mahmoud darwish’s lyric epiccredit: previously published as introduction to if i were another:...

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

When Mahmoud Darwish and I met onAugust 4, 2008, five days before he under-went the surgery that would end his life, hereiterated the centrality and importance

Mural

holds for this collection. In

Mural

hegrasped what he feared would be his lastchance to write after surviving cardiovascu-lar death for the second time in 1999. Thepoem was a song of praise that affirms lifeand the humanity not only of the marginal-ized Palestinian but also of the individualon this earth, and of Mahmoud Darwishhimself.

Mural

was made into a play by thePalestinian National Theatre shortly after

its publication in 2000 without any prompt-ing from Darwish (his poetry has often beenset to film, music, and song). The stagedpoem has continued to tour the world to as-tounding acclaim, in Paris, Edinburgh, Tu-nisia, Ramallah, Haifa, and elsewhere. Aconsummate poet at the acme of innermostexperience, simultaneously personal anduniversal, between the death of languageand physical death, Darwish created some-thing uniquely his: the treatise of a privatespeech become collective.

Mural

was theone magnum opus of which he was certain,a rare conviction for a poet who reflects on

Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet and physician, was the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger PoetsCompetition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic, which was published by Yale University Press inApril 2008. Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya andSaudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University ofGeorgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at theUniversity of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteeredabroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. Joudah's poetry has been published in avariety of publications, including Poetry magazine, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner andCrab Orchard. In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poetMahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic. He was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation forhis translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). The translation wonthe Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary translation from the Society of Authors in the UnitedKingdom. CREDIT: Previously published as Introduction to If I Were Another: Poems (2009), a collection of poemsby Mahmoud Darwish translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, this essay is republished herein courtesy ofthe author Fady Joudah and publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011.

Mahmoud Darwish’s Lyric Epic

Fady Joudah

Palestinian-American Poet, Physician, and Translator––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: This essay is a reprint of an introduction by Fady Joudah, noted Palestinian-American poet andtranslator of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, to If I Were Another (2009), a collection of poems by Darwishtranslated from the Arabic by Joudah. It is republished herein courtesy of the author Fady Joudah and pub-lisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. According to Joudah, “If I Were Another is a tribute to Darwish’slyric epic, and to the essence of his “late style,” the culmination of an entire life in dialogue that merges theself with its stranger, its other, in continuous renewal within the widening periphery of human grace.”

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his completed works with harsh doubtequal only to his ecstatic embrace when onthe threshold of new poems.

His first experience of death, in 1984,was peaceful and painless, filled with dar-wish. “whiteness.” The second was moretraumatic and was packed with intense vi-sions.

Mural

gathered Darwish’s experi-ences of life, art, and death, in their whiteserenity and violent awakening, and accel-erated his “late style” into prolific, progres-sively experimental output in search of newpossibilities in language and form, underthe shadow of absence and a third and finaldeath. “Who am I to disappoint the void /who am I” ask the final lines of

The DicePlayer

, Darwish’s last uncollected lyric epic,written weeks before his death on August 9,2008. But I still remember his boyish, trium-phant laugh when I said to him: “

The DicePlayer

is a distilled

Mural

in entirely newdiction,” and his reply: “Some friends evencall it the

anti-Mural

.” He had overcome hisown art (and death) for one last time, held itapart from himself so that it would indis-putably and singularly belong to him andhe to it.

If I Were Another

is a tribute to Dar-wish’s lyric epic, and to the essence of his“late style,” the culmination of an entire lifein dialogue that merges the self with itsstranger, its other, in continuous renewalwithin the widening periphery of humangrace. The two collections of long poemsthat begin this book,

I See What I Want

(1990)and

Eleven Planets

(1992), mark the comple-tion of Darwish’s middle period. In them hewove a “space for the jasmine” and (su-per)imposed it on the oppressive exclusiv-ity of historical and antinomian narrative.In 1990, between the personal and the col-lective, “birth [was] a riddle,” but in 1996birth became “a cloud in [Darwish’s] hand.”And by

Mural

’s end (2000), there was “nocloud in [his] hand / no eleven planets /on[his] temple.” Instead there was the vowelin his name, the letter

Waw

, “loyal to birthwherever possible.” By 2005, Darwish

would return, through the medium or vi-sion of almond blossoms, the flower of hisbirth in March, to revisit the memory andmeaning of place, and the “I” in place,through several other selves, in

Exile

, hislast collected long poem. Dialectic, lyric,and drama opened up a new space for timein his poetry, a “lateness” infused with ageand survival while it does not “go gentleinto that good night.”

—————

It is necessary to read Darwish’s trans-formation of the long poem over the mostaccomplished fifteen years of his life: theshift in diction from a gnomic and highlymetaphoric drive to a stroll of mixed andconversational speech; the paradoxes be-tween private and public, presence and ab-sence; the bond between the individual andthe earth, place, and nature; the illumina-tion of the contemporary Sufi aestheticmethod as the essence of poetic knowledge,on the interface of reason and the sensory,imagination and the real, the real and itsvanishing where the “I” is interchangeablewith (and not split from) its other; and hisaffair with dialogue, and theater (tragic, ab-surd, or otherwise) to produce a lyric epicsui generis

.

