Hagar's Prayer in the Desert and Great Bracha in the High: A Dissenting and Decentralizing Voice in Israeli Poetry

Abstract: This essay addresses the power of poetry to express dissenting voices in a society that demands ideological unity in the name of collective survival. The revival of Hebrew has been intimately associated with Zionist cultural politics. However, Hebrew poetry has continuously challenged the dominant ideological precepts of the political movements of Zionism. This essay focuses on reading the poetry of Bracha Serri, a feminist poet who was born in Sanaa, Yemen in 1940 and passed away in Jerusalem in 2013. The religious education of her childhood, her academic studies, and the period she spent in Northern California have inspired the unabashed and highly original feminist voice of her poems. Her religious idiom powerfully revolutionizes the patriarchal hierarchies embodied in traditional Jewish religion and produces an innovative religious language which not only addresses a divine female figure in traditional sacred language but also boldly shatters the boundaries of gender. Finally, it also uplifts the poet herself from an oppressed position dictated by gender hierarchy as well as the ethnic injustices characterizing Israeli society. Serri was not afraid to shock and to attack dominant norms. Not only is her poetry antimilitaristic but it also identifies the common interests of Palestinian women and Mizrahi Israeli women, as well as women in general. In her poetic language, she also admiringly incorporates associations from the Black struggle in the United States. Her choice to avoid publishing her poetry at leading Israeli publishing houses and journals and to instead publish most of her literary work by herself was not merely an act of dissent, but also constituted an act of decentralization by establishing a center of her own that resisted the dominant centers of power. Serri's poetry is a particularly beautiful, moving, forceful, and important voice among the voices critically responding to Zionism.