Darwish Critical Studies

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

HUMAN

ARCHITECTURE

Journal of theSociology of Self-

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

Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let merest my road against a stone.

Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let mesee an end to this journey.

(Unfortunately 11)

Mahmoud Darwish, acclaimed as thesaviour of the Arabic Language (Saith 1),is perhaps today the best known Arabiclanguage poet. Darwish was consideredthe poet of his people, the Poet Laureate ofPalestine, and a voice for the voiceless. Hiswork contains a universality born fromspecific suffering that reaches across theboundaries of language and nation to in-scribe the national within the universal(Darwish, Unfortunately

xix). The dualproject of Darwishs work is simulta-neously anti-colonial, concerned politically

with the establishment of an independent

and self-determined Palestine free from im-perial occupation, and postnational in thesense that Said hints at in his introductionto Culture and Imperialism

. Said describesnew alignments made across nationswhich provoke and challenge the funda-mentally static notion of identity

that has

been the core of cultural thought during theera of imperialism by which one is de-fined by the nation, which in turn derivesits authority from a supposedly unbrokentradition (Said xxv). This gesture beyondidentity defined in national terms requiresa movement beyond the structures of post-colonial identity.

If post-colonial identity is founded inthe anti-colonial establishment of an histor-ical nation, projected linearly through timeby means of narrative, postnational iden-tity is loosed from the bonds of causal time.

Said takes this point from Eliots Tradition

Erica Mena is a poet and translator. She completed her BA in English and the Study of Religion at UMassBoston, her M.Phil in Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge and is currently pursuing an MFA inLiterary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her poetry has appeared with Arrowsmith Press and PressedWafer, and is forthcoming in Dos Passos Review. Her book of translations of Puerto Rican poet Etnairis Rivera,Return To The Sea, was published in 2006. Her translations of Roberto Bolaos prose poetry are forthcoming inWords Without Borders.

The Geography of Poet ry : Mahmoud Darw i sh and

Post nat i onal I denti t y

Erica Mena

University of Iowa

[email protected]

Abstract: This essay was written several years ago at UMass Boston as part of my Senior Undergraduate

Honors Thesis in Literature. Since then, my continued interest in the postnational as a political and socialconstruct has led me to continue examining poetry as a means of accessing ideas of universal community

based not on the limited identities of nationality but on chosen affiliations across boundaries of space andtime. This was a starting point for a consideration of what arises from post-colonialism from a poetic per-spective.


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and the Individual Talent writing:

Past and present inform each oth-

er, each implies the other and, inthe totally idea sense intended byEliot, each co-exists with the other.What Eliot proposes, in short, is avision of literary tradition that,while it respects temporal succes-sion, is not wholly commanded byit. (Said 4)

The postnational relies on the destabili-zation of temporality and territory, andstrives to create an identity capable of en-gagement with universal systems. Contex-

tualizing and demystifying the nationalnarrative, the postnational collapses timefrom a progressive movement along pointson a line into a momentary eternity

, a fluidever-changing present (Zamorano, 106 inFriberg). In this postnational scape, imagin-ing becomes a kind of agency, constructingoneself, and ones place in the world as wellas the possibility for political and culturalinteraction and reproduction. This occursespecially through poetry: narrative forms,as context-driven, reproduce cohesive com-munities, while poetics, as context-genera-

tive, produce ruptures leading to newpossibilities. It is the postnational and con-text-generative nature of Darwishs poetrythat focuses my reading throughout thispaper, which by no means should be un-derstood as minimizing his anti-colonialpolitical agenda, but rather as situating thetwo moves as simultaneous and mutuallyinforming.

Darwish writes in I Belong There, Ihave learned and dismantled all the wordsin order to draw from them a single word:

Home

(

Unfortunately

7). This statement, aspure in its elegance as it is in its raw desper-ation, not only speaks to a commonality ofsuffering but stands (without necessarilydemanding) deeper analysis, yielding aricher understanding of the relationship be-tween words and place. It is not the physi-

cal location but the word

Home

that thepoet has created, and the word has beencreated only through the destruction of all

words. Paradoxically, one assumes theword

Home

was among all the words,and was therefore learned and dismantledalong with them, only to be reborn from theunderstanding of all the words, which is tosay all the world. As words are signifiersfor the world, so they symbolize what theyrepresent, and from words an understand-ing of what they represent is created. But itis only by dismantling all the words,which is to say the world, that Home

(andwhat it signifies) can be foundas the driv-ing motivation behind all action, and that

to which everything returns.Though even that one line could stand

deeper explication, its urgent despair for

Home

is readily apparent and universallysignificant. Rising as it does from Dar-wishs experience of exile, of homelessness,it addresses not only the Palestinian peo-ples disarticulation (both literally and fig-uratively), but that of all displaced persons.In Another Road in the Roada title thatspeaks to the endlessness of the journey ofexileDarwish writes: I am from here, Iam from there, yet am neither here nor

there (

Unfortunately

4). The physical dis-placement in the last phrase does not di-minish the place of origin in the first clause(I am from here). This seems at firstglance to be only within the concerns of thepost-colonial exile literary tradition. Whilethe establishment of a physical Palestiniannation is a central concern for Darwishwithin his work, it is no less his concern toestablish concomitantly a community thatmoves beyond geography and nation. Dar-wish said: I want, both as a poet and as ahuman being, to free myself from Palestine.But I cant. When my country is liberated,so shall I be (Saith 1). Darwishs Palestineis a memory, an imagined nation in the tru-est form.