If Darwish’s friend the greatcritic Edward Said had a leaning toward thenovel, Darwish was undoubtedly a play-wright at heart. This had been evident sincehis youth, whether in poems like

A SoldierDreams of White Lilies

(written in 1967 andnow a part of the Norwegian live-film-per-formance

Identity of the Soul

[2008], in whichDarwish is featured), or

Writing to the Lightof a Rifle

(1970), or in his brilliant early prosebook and its title piece,

Diaries of OrdinarySorrow

(1973). Yet Darwish was never comfortable

with looking back at his glorious past. Hewas an embodiment of exile, as both exis-tential and metaphysical state, beyond themerely external, and beyond metaphor, inhis interior relations with self and art. Natu-rally, and perhaps reflexively, Darwish ex-

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pressed a fleeting reservation at my desireto include here the two older volumes

I SeeWhat I Want

and

Eleven Planets

. True, thetwo are linked to a larger historical reel thanis

Mural

or

Exile

, since the former volumeswere written during the first Palestinian In-tifada, which began in 1987, a major defin-ing event in the identity and hopes of adispossessed people, and in response to thespectacle of the peace accords Darwishknew would follow. But more important, inthese two volumes Darwish had written his

Canto General

, his

Notebook of a Return to MyNative Land

, his

Omeros

, destabilizing thehegemony of myth into an inclusive, expan-sive humanizing lyric that soars, like a hoo-poe, over a Canaanite reality and anAndalusian song, where vision is both Sufiand Sophoclean, and elegy arches over thefather, the lover, and the other, as well asover a grand historical narrative and its lim-inal stages on this earth.

I See What I Want

and

Eleven Planets

arecollections concerned with vision, not im-age. Even their titles read as one. In the firstinstance of seeing, Darwish declares a sin-gular self that creates its private lexicon ofsorrow and praise and transformation intothe collective: a prebiblical past, a Palestin-ian present, and a future where the self flies“just to fly,” free from “the knot of sym-bols,” to where compassion is “one in thenights” with “one moon for all, for bothsides of the trench.” In

Eleven Planets

, theself has vanished into its other, more elegia-cally, and “flight” has reached 1492, the yearof “the Atlantic banners of Columbus” and“the Arab’s last exhalation” in Granada. Theself is transfigured into “The ‘Red Indian’s’Penultimate Speech” and into “murderedIraq,” this most contemporary of graves, “Ostone of the soul, our silence!” Throughoutthe two books, the oscillation between the“I” and the “we,” the private and the public,is maintained in tension, in abeyance. Andby the end, Darwish questions himself andhis aesthetic: “The dead will not forgivethose who stood, like us, perplexed / at the

edge of the well asking: Was Joseph theSumerian our brother, our / beautifulbrother, to snatch the planets of this beauti-ful evening from him?” It is the same beau-tiful Joseph (son of Jacob) who saw “elevenplanets, the sun, and the moon prostrate be-fore [him]” in the Quran, and it is the samepast-future elegy of exile and expulsion, cir-cling around to those other sadly beautifulplanets “at the end of the Andalusianscene.” Yet Darwish triumphs over the voidwith song: “O water, be a string to my gui-tar” and “open two windows on shadowstreet” because “April will come out of oursleep soon” “with the first almond blos-som.”

I See What I Want

marks the first maturepresence of the Sufi aesthetic in Darwish’soeuvre, where he will disassemble and reas-semble his language, again and again, in anidea of return: wind, horse, wheat, well,dove, gazelle, echo, holm oak, anemones,chrysanthemum, or something more recog-nizably biographical, like “prison” in Israelijails. In this recurrence and retreatment, inseating and unseating absence, Darwish is aprodigal between memory and history whoextroverts language and the “need to say:Good Morning.” Through the process, heattains illumination, not as a fixed and de-fined state but as the arrival at one truthconstantly examined and replaced with an-other. “Take Care of the Stags, Father” is anelegy to his father, where the father, the “I,”the grandfather, and the forefather inter-twine and dissolve time, place, and identity“like anemones that adopt the land and singher as a house for the sky.” The private andpsychological detail is abundant: Darwish’sgrandfather was his primary teacher; his fa-ther became an endlessly broken man whotoiled as a hired laborer on land he ownedbefore the creation of Israel in 1948; thehorse he left behind “to keep the housecompany” when they fled was lost; and the“cactus” that grows on the site of each ru-ined Palestinian village punctures the heart.

All these details and themes and more

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are a personal representation first and fore-most. Yet the echo resounds a larger collec-tive memory, Palestinian or otherwise.Darwish’s fathers resembled, “by chance,”the fathers of hundreds of thousand others,and his “I” also resembled another’s. His-tory is broken with an earth that “cracks itseggshell and swims between us / green be-neath the clouds.” And “exile” is “a land ofwords the pigeons carry to the pigeons,”just as the self is “an exile of incursionsspeech delivers to speech.” And the poem isever present: “Why,” “What good is thepoem?/ It raises the ceiling of our caves andflies from our blood to the language ofdoves.” “Take Care of the Stags, Father” isalso a praise for “chrysanthemum,” an ac-count of Darwish’s profound relationshipwith the earth, where a different “specific-ity” and “dailiness” is filtered, captured,through presence and absence. Darwishwas a “green” poet whose verse was shapedby flowers, trees, and animals the way peo-ple see them: “without story / the lemonblossom is born out of the lemon blossom”;as well as through the dispossessed land-scape: a “return” within and without“progress.”

