Ronny Someck and the Politics of Popular Poetry

Abstract

Ronny Someck's poetry is unique in that it translates canonical Hebrew poetry into popular poetry. It is especially visible in the intertextual relations that Someck's poetry constructs with Yehuda Amichai's canonic poetry. Following Marx, the article analyses Someck's poetry as commodity structure as fetish. Someck brilliantly—and broadly—utilizes the figure of the stereotype; but in contrast with the accepted norm, he relies on the contradiction at the basis of the fetish to write subversive political poetry. Avoiding the binarism existing between resistance and affirmation, in his poems Someck develops a dialectic discourse that keeps rewriting the popular text as commodity existing in the circular rotation of selling and buying. This dialectic is manifested in the mode in which the fluid, hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity is represented in his poems. Through his poetry, Someck constitutes an inexhaustible space that allows the poems to develop subversiveness, which operates under the false appearance of total, coherent spaces. As part of Israeli culture, it could have been expected that this poetry would be stereotypical, adopting an Orientalist outlook. But Someck's poems develop, instead, an unstable gaze that undermines Orientalism's binarism. The lack of binarism is expressed in Someck's poems through a dual-layered structure; the two layers, one figurative and one literal, are separate and continuous and carry out complex interrelations. Within this relational frame the literal, violent layer punctures the figurative layer, and then materializes via political violence. But instead of relating to the Israeli occupation as an arena of a binary confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, it relies on its Mizrahi identity to destroy this binarism, and thus develops a flexible moral and political stance. Through writing his poetry as a "minor literature," Someck can maneuver between its two linguistic options—deterritorialization on one hand and reterritorialization on the other. A very impressive example is the poem about the Israeli Arab-Druze poet Samih El Kasem, in which he highlights the poet's guitar-playing in Hebrew as a major language. The deterritorialization in Samih El Kasem's poetry is expressed in the subversive deterritorialization of Someck's poem. The linguistic deterritorialization is visible when Someck defines his poetry as a stammer and thus gives voice to the oppressed and the rebels.