Exile literature may be categorized as apart of the post-colonial literary tradition


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because of the shared concern with identityin connection to the geography of a nation-state, or lack thereof. While the experience

of exile informs Darwishs work, I do notbelieve Darwish to be primarily an exilewriter. Rather, Darwish is in a sense apostnational writerhis postnationality isone of necessity, rather than explicit choice,because by necessity Darwish creates andexpresses a community that is without na-tional borders.

Darwish is not given the choice to lookbeyond his nation, but rather by necessityof circumstance carries his community withhim as an imagined construct. He is thusable to write beyond the constraints of the

borders of national identity, and reach acommunity of people who are external toany sense of Palestinian-ness. Where thepost-colonial literary tradition is primarilyconcerned with a re-establishment of dis-placed identity through connection to land,the postnational is concerned with movingbeyond the need for a primary connectionto boundaries. Darwish does this inher-ently, in part because his circumstance as aPalestinian does not allow for anythingelse.

The post-colonial sense of time is one of

progression: from a projected historicalnarrative to an infinitely extending future,the post-colonial nation posits a fixedcausal beginning and no end. The postna-tional community, however, exists in a cy-clical time, when past and future existsimultaneously and are interconnected in amomentary eternity. Here, it is important tokeep in mind the difference between thepostnational community

and the abstract na-tion

; the nation, even in a wholly abstractform, still relies on temporal boundaries todefine it and oppose itself against.

Darwishs work illustrates this postna-tional sense of time. An end like a begin-ning, like the beginning of an end Darwishwrites in The Hoopoe (

Unfortunately

35),and later

Everything will begin again

inThe Lute of Ismael (

Unfortunately

66).

The end is a beginning, and has a begin-ning. It is not a fixed movement from one tothe other, but they are similar and con-

nected through. Later, in The OwlsNight Darwish uses a refrain-like phrasethat explores the shifting of this momen-tary eternity:

There is, here, a present not embracedby the past.

When we reached the last of the trees,we knew we were unable to payattention.

And when we returned to the ships, wesaw absence piling up its chosenobjects

and pitching its eternal tent around us.There is, here, a timeless present, and

here no one can find anyone.No one remembers how we went out

the door like a gust of wind,and at what hour we fell from

yesterday, and thenyesterday shattered on the tilesin shards for others to reassemble into

mirrorsreflecting their images over ours.

There is, here, a placeless present.Perhaps I can handle my life and cry

out in the owls night:

Was this condemned man my father whoburdens me with his history?

Perhaps I will be transformed withinmy name, and will choose

my mothers words and way of life,exactly as they should be.

There is, here a transient present.(63-64)

The present shifts through the poem,first disconnected from the past in a sepa-rateness that arrives to unity as the presentbecomes placeless and transient. Thisshift exemplifies the shift into postnational-ity. At first the present is not embraced by


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the pastthe two cannot be reconciled.The present is projected back onto the pastto force an agreement between the two,

which necessarily distorts both. The inabil-ity to pay attention and the absence pilingup its chosen objects could be read as thisdistortion of the past under the lens of post-colonial identity. The eternal tent closesthe poet off from the world, surroundingthe poet and his readers in the historicalimagination of national identity. This is theborder of the abstract nationits existencein time. While the physical nation imposesitself on geography, drawing borders andboundaries, the abstract nation is born andlost in time. In the postnational reality how-

ever, time is not a series of causes and ef-fects, nor a linear progression, but aconstant flux. It is precisely this that is themomentary eternityrather than pro-jecting afixed linear progression both back-wards and forwards in time from thepresent, each moment of the present istaken individually as reality, and as a con-stantly shifting experience. The sense of thepresent in the poem shifts and becomestimeless, without progression or changewhich erases the past. Darwish writes thatno one can find anyone, that they fell

from yesterdaythey are unable to evenform a community in this timelesspresent that is cut off from its past, bothliterally because of the suppression of thePalestinian history, and metaphorically be-cause of the drive towards continuity thaterases the historical reality of the past.