The beautifully measured exegesis of“Truce with the Mongols by the Holm OakForest,” and its epiphora of “holm oak,”confirms the formal, thematic, and struc-tural range in these two collections. Themesmerizing prescience in “Truce,” how-ever, is alarming. Peace is able to envision it-self but, like Cassandra or Tiresias, is eitherpunished or discredited. Thus “The Trag-edy of Narcissus the Comedy of Silver” fol-lows in monumental footsteps. Whether inits several stanzaic forms, as an early pre-cursor of

Mural

, or in its undulation be-tween elegy and praise, history and myth,absurdity and distress, this epic must beread with attention to its ubiquitous nu-ance, its “Ulysses / of paradox,” its “Sufi[who] sneaks away from a woman” thenasks, “Does the soul have buttocks and awaist and a shadow?” Circumstantially, as

noted, the poem is linked to the birth of thefirst Palestinian Intifada, “a stone scratchingthe sun.” And if this “stone radiating ourmystery” will provide fodder for many, “forboth sides of the trench,” who are drawn tothe “political” in Darwish’s poetry and life,Darwish offers a reply: “Extreme clarity is amystery.” Darwish wrote not a manifestofor return but a myth of return—where theexiles and displaced “used to know, anddream, and return, and dream, and know,and return, / and return, and dream, anddream, and return.” “Bygones are by-gones”: “they returned / from the myths ofdefending citadels to what is simple inspeech.” “No harm befell the land” despitethose who “immortalized their names withspear or mangonel … and departed,” since“none of them deprived April of its habits.”“And land, like language, is inherited.” Andexile is “the birds that exceed the eulogy oftheir songs.” Yet “victims don’t believe theirintuition” and don’t “recognize theirnames.” “Our history is their history,”“their history is our history.” Darwish asksif anyone managed to fashion “his narrativefar from the rise of its antithesis and hero-ism” and answers: “No one.” Still he pleads,“O hero within us … don’t rush,” and “stayfar from us so we can walk in you towardanother ending, the beginning is damned.”

Such an ending would find itself in“The Hoopoe.” (And just as the two vol-umes

I See What I Want

and

Eleven Planets

are twins, “The Tragedy of Narcissus theComedy of Silver” and “The Hoopoe” aretwins.) Both poems are tragedies in verse.Threading the dream of return, “The Hoo-poe” suspends arrival right from the start:“We haven’t approached the land of our dis-tant star yet.” And despite the incessant re-monstrance and the litany of pretexts by thecollective voice in wandering—“Are we theskin of the earth?” “No sword remains thathasn’t sheathed itself in our flesh”—thehoopoe insists on simply guiding to “a lostsky,” to “vastness after vastness after vast-ness,” and urges us to “cast the place’s

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body” aside, because “the universe issmaller than a butterfly’s wing in the court-yard of the large heart.” “The Hoopoe” isbased on the twelfth-century Sufi narrativeepic poem

Conference of the Birds

, by FaridAddin al-Attar of Nishapur. In it a hoopoeleads all birds to the One, who turns out tobe all the birds who managed to completethe journey and reach attainment. There areseven wadis on the path to attainment, thelast of which is the Wadi of Vanishing,whose essence is Forgetfulness (a visibletheme in Darwish’s “late” poems). Darwishtransforms this Sufi doctrine about God asan internal and not an external reality, a selfinseparable from its other, to address exileand the (meta)physicality of identity in awork that is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Similarly, “Eleven Planets at the End ofthe Andalusian Scene” and “The ‘Red In-dian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the WhiteMan” are two of Darwish’s most accom-plished and beloved poems. The formercommemorates five hundred years of thebrutal cleansing of Muslims and Jews fromSpain, then leaps toward another annihila-tion across the Atlantic in the latter (whichwas excerpted and enacted in Jean-Luc Go-dard’s movie

Notre Musique

). In both poemsDarwish writes against the perpetualcrimes of humans against humanity andagainst the earth, with the hope thesecrimes won’t be repeated. Darwish clings tothe dream of al-Andalus (of coexistence andmutual flourishing between outsiders andnatives), even if he questions the reality ofthat dream, whether it existed “on earth …or in the poem” (still he asks us in “The ‘RedIndian’s’ Speech” whether we would“memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaugh-ter”). “Granada is my body,” he sings,“Granada is my country. / And I come fromthere.” The “descent” is not the “Arab” lay-ing claim to distant lands and a gloriouspast—a clichéd annotation; it is the grand il-lumination against the “cleansing” of theother, in revenge or otherwise, in the past orthe future, embodied in the “dream” of al-

Andalus that could not save itself from thehorrors of history.

While each of the eleven sections in“The Andalusian Scene” is a stand-alonepoem, the entire sequence is a love poemthat embraces time and place “in the depar-ture to one essence” and touches the deepbond Darwish had with Federico GarcíaLorca and his “bedouin moon.” “The ‘RedIndian’s’ Speech” should also be read be-yond the comparative impulse or historicalallegory (Darwish composed the poem afterlistening repeatedly to Native Americanchants) and as a defense against the destruc-tion of the earth, as a celebration of theearth: “Do not kill the grass anymore, thegrass has a soul in us that defends / the soulin the earth.” “Our names are trees of thedeity’s speech, and birds that soar higher /than the rifle,” so “if our murder is impera-tive, then do not / kill the animals that havebefriended us”; “do / you know the deerwill not chew the grass if our blood touchesit?” “A Canaanite Rock in the Dead Sea” re-treats (into) the “father” and reaffirms “I amI” in an “absence entirely trees.” The lyricbegins with “my poem / is a rock flying tomy father as a partridge does.” In Arabic,“partridge” is also the word for “skip” or“hop”—exactly the rhythm of this poem.Ablation of myth is rewritten through theCanaanite “pigeon tower” and through thesharing of the earth.

