Political Readings of the Hagar Narratives in Poems By Jewish Women

Abstract: The biblical story of Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant, whom she gave to her husband, Abraham, as a concubine, appears in the Book of Genesis, Chapters 16 and 20. This article discusses poems written by modern Jewish women poets that use the Hagar narrative to comment on the conflict between the Jews, the descendants of Sarah, and the Arabs, the descendants of Hagar. Two themes are prominent: The conflict between Sarah and Hagar, and their common motherhood. Through these themes, which are both manifest in the biblical story, the poets give expression to their own worldviews regarding the ethnic tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some of the poems discussed here conceive of the Hagar narrative as symbolizing the root of the unending conflict between Arabs and Jews. They are interested in rectifying the historical injustice that began, as it were, when Sarah banished her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to the wilderness with her son Ishmael. Other poems offer a gentler understanding of Hagar, seeking to understand and empathize with her through a common femininity/maternity and in this way to overcome the political implications of the story. These themes stand in contrast with the midrashic tradition that sees Ishmael as a symbol of the enemy and Hagar as the symbolic mother of the enemy. A third group of poems uses the Hagar story to reflect on the dynamic between Arabs and Jews, moving between violence and eroticism. This article will discuss poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch, Zerubavela Sasonkin, Nava Semel, Bracha Serri, Shirley Kaufman, Lynn Gottlieb, Lally Alexander, Hava Pinhas-Cohen and Rivka Miriam.