Taha in Barcelona: Spain learns of the life of a Palestinian poet

Taha Muhammad Ali felt the lifelong pain of displacement after Israeli forces took control of his beloved village in 1948. A pared-back one-man show of his life leaves the audience thinking of Gaza.

Spanish actor Lluís Marco

Taha in Barcelona: Spain learns of the life of a Palestinian poet

Samer Abou Hawwach

last update on 24 Apr 2025

The life story of Palestinian short story writer and poet Taha Muhammad Ali, as narrated by writer Amer Hlehel in a play (titled TAHA) that reaches back to years gone by, recounts the story of an ‘ordinary’ man who never stopped dreaming of returning to his village.

The play portrays the intimate story of a man who once dreamed of building homes and shops in his native village of Saffuriyya, near Nazareth. His life became an ongoing reflection of longing for that very village, from which he and his family were displaced in the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, before he had turned 17.

When Israeli forces took control of Saffuriyya, he fled with his family to southern Lebanon, but his father felt they could not survive in exile, so they returned covertly.

The play, adapted and directed by the Barcelona-based Palestinian theatre director Mohamed Bitari, was part of a series of Palestinian theatrical productions under the banner ‘Barcelona Calls Palestine,’ staged at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya.

Bitari, together with assistant director Susana Barranco and composer Neus Ballbé, were faithful to Hlehel’s script, and the production’s austerity is deliberate: a single actor, a few travel bags, and some scattered chairs. The minimalism accentuates the narrative (the poet’s story) as something that can stand alone without visual extravagance or excessive melodrama.

The play’s purpose is not to present Taha (1931–2011) as one of the Palestinian resistance poets, as he is sometimes described alongside Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Ezzedine al-Manasrah. Rather, it is to show him as a Palestinian whose experience mirrors that of every Palestinian expelled from their land, who then spends a lifetime rebuilding that homeland in their imagination and their language.

Commanding presence

The voice of the poet is brought to life through the commanding presence of veteran Spanish actor Lluís Marco. Wounded and fractured, his voice at times is laced with bitter sarcasm, at others it brims with seething anger. Yet it never succumbs to mythologising the Palestinian tragedy, despite the pull of such myth-making.

The play’s power lies in its ability to distil the unimaginable—its historical roots, its entwinement with occupation, dispossession, and the seizure of land—into a narrative closer to a folk tale. It evokes the oral storytelling of Palestinian elders recounting their memories to grandchildren in refugee camps.

As the actor reads directly from Hlehel's script, clutching its pages on stage, the illusion of theatre is consciously broken. The performer remains an actor, the stage remains a stage, and the departed poet remains a memory.

Bitari's directorial approach does not seek to transcend this reality. Instead, it urges the audience to listen, fully aware of the dissonance between what is heard and what is seen, and between the layered complexity of the Palestinian experience and its often-inexpressible nature.

Taha's experience mirrors that of every Palestinian refugee who spends their lifetime rebuilding a homeland in their imagination

Marco speaks in the voice of a young Taha Muhammad Ali, during the fraught years of his adolescence, as his father grew increasingly fearful that the occupation would soon reach Saffuriyya, having already engulfed Acre and Haifa. The young man's tone carries an air of innocent disbelief: how could land simply be taken? How could one wake up to find it no longer beneath their feet?

It defied logic, and yet it happened. One day, Saffuriyya became 'Tzippori' and its people were dispersed. Some would return to Nazareth, settling in a district that, ironically, came to be known as 'Hay al-Safafira' (the Saffuriyya neighbourhood).

Through these plain yet profound reflections, the true catastrophe of the Palestinian people is revealed. Many, including descendants, still struggle to grasp (or choose to ignore) that a new world order emerged after the Second World War, and that the price of the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews would be paid with their land, their children's lives, and their future.

A humble man

The stage portrayal of Taha remains faithful to the man. Untouched by grandiose rhetoric, he had no desire to craft a mythic, Sisyphean image from exile or from the impossibility of return. Nor did he put himself at the forefront of the Palestinian poetic movement, never seeking to be one of its principal narrators. This may explain why, for so long, he remained on its margins.