“We Will Choose Sophocles” switchesto the collective in a discourse that weavesancient and contemporary identity, a gentleliving “the taste of small differences amongthe seasons,” where “the mallow climbs theancient shields / and its red flowers hidewhat the sword has done to the name.” An-other significance of the poem stems fromthe mention of two literary charactersplaced in opposition: Imru’ el-Qyss, princeof Kinda, the great pre-Islamic (Jahili) Arabpoet, who sought Caesar’s help (to avengehis father’s murder) and failed and died asconsequence of this option; and Sophocles,who rejected and mocked political author-

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ity and power. This coincides with thelooming failure of the 1993 Oslo peace ac-cords. Darwish’s invocation of the Greekdramatist’s lines—“He who makes the jour-ney / To one in power is / His salve even ifwhen / He set out he was free”—is haunt-ing. His rejection of the peace façade is bothfirm and tender, a theme he develops in a1996 poem, “A Non-linguistic Dispute withImru’ el-Qyss”: “Our blood wasn’t speak-ing in microphones on/ that day, the day weleaned on a language that dispersed / itsheart when it changed its path. No one /asked Imru’ el-Qyss: What have you done /to us and to yourself? Go now on Caesar’s /path, after a smoke that looks out through /time, black. Go on Caesar’s path, alone,alone, alone, / and leave, right here, for us,your language!” And again later in Mural,with growing disinterest that highlights themutability of recurrence or circularity in theDarwish poem: “I tired of what my lan-guage on the backs of horses / says ordoesn’t say about the days of Imru’ el-Qyss/ who was scattered between Caesar andrhyme.”

The conundrum whereby the Palestin-ian tragedy is not permitted to “belong tothe victim’s question” “without interrup-tion” clouds the reading of Darwish’s po-etry for many. “I am he, my self’s coachman,/ no horse whinnies in my language,” Dar-wish would say in Exile in 2005, assertinghis supreme concern with his art, indepen-dence, and individuality. Still, in “Rita’sWinter,” a love poem that returns us to Dar-wish’s affair with dialogue, the private is atits most triumphant in these two collec-tions. “Rita” is a pseudonym for Darwish’sfirst love, a Jewish Israeli woman who be-came a cultural icon in the Arabic world af-ter the renowned Lebanese musician andsinger Marcel Khalife sang one of Darwish’syouthful poems, “Rita and the Rifle”:“There’s a rifle between Rita and me / andwhoever knows Rita bows / and prays / toa god in those honey eyes . . .” “O Rita /nothing could turn your eyes away from

mine / except a snooze / some honeyclouds/ and this rifle.” The rifle connotesthe Israeli military, in which Rita enlisted(and which perhaps reappears as the hand-gun placed on “the poem’s draft” in the fi-nal lines of “Rita’s Winter”). There were atleast four more Rita poems in the 1960s and70s. In “The Sleeping Garden” in 1977, forexample, Darwish wrote: “Rita sleeps . . .sleeps then wakes her dreams: / Shall weget married? / Yes. / When? / When violetgrows / on the soldiers’ helmet. . .” “I loveyou, Rita. I love you. Sleep / and I will askyou in thirteen winters: / Are you stillsleeping?” Rita would sleep for fifteen addi-tional winters before she would make herreturn in 1992, her final appearance in aDarwish poem.

—————

As I said, Mural’s significance stemsfrom a great artist’s engagement with deathin his late years: the simultaneity of art andmortality, the objective and the subjective,on two parallel lanes of what is left of timein a body or, as Theodor Adorno termed it,“the catastrophe” of “late style” (an ironicexpression for a Palestinian). Mural begins aperiod of elusive abandon in Darwish’s po-etry, an ease with what language may bring.He puts it another way in “I Don’t Know theStranger,” a poem from 2005: “The dead areequal before death, they don’t speak / andprobably don’t dream … / and thisstranger’s funeral might have been mine /had it not been for a divine matter that post-poned it / for many reasons, among them/an error in my poem.” This righting of thepoem’s wrong life—this potential philo-sophic “error” (which also shadows theeleventh-century Arab poet-philosopher al-Ma’arri) upon which Darwish embarked—was a chronic concern for him. In Mural, cer-tain elements of his youthful aesthetic,namely dialogue and more casual diction,return and are now redeemed by age. Pithynarrative stitches the lyric epic into dramaon the stage. Monologue belongs to several

MAHMOUD DARWISH’S LYRIC EPIC 13


voices. Darwish’s dramatic theater (of “TheTragedy of Narcissus” or “The Hoopoe”) in-corporates several styles of dialogue andquotidian settings. For example, the terse,concise line-by-line chat between Darwishand his prison guard toward the poem’send is a continuation of the conversationaltone that resurfaced in short lyrics in WhyDid You Leave the Horse Alone? (1996), wasmastered in Don’t Apologize for What You’veDone (2003), and became fully available inthe lyric epic in Exile (2005).

