding in East and West. Without her persistence and her ability to persuade, encourage and inspire none of this could have been achieved.
During these years Salma remained in regular touch with her friends and colleagues at SOAS. During her visits to London, she stayed with her son Usama whose kind and generous welcome to the many who converged on his home to see his mother must not go unmentioned. In 1993 Salma joined SOAS to give the keynote address at the Qasida Conference, an international gathering which had been convened to document the influence which the Arabic poetic form has exerted on poetry composed in languages throughout the Islamic world, from West Africa to Indonesia. Her address, entitled ‘The Persistence of the Qasida Form’, provides the opening chapter of the two-volume publication which resulted from the conference (Qasida Poetry in Islamic Africa and Asia, ed. by S. Sperl and C. Shackle, 1996).
Among the many books inspired and edited by Salma two stand out in particular. The first is her 850-page Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (1992) which includes poetry and prose by some 90 poets, novelists and short-story writers. As Salma notes in her substantial introductory chapter (a prime example of what has become known as a ‘Jayyusi introduction’), many of these authors ‘have risen to the forefront of contemporary Arabic letters’ by ‘leading the way in inventiveness and change’. The book provides an indispensable record of 20th century Palestinian cultural history and firmly establishes the presence of Palestine on the international literary stage.
The second is The Legacy of Muslim Spain, a truly monumental volume designed by Salma from the outset to be ‘as comprehensive as possible’ in its depiction of the Islamic civilisation of medieval Spain. To this effect she rallied the expertise of some 50 leading authorities on the subject whose contributions cover virtually every realm of cultural activity attested during this exceptionally fertile period, from science and technology via philosophy, religion and the arts down to culinary culture and gardening. The substantial section on language and literature includes two chapters on Hispano-Arabic poetry authored by Salma herself. Published under the auspices of PROTA, the Legacy of Muslim Spain is, in the first instance, motivated by the same urge that caused Salma to bring her great translation enterprise into being: to foster awareness of the Arabic / Islamic heritage and its achievements and thereby to change attitudes and promote mutual understanding. But the true, spiritual goal of her endeavour goes further than that. As she explains in the concluding paragraph of the foreword to her 1,100-page volume on Muslim Spain:
The basic aim of PROTA is not to bring out differences, but to assert the unity and indivisibility of human creativity, which is the only unity that can be achieved in a world still so aggressively divided.
In the same spirit Salma declared in the opening page of her reflections on the Arabic qasida:
True lovers of poetry cannot fail to see the splendour of every aesthetic form: they are versatile, mobile, open to every kind of beautiful utterance, endlessly captivated by the poignant poetic passage in any language and in any form.
This all-embracing, universalist and truly integrative vision characterises Salma’s life’s work as a whole and makes her into an example and a beacon of hope for all those who share her faith in the greater unity of man. She was a patriot in desperate times for her country, but above all else she was a humanist in the deepest sense.
With the untimely death of her son Usama in 2015 Salma’s visits to London came to an end. She settled in Amman where she remained, still active and surrounded by the love and care of her daughters May and Lena, both of them scholars and translators in their own right who had repeatedly lent their mother an invaluable helping hand in the production of her books. The last one of these is Ṣafawnā maꜤa al-Dahr (‘Serene with Time’, 2021), an eagerly awaited collection of poems which includes excerpts from her first Diwan as well as her most recent works. Among them is a poem written in memory of her beloved son Usama which gives vent to her grief at this parting. Purged by deep sorrow, Salma’s own inimitable, indomitable voice arises once more, and she concludes:
This is me, a gipsy to the end,
Tender, except when the truth is at stake,
Intractable, with Gabriel filled,
The doyenne of lovers,
The enemy of potentates,
A wave flowing mightily with its waters,
Rising and falling,
Limpidly surging,
Never dispersing.
هذا أنا غجرية ٌ إلى الأبدْ
ليّنة إلا على الحقْ
مشاكسة ، مملوءة ٌ بجبريلْ
أميرة العشاقِ
عـدوة السلاطينْ
موجة تتلوّى قويةً بمياهها
تعلو وتنخفضُ ،
تروق وتزيدُ ،
ولا تتبـدّدْ.
Photo credit: Osama Silwadi
