The Death of Darwish

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died August 9, 2008, after open-heart surgery at a Houston medical center. He was 67. Mahmoud Darwish's poetry documents the many different lives of Palestine and Palestinians, his own life of exile, and the notion of homeland in the face of diaspora. His writing is steeped in images, and memories of a Palestine both real and imagined. Gathered together they represent one man's relation to a place and people that have at one and the same time been taken away, and never existed.

The Guardian obituary to Darwish quotes Margaret Obank, an Arab poet who had worked with Darwish on an Iraqi literary journal that presented contemporary Arab writers in English for the first time. Recounting the acceptance speech Darwish had prepared for the Prince Claus Fund prize, she remembers his few words:

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.

The experience of exile--the forced separation from a homeland, or as is sometimes the case, the substantive transformation of a place to the point of unrecognizability--in Darwish's poetry forces the creation and recreation of imaginations of a homeland. Pierre Bourdieu reflecting on the Algerian War a rough half century ago commented on the transmogrification that occurs in colonial situations (see Political Interventions): even if a people aren't entirely displaced by colonization the fundamental features of everyday life, culture(s), can be colonized or displaced, preventing the actual experience of home.

The break with a familiar environment, a stable and habitual social universe in which traditional behaviour was experienced as natural, leads to abandonment of such behaviour once this is cut off from the original soil in which it took root. The transformation of the space of life demands a general transformation of behaviour. But the uprooting is usually so brutal and total, that disarray, disgust and hopelessness are far more common than the innovative behaviour that would be needed to adapt to radically new conditions. (Bourdieu. Political Interventions.)

In a much more minute way (and this comparison is not to make less of the devastating effects of colonization on pre-established peoples), the experience of a birth-place or parent's home after returning to it following a long absence is similar. With the absence of a single life (yours', one's) the movements, and day-to-day motions of the others remaining will alter, and change even if the shadows of other personalities linger there.

The perpetual movement of Darwish’s life, both as a political exile and an internationally renowned poet offered him a contrasting language to juxtapose against the symbolic Palestine; the Palestinian homeland could remain motionless, immortalized through (increasingly foggy) memory while the song of exile danced around it, creating new landscapes of paradise, more uplifted peoples, and a transient self-conception driven by separation from one's own soil. This dialectic of home and exile enables a poetry, not of hope--in this case, the always present longing of return--but of creation. Home is not the land you knew and will greet again (though Darwish would remain throughout his life a defender of the Palestinian cause) but a place impossibly unknown. It is an interpretation of any place, made to be a paradise, and most definitively, a place that never will be born, except through imagination.

Arriving at this point, however, took some time for Darwish. The original poems, written during stay in Israel, are little more than beautifully woven political anthems. The fate of Palestine proper seems tenuous, and open to influence; "Characterized by a sense of injury and loss, these first poems are also tempered by the poet's belief in the Palestinian cause and hope for its eventual success" (see Gale Literary Database online). In his first collections of poems, Darwish bears witness to the hardships of Palestinian existence, and sings songs intended to inspire rebellion and invoke a future where the "Palestine question" is overcome.

By the end of his life, having been disillusioned by Oslo and having been a bystander to the second Intifada the political invocations of Darwish's younger years no longer had precedence in his poetry. Reflecting on a change in personal aesthetics, style and intention, Darwish wrote in 1999.

...I discovered that the earth was fragile, and the sea light; I discovered that language and metaphor are not enough to provide a place for that place. The geographical part of History is stronger than the historical part of geography. Unable to find my place on earth, I tried to find it in History. And History cannot be reduced to compensation for lost geography. It is also a point from which to observe the shadows of self and other, graspable in a more complex human journeying...What matters is that I was able to find a greater lyrical capacity, and a passage from the relative to the absolute. An opening allowing me to inscribe that national on the universal, so that Palestine not limit itself to Palestine, but that it may found its aesthetic legitimacy in a vaster human space. (Darwish, Boundary 2 , Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999), pp. 81-83)

The cultural disruption, displacement, and exile endured by Darwish in his life gave way to a poetry of boundless transience. Places no longer possess collective cultural substance that spring forth claims of home: a place is the site of a poet's conjuration only, which is for him, the alteration of a place. Desire in consciousness is thrust outward onto a landscape and sated there, by poetry's creative power. Longing, sadness, and foreignness are overcome by finding in the midst of what Darwish calls "this no-here, in this no-time", the necessary material for the familiar, the intimate and loved. Far from a solipsistic indictment of the world of objects as unreal, poetry turns real worlds, no matter how unfamiliar, into Palestines better than Palestine, homes more known then home. Mural (Jidariyya, 2000) one of Darwish's few long poems is a meditation on this task:

One day, I will be what I want to be.
One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my vision.
My language will be a metaphor for metaphor.
I don't speak. I don't allude to a place.
Place is my sin and my alibi.
I come from there.
My "here" leaps from my steps to my imagination.
I am what I was, and what I will be--created and destroyed by an ever
expanding space.