Mural rotates setting and scene in threemajor movements between a hospital room,Death, and the poet’s visions and conversa-tions. The poem opens with the nurse andthe poet’s “horizontal” name, Darwish’sawareness of his death, his ensuing searchfor meaning and existence. He becomes“the dialogue of dreamers,” a bird, a vine-yard, and a poet whose language is “a met-aphor for metaphor.” But the nurse swiftlyreturns and interrupts him in an importantmoment that heralds the full realization ofthe name in the final pages of Mural (whenthe “horizontal name” becomes verticalabecedary). For now, however, a womannurse says: “This is your name, remember itwell! / And don’t disagree with it over a let-ter / or concern yourself with tribal ban-ners, / be a friend to your horizontal name,/ try it out on the dead and the living, teachit / accurate pronunciation in the companyof strangers,” “a stranger is anotherstranger’s brother. / We will seize the femi-nine with a vowel promised to the flutes.”Then Darwish is reunited with his first love,his first goddess and first legends, hisstranger self, his “other” and “alternate.”

Early in the poem Darwish (who wasshy, generous, and modest) is quite aware ofthe unfolding play that has become his life,between perception and illusion, the privateand the public, poem and being: “Am I he?/ Do I perform my role well in the finalact?” “or did the victim change / his affida-vit to live the postmodern moment, / sincethe author strayed from the script / and the

actors and spectators have gone?” Charac-ters (including “echo” and “Death”) enterand exit the lyrical fantasy of the poet. He is“one who talks to himself” and one who“sang to weigh the spilled vastness / in theache of a dove.” And he arrives at an essen-tial truth of his art: “my poem’s land isgreen and high,” a celebration of beingalive, and of the earth, because “there is nonation smaller than its poem,” and “theearth is the festival of losers” to whom Dar-wish belongs (perhaps as the absented poetof Troy). And he returns to his poem’s fea-tures: “the narcissus contemplating the wa-ter of its image,” “the clarity of shadows insynonyms,” “the speech of prophets on thesurface of night,” “the donkey of wisdom …mocking the poem’s reality and myth,” “thecongestion of symbol with its opposites,”“the other ‘I’/ writing its diaries in the note-books of lyricists … at the gates of exile,”and “echo as it scrapes the sea salt / of [his]language off the walls.” The nurse reenters,and the poet catalogs visions and dreamsinduced by sedatives: memories of his fa-ther’s death, his mother’s bread, his exilefrom his language and place, and his kin-ship to dead poets and philosophers. He re-alizes he is still alive, that his “hour hasn’tarrived,” and summons his favorite god-dess, Anat, to sing since “life might comesuddenly, / to those disinclined to meaning,from the wing of a butterfly / caught in arhyme.”

“And I want to live,” he declares to be-gin the second and perhaps best-knownmovement of Mural. This vivid and occa-sionally humorous dialogue with Death istimeless writing. Darwish is neither waitingfor Godot nor bargaining with Faustus. Heleaves us his will (which he knows will notbe followed when he dies), perhaps to au-thenticate the separateness of his privateself from what the larger collective per-ceives it to be (though in death, the gap be-comes narrow): “Death! wait for me, until Ifinish / the funeral arrangements in thisfragile spring, / when I was born, when I

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would prevent the sermonizers / from re-peating what they said about the sad coun-try / and the resistance of olives and figs inthe face / of time and its army. I will tellthem: Pour me / in the Nu¯n, where my soulgulps / Surat al-Rahman in the Quran,” and“Don’t put violets on my grave: violets are/ for the depressed, to remind the dead oflove’s / premature death. Put seven greenears / of wheat on the coffin instead, andsome / anemones, if either can be found.Otherwise, leave the roses / of the church tothe church and the weddings. / Death, wait,until I pack my suitcase: / my toothbrush,my soap, / my electric razor, cologne, andclothes. / Is the climate temperate there? /Do conditions change in the eternal white-ness / or do they remain the same in au-tumn / as in winter? Is one book enough /to entertain me in timelessness, or will Ineed / a library? And what’s the spokenlanguage there: / colloquial for all, or classi-cal Arabic?”

With irony and resolve, Darwish em-braces and humanizes the self and others,where he is simultaneously a lyrical letter inthe Quran and “at ease with the Old Testa-ment’s narrative” as the beautiful Joseph,whose vision is of abundance and fertility in“seven green ears / of wheat.” Even Arabicis an “I” indivisible from its “other,” an “ex-terior” within an “interior.” And as Darwishgoes on in this wonderful dialogue withDeath, paradox and parody (“Death, wait,have a seat,” “perhaps / the star wars havetired you today?”) grow into exultation (“allthe arts have defeated you”) and provoca-tion (“you are the only exile, poor you,”“How do you walk like this without guardsor a singing choir, / like a coward thief”).But this frivolity does not last long, and thepoet comes clean with Death because thetwo of them “on god’s road / are two Sufiswho are governed by vision / but don’tsee.” Still, Darwish insists, despite Death’sindifference, on meeting by the sea gate,where the poem will eventually close, inAkko, the port of his childhood, seven kilo-

meters from his razed village, al-Birweh, inGalilee. And as with the hospital scene andthe name, “this sea” will eventually becomepresent to announce the poem’s end.

