A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian

Author:David Tresilian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863568022
Publisher: Saqi Books

12. Mahmoud Darwish, national poet of Palestine

In his best work Darwish has explored similar issues. Born in 1941 in a village in Galilee, he and his family were forced into exile in 1948, and he has lived since in various Arab capitals, including Cairo and Beirut. He has been the editor of an important literary review, al-Karmel. Darwish’s poetry can be read in various English translations,16 and it contains textbook examples of poems of Palestinian loss and exile, pieces such as ‘We Travel Like Other People’ (‘We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere’) or ‘Athens Airport’ (‘Athens Airport changes its people every day. But we have stayed put … waiting for the sea’) from the 1986 collection Fewer Roses, capturing such experience. However, his work also contains material that attempts larger reflections, including an ambitious memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, written after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut.17

This book, a long work of ‘prose poetry’, connects the author’s experience of being trapped in his flat in war-torn Beirut to the fate of the Palestinian refugees around him, who, deprived of work and equal rights in their host country of Lebanon, are seen as the problem, ‘making trouble, violating the rules of hospitality,’ and now allegedly responsible for the war. ‘Why don’t you go back to your own country?’ he is asked. Israel will then have less reason to invade. Making coffee in his flat, walking through the streets, visiting friends as the bombs rain down, what, Darwish asks, is the role of the Palestinian poet under such circumstances? ‘Palestine has been transformed from a birthplace to a slogan,’ and one that all too often does not even serve the Palestinians’ interests, now that Beirut, ‘birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who know no other cradle’, is being evacuated under the impact of Israeli bombs. ‘No one wants to forget. More accurately, no one wants to be forgotten,’ he writes, and as a result he chooses to ‘join battle’, in his translator’s words, ‘against oblivion’, producing a memory for forgetfulness that is ‘not chronicle, journey, history, memoir, fiction, myth, or allegory, but all of them together’.

Darwish’s work can be understood as an act of memory and a set of meditations on the role and responsibilities of the Palestinian poet. But he himself has been ambivalent about that role, and he has criticized his earlier poems for being too direct, too crude, insufficiently poetic and too rhetorical. Darwish, in fact, is a man of enormous literary culture, and he has reflected deeply about the relationship between Palestinian poetry and Arabic poetry and between Arabic poetry and world poetry, as well as about his responsibilities to himself, to his audiences and to Palestine. Reading a recent collection of interviews with Darwish, one is reminded strongly of W. B. Yeats, whose developing responsibilities to Ireland similarly lay at the root of much of his poetry.18 Being the ‘Palestinian national poet’ is an enormous responsibility calling for a certain distance if one is not to be imprisoned in the role.

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