Taha's status within the literary scene was more closely tied to his personal charm and the deep friendships he shared with contemporaries such as Darwish and al-Qasim than to any sweeping cultural project. As a result, he remained somewhat on the margins, never gaining the widespread recognition afforded to the so-called "resistance poets," and never claiming to speak on behalf of the "Palestinian cause".

Even the oft-repeated anecdote of a poetry evening in London, attended by the Arab world's most celebrated poets of the time (including Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Unsi al-Hajj), is recounted by Amer Hlehel with a tone of humour. It is tinged with Taha's discomfort at finding himself among such towering literary figures, and his embarrassment at standing before them to read his modest verses.

The poem he selected that night was not a resistance poem in the conventional sense. There was no defiance, no call-to-arms, no echo of violence. Instead, he confessed to being unable to kill his enemy, because he imagined that enemy had a mother, a lover, and children.

In the end, the only revenge left to the dispossessed was to forget the usurper of the land, to behave as though he had never existed. A kind of poetic justice, perhaps, befitting a humble man whose dreams were confined to reuniting with his beloved, gaining his father's approval, and one day returning to his village.

He could not mirror the image of his oppressor; he was neither a killer nor a land-grabber, and he rejected the language of violence and exclusion. And yet, Taha's story remains suffused with sorrow.

Taha's story need not evoke sorrow only. It offers undeniable proof of a simple truth: the impossibility of occupation.

Echoes into the present

Although the play was written years before 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war of extermination, it is impossible to watch the production today outside the context of daily massacres. It seems to serve as an unwritten chapter in Taha's life story, a continuation of what began in 1948, and the heavy price paid by him, his family, and his generation.

Perhaps the audience sensed this. Perhaps they wanted to. The long applause that followed the performance seemed to express not only sympathy but also a quiet, collective recognition of a truth already known to all. It was not a demand to reframe that truth, but an affirmation of its enduring reality.

The reason behind the audience's deep engagement—and indeed the source of the play's quiet strength, despite its simplicity—lies in its indirect response to a deeply unsettling question: why did 7 October 2023 happen? Furthermore, can both the event and its ongoing aftermath be understood in isolation from their historical context? Plainly, it cannot. The story has deep, undeniable roots.

Everything that has followed the Nakba, right up to today, is the continuation of a single, unbroken narrative. Today's events are the unfolding of a new Nakba before our eyes, as if the occupation is now completing what it left unfinished in 1948 and 1967, only this time, it is more brazen, more explicit, and far bloodier.

Gaza is never mentioned in the play, yet it hovers silently over the performance. It is felt not through the script but in the way the audience receives the work. In its suffering, Gaza is central to the narrative, folded into the emotional texture of the performance.

Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP — A man raises the Palestinian flag as he watches the return of displaced people to northern Gaza via the Netzarim Corridor.

This is because Taha, himself a refugee within his own homeland, is not a rare exception. He represents every Palestinian today, regardless of geography or location. And while his story is undeniably tragic, it need not solely evoke sorrow. On the contrary, seen from another angle—and in a way the occupation never anticipates—it offers undeniable proof of a simple truth: the impossibility of occupation.

No matter how enduring it appears, it remains temporary. Taha's father understood this profoundly. On his deathbed, he offered parting words to each of his sons, practical advice tied to daily life. Yet when he came to Taha, he said nothing. Why, Taha asked. "Your dreams are too great to be confined to a will," his father replied.

Amer Hlehel's script never states it outright, but Taha's dream is the dream of all poets who possess the power of language and memory and pass them down through generations. It is the dream that the land will return, the occupation will end, and the name Saffuriyya will once again be restored to the land itself.

In the end, Palestine resembles Taha: a poet born after several of his siblings died at birth—a life that seemed almost impossible, as though existence itself had resisted him. The play begins with the line: "In my life, nothing came easy. I came into the world despite its will; it never wanted me." Yet he was born. He carried his name, lived, loved, and wrote poetry. And perhaps that alone stands as the most profound act of resistance, the most powerful answer to occupation.

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