The third movement begins as thenurse reappears and “the death of lan-guage” has passed. In one of the poem’smore memorable stanzas, in a recurringscene between patient and nurse, she saysto him: “You used to hallucinate / often andscream at me: / I don’t want to return toanyone, / I don’t want to return to anycountry / after this long absence … / I onlywant to return / to my language in the dis-tances of cooing.” In this extreme momentof personality disconcerted with geograph-ical “return,” in the artist’s tremendous andvolatile gripping of his medium, “the dis-tances of cooing,” their quietude and sereneimagination, paradoxically affirm “return”to a region beyond the political or historical,therefore more lasting, more durable. Thepoem remains “green and high,” and thepoet writes it down “patiently, to the meter/ of seagulls in the book of water,” and “tothe scattering / of wheat ears in the book ofthe field.” Again he praises: “I am the grain/ of wheat that has died to become greenagain. / And in my death there is a kind oflife …” And as is Darwish’s custom of unit-ing art with life, he tells us of what he has fa-thered: “I preferred the free marriagebetween words … / the feminine will findthe suitable masculine / in poetry’s leaningtoward prose …” Between “the sentimen-tal” and “thousands of romantic years” thepoet carves “a tattoo in identity” where“The personal is not personal. / The univer-sal not universal …”

Darwish returns to myth, the mirror im-age of the poem’s first movement, a circularaesthetic. Anat, the Sumerian and Canaan-ite goddess, reappears, scriptures persist,but new characters and subjects also ap-pear: Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Osiris, King So-lomon, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Hemeets his boy self, his girl love, his prisonguard, and his childhood horse. With each



encounter Darwish rewrites anew what hehad written in the past (as in the story of hisimprisonment) or what he would rewrite inthe future (as in the horse that guided hisfamily back to an unconscious boy Darwishwho fell off it one wild night when he tookit out for a ride). Perhaps “the horse” exem-plifies the excessive reading that frequentlygoes into Darwish’s “symbols,” whereas infact these “symbols” are often private mem-ories. Perhaps it is the same horse whosaved Darwish’s life that the poet addressestoward the end of Mural: “Persist, my horse,we no longer differ in the wind … / you’remy youth and I’m your imagination.Straighten / like an Aleph,” “You’re my pre-text, and I’m your metaphor / away fromriders who are tamed like destinies.” Per-haps it is an appeal to that elemental bondthat granted him life once that it mightgrant it again, in a delightful dance betweenthe pastoral and the postmodern: “Don’t diebefore me, horse, or after me, or with me /on the final slope. And look inside the am-bulances, / stare at the dead … I might stillbe living.”

The plethora of actors and dialogue ac-celerate, and gather, suspense in a radiancethat lends itself to the imagination on thestage. And in preparation for the finale,Darwish announces that “as Christ walkedon the lake, / I walked in my vision. But Icame down / from the cross because I havea fear of heights and don’t / promise resur-rection. I only changed / my cadence tohear my heart clearly.” This declaration ofhis fragility goes on to speak the most deli-cate assertion of his poetry: “The epicistshave falcons, and I have /The Collar of theDove,” the wings of love that would returnhim to Akko’s port, as he had mentioned inan earlier poem, “Ivory Combs,” where his“mother had lost her handkerchiefs”; ormaybe it is as he retells it in Mural: “I might/add the description of Akko to the story /the oldest beautiful city / the loveliest oldcity / a stone box / where the dead and theliving move / in its clay as if in a captive

beehive.” Darwish begins the final ascen-sion of Mural and recounts what is his, start-ing with Akko’s sea, his semen, and downto the two meters of this earth that wouldhouse his 175-centimeter horizontal body,and his return to his horizontal name, nowloosened into vertical lines whose allitera-tive luminosity will remain the privacy ofhis language, the language of the Dhad, im-possible to translate otherwise. And thesimply complex notion of his existence, andof anyone’s being, becomes an eternal call-ing: “I am not mine / I am not mine / I amnot mine.”

—————

Six years and three books after Mural, in2005, Darwish was still writing, still search-ing for the self within its others, throughnew lyric form. Exile is a play in verse that“neither linger[s] … nor hurr[ies]” in a ma-ture prosody like “life’s simple prose,” evenif intransigently lyrical and giddy in parts.Exile has its “bridge” and could simply be“the cunning of eloquence” or “the back-drop of the epic scene.” And “return” is “acomedy by one of our frivolous goddesses.”If dialogue or dialectic and its supportingcast were spontaneous and major expres-sions in the totality of Darwish’s languagein Mural, they became a more purposefulaesthetic of the theater of the lyric epic inExile: four quartets, each with a setting andat least two characters, palpable or spectral,named or unnamed (of which the “I” is con-stant among them); choral modes or inter-ludes are regularly introduced (especially inthe first three movements); memory and vi-sion stand in for scenes within each act; theentire sequence is a dialogue that alternatesbetween the absurd and the expository. Ex-ile walks in strata or polyphony: of love andpleasure (“If the canary doesn’t sing / toyou, my friend”); of place (“What is place?”“The senses’ discovery of a foothold / forintuition”); of time (where one and his ghost“fly, as a Sufi does, in the words … to any-where”); and of art (where “aesthetic is only

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the presence / of the real in form,” “a free-dom” that bids “farewell to the poem / ofpain”).

The first quartet finds the poet strollingon a Tuesday when “the weather is clear”“as if [he] were another.” After remem-brance and forgetting, and wonderful dis-cursiveness, he meets his lover. (“Mylexicon is Sufi. My desires are sensory / andI am not who I am / unless the two meet: /I and the feminine I,” he would write in TheDice Player in 2008.) Unlike Rita, the “femi-nine” in “Tuesday and the Weather Is Clear”is not named, yet the personal detail isequally intimate, if not more so. And as thetwo part, the poet continues to walk until hefinds himself in the throes of his private lan-guage and conducts a brilliant appeal to it,almost a prayer: “O my language, / help meto adapt and embrace the universe”; “Mylanguage, will I become what you’ll be-come, or are you / what becomes of me?Teach me the wedding parade / that mergesthe alphabet with my body parts. / Teachme to become a master not an echo”; “Forwho, if I utter what isn’t poetry, /will un-derstand me? Who will speak to me of ahidden / longing for a lost time if I utterwhat isn’t poetry? / And who will know thestranger’s land?…”

In the second sequence, the self movesinto its masculine other “on the bridge,”where fog competes with vision at dawn. Adialectic, where “a thing cannot be knownby its opposite,” dominates “Dense Fogover the Bridge,” which pushes the limits ofobsession and rumination until it deliversperhaps the last intense lyric spell in Dar-wish’s poetry, a dream approaching “fever”in sixteen successive quatrains that speak ofjasmine and “every -ology” until the “I”reaches “the land of story.” “Dense Fog”certainly invokes the Jericho Bridge (for-merly the Allenby Bridge, after the Britishgeneral who conquered Jerusalem in 1917).The bridge has become iconic for Palestin-ians and continues to serve as an oppressivecheckpoint for those crossing between Jor-

dan and the West Bank. It was on thisbridge, for example, that Darwish was re-cently interrogated and asked, as the fa-mous poet, to recite some of his poems, towhich he replied: “A prisoner does not singto his prison warden.”

Darwish managed to transform thissubjugation into a more profound dialoguein his poetry, where the physicality of thebridge, and of those on it, is and is not itself.(Like “river,” the manifestation of “bridge”in Darwish’s late poetry is worthy of inde-pendent study. See, for example, “We Walkon the Bridge,” or the occurrence of “river”in poems like “A Cloud from Sodom” or “AMask … for Majnoon Laila.”) Recurrencesimply seeks “the thing itself,” or, as he saidin “The Southerner’s House” in 2003, “thetransparency of the thing.” And the journeyhome becomes more beautiful than home:“On the bridge,” the mystery that was “ex-treme clarity” in “The Tragedy of Narcis-sus” becomes “neither mysterious norclear,” “like a dawn that yawns a lot.” AndJericho (which was one of the first citieshanded over to “Palestinian control” underthe “peace agreement”) is simply exposed:“Don’t promise me anything / don’t giveme / a rose from Jericho.” Darwish waslooking “not for a burial place” but “a placeto live in, to curse” if he wished it so. Shortof that, he would continue to rotate on “thebridge,” between entry and exit, interiorand exterior, “like a sunflower,” while ab-sence is still “wearing trees.” And he wouldbe content with the “work [he has left] to doin myth.”

And walking farther, toward this newtask in myth, Darwish stumbles onto hisghost, his shadow, the archetypal exile, thewandering human, personified in the pre-Islamic Arab poet Tarafah Ibn al-Abd (whois also mentioned in Mural, and paired with“existentialists”). The title of the poem,“Like a Hand Tattoo in the Jahili Poet’sOde,” draws from the opening line ofTarafah’s famous ode, which describes theruins of the beloved’s dwelling that “sway



like the remnants of a tattoo on the back of ahand.” The poem is suspended betweentwo shadows of the same self, one thaturges the other to “drop metaphor, and takea stroll on the woolly earth,” while the otheris deceived by “a cloud [that] knits its iden-tity around [him].” This paradox is held inbalance between “two epochs”: the first“imagination’s return to the real,” the relicsof “an ancestral notion,” and the second “abutterfly trace in the light.” (Thus “HandTattoo” is significant as an ars poetica thatcombines two major aesthetics of the his-tory of Arab poetics in one poem.)

Darwish’s easing of the lyric intensitytakes hold in “Hand Tattoo” (and preparesthe reader for “Counterpoint,” the finalquartet). The poem addresses the marginal-ized account of the Palestinian narrative inmore personal and informal speech. “Andas for anthem, the anthem of happy finale /has no poet.” A third voice is eventually in-troduced. It grounds dialogue between thetwo, like “a bulldozer / driver whochanged the spontaneity of this place / andcut the braids of your olive trees to match /the soldiers’ hair.” Governed by silence andabsence, pointed dialogue follows. Thestruggle to break free from the shackles ofidentity in “Hand Tattoo” remains as it wasin “The Hoopoe”: “Place is the passion.”And flight “in the words … to anywhere”also persists. Still the “I and I” seek to“make amends” with their relics, since “inthe presence of death we grasp only the ac-curacy of our names,” a quotidian existenti-ality that is sieved through the mystery ofidentity. However, in time, “I and I” “foundnot one stone / that carries a victim’sname,” “a lewd absurdity.”

Darwish does not resolve the poem andtakes myth into the satiric final lines, whichexpose the eroticization of a place and itspeople, no matter how language subvertsthe plot of power. If Darwish had previ-ously attempted to upend myth and history,through the affirmation of the ancient(Canaanite) self, and through

fraternity with a larger human narra-tive, he now comes full circle to the “lewdabsurdity” that turns a victim into a newfascination of a “foreign tourist who loves[the native’s] myths” and would love “tomarry one of [his goddess’s] widoweddaughters.” It’s a startling ending of a veryserious poem, a determined “frivolous”conclusion, in fact, and it returns us to thepoem’s beginning, when the poet wishedhis name had “fewer letters, / easier letterson the foreign woman’s ears,” a spoof andan almost elegiac reverberation of thenurse’s instruction to Darwish regardinghis name at the beginning of Mural.

This amusement and irreconcilability,this “late style,” is a highly developed formof aesthetic resistance (“Every beautifulpoem is an act of resistance,” Darwish laterwrote). It is fitting, therefore, that in the finalmovement of Exile, Edward Said appears,side by side with Darwish, where, on theone hand, “the intellectual reins in the nov-elist’s rendition,” and on the other, “the phi-losopher dissects the singer’s rose.” Thetwo protagonists converge and part over ex-ile as “two in one / like a sparrow’s wings,”in diction that seems like talk over coffee ordinner. Identity is exposed as “self-defense”that should not be “an inheritance / of apast” but is what its “owner creates”: “I amthe plural. Within my interior /my renew-ing exterior resides.” And Darwish’s finallines, his “farewell to the poem / of pain,”embrace “the impossible” and “the suit-able,” “words /that immortalize their read-ers,” one of the legacies he leaves behindand entrusts to us.

—————

For the longest time I have been drawnto a passage on “intention” in TheodorAdorno’s Minima Moralia. He talks aboutfilm, image, and reproduction, but the pas-sage also brings to mind the “use” or “func-tion” of poetry: “True intentions would onlybe possible by renouncing intention,”Adorno says, and this “stems from the [am-

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biguous] concept of significance.” Signifi-cance hits the mark when “the objectivefigure, the realized expression, turns out-ward from itself and speaks”; equally, sig-nificance goes astray when “the figure iscorrupted by counting in the interlocutor.”This “danger” must be undertaken in awork of art: “Significant form, however eso-teric, makes concessions to consumption;lack of significance is dilettantism by its im-manent criteria. Quality is decided by thedepth at which the work incorporates thealternatives within itself, and so mastersthem.”

This seems to me a profound account ofDarwish’s work. Intention in his poetrygives way to language, in lyric form, with-out ever losing significance, despite the haz-ardous paradox of public appropriation ofthe work, which Darwish always guardedagainst by engaging several other selves; aspherical form, or an “orbit I never lose,” ashe said in “Hand Tattoo.” “There is no lovethat is not an echo,” Adorno says in anotherentry, and so it is for Darwish. Echo is re-turn. Echo is reciprocity, and also the dis-tance necessary for the “I” to reach its“other,” for the “other” to recognize its “I.”At a book signing for Like Almond Blossomsor Farther in Ramallah, 2005, Darwish wrote:“The Palestinian is not a profession or a slo-gan. He, in the first place, is a human beingwho loves life and is taken by almond blos-soms and feels a shiver after the first au-tumn rain,” “and this means the longoccupation has failed to erase our humannature, and has not succeeded in submittingour language and emotions to the droughtdesired for them at the checkpoint.” “Wordsare not land or exile” but the “density of astanza that isn’t written with letters” and“the yearning to describe the whiteness ofalmond blossoms.”

Darwish would not neglect “the poem’send,” he would leave “the door open/ forthe Andalus of lyricists, and [choose] tostand / on the almond and pomegranatefence, shaking / the spiderwebs off [his]

grandfather’s aba / while a foreign armywas marching / the same old roads, mea-suring time/with the same old war ma-chine.” He clearly merges East and West(where “the East is not completely East/andthe West is not completely West”), and therepetitive processing and expansion of lexi-con and memory stand for a philosophy.The list of great writers who inform his po-etry (or coincide with it, and he with theirs)is not merely a reflection of influence but anassertion of the shared well of humanknowledge and spirit. “A poet is made up ofa thousand poets,” he used to say. He be-came deeply enmeshed in the complex, richhistory of Arabic literary thought as hewrote a language for his time. His treatmentof dialectic, metaphysics, mysticism, recur-rence, form, duality, among other things,and deserves more advanced study than Ican offer, but it also demands a daring, un-apologetic openness to life, humanity, andthe world: “If I were another I would havebelonged to the road”, “become two / onthis road: I … and another”; “If I were an-other I would leave this white paper andconverse with a Japanese novel whose au-thor climbs to the mountaintop to see whatpredator and marauder birds have donewith his ancestors. Perhaps he is still writ-ing, and his dead are still dying. But I lackthe experience, and the metaphysical harsh-ness”; “if I were another / I might still bemyself the second time around.”

SOURCES

Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism (Saqi Books, 2005).Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso, 1974).Sinan Anton, “Mahmoud Darwish’s Allegorical Cri-

tique of Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 2002.Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper

Canyon Press, 2007).Reginald Gibbons, “Sophokles the Poet,” American

Poetry Review, 2008.Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (Merlin Press,

1989).Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and the Literature

Against the Grain (Vintage, 2008).

mahmoud darwish’s lyric epiccredit: previously published as introduction to if i were another:...

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