There is an insular sense of the post-co-lonial present as timeless that separates in-dividuals from their community and fromtheir past as well. Because in a post-colonialsense of history, the present national inde-pendence is projected as a pre-colonial con-dition, and also as an inevitably continuousfuture condition, there is a sense of thetimelessness, the unchangingness, of thepost-colonial reality. Post-coloniality re-quires this timelessness in order to assert itsnational authority over identity, claiming

that the national identity as defined in thepost-colonial period always existed, wasimposed upon by the condition of being a

colony, but has been recovered and will al-ways exist. In this sense the timelessnessamounts to unchangingness tied to place.However, in each repetition in the poem thepresent is here, a word emphasized bythe commas on either side of it. It is apresent connected to space

, and in the thirdrepetition we come to that postnationalmovement: There is, here, a placelesspresent. It is here, but it is placeless, whichis to say it is physically existent but not lim-ited to place. Once the present is freed fromthe necessity of projecting itself into the

past, creating a continuous linear progres-sion up to itself, it can also move beyondthe ties to place. Only then can the poetreach beyond the present and the past to hisconnection with his family, his community,his mothers words and way of life, ex-actly as they should be.

Darwishs postnationality is one of ne-cessity. Because the post-colonial conditionrequires a connection to land and historicalplace that the Palestinian people have notbeen able to realize, they are by circum-stance both a colonized nation and a post-

national community. Post-colonialitytherefore is a mis-categorization of Dar-wish; his writing is significantly concernedwith building a community that is indepen-dent of national borders and outside of lin-ear historical progression in order to enactsimultaneous anti-colonial and postna-tional agendas. It is extra-temporal, and ex-isting only through language it is botheternal and changing, rather than the staticinfinite projected by the post-colonial na-tion.

This complex relationship with time isone that is difficult to relate in English, andwithin the constraints of Western literarytheory, but is vital to understanding Dar-wishs poetry.

1

He returns to it in IvoryCombs:


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Would that I had a different present,I would hold the keys to my past.And would that I had a past within me,

I would possess all tomorrows.Here is the obsession with a songthrough which I convey a repeated

tragedy. (79-80)

The present as it is (the postnationalpresent) distances the poet from causal his-tory, and therefore the past that is necessaryas a cause of the future. The relationship isinterwoven, but begins not with the pastbut with the presentfor it is from thepresent that all understanding of past and

future come. Following this is a phrase inwhich the poet becomes the singer and sto-ryteller, historian, prophet and teacher.Darwish is conveying the repeated trag-edy of not only his experience, and thePalestinian peoples experience, but that ofanyone who has been displaced either spa-tially, linguistically or temporally.

Throughout Darwishs work this ques-tion of identity in the face of displacementcontinues to be a primary one. This concernwith identity, however, is not one that lookssimply to reconnect a specific identity claim

with corresponding borders, linguistic orgeographic, but one that seeks to answermore abstract questions about developingan identity rooted in community as con-structed through words, or rather, throughwhat the words represent.

Who am I? This is a question thatothers ask, but has no answer.

I am my language. I am my language. I am words writ:

Be! Be my body!

No land on earth bears me. Only mywords bear me,

This is my language, a necklace of stars

around the necksof my loved ones. They emigrated.They carried the place and emigrated,

they carried the time andemigrated.

We dont linger upon what is to come.There is no tomorrow in this desert,

save what we saw yesterday,so let me brandish my ode to break the

cycle of time,and let there be beautiful days!How much past tomorrow holds! (90-

92)

Without linear history and place thereis only language connecting community.Darwish writes later in the poem: This ismy language, my miracle/my first iden-tity, my polished metal, the desert idol of anArab / who worships what flows from

rhymes like stars in his aba

, / and who wor-ships his own words (

Unfortunately

93).Language for Darwish is home and selfitis outside of place and time, because with itthey carried the placethey carried thetime. This poem exemplifies what Saithwrote about Darwish: His poetry givespower to the tired and forlorn, to revive, re-store, and relive the imagined mobile spacecalled home (Saith 1). His identity formedfrom words, portable and untied to a phys-ical nation, is universally experienceableand communicable. It is the identity he is

claiming not only for himself, but also foranyone reading his words. However, it ishis first identity, which implies correctlythat there are layers and a multiplicity toidentity.

Darwish never denies that the estab-

1 Further, because Arabic has no tense assuch, grammatical time is not, as in English, de-fi

ned in relation to the moment of speech, a pro-cess that interjects an implied subject in everyutterance. Arabic prose does not have to main-tain the consistent pattern of tense sequence re-quired in English. Hence it is easy for Darwishto scramble time, removing the action from thetemporal sphere and placing it in a dreamlikerealm (Darwish,Memory for Forgetfulness

xxvi-ii).


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lishment of a Palestinian nation is a concernfor him; and the development of nationalidentity is part of that establishment. He

was a senior offi

cer in the PLO for manyyears, and continued to be vocal about thisissue. But this national identity comes afterthe first identity founded in language,through poetry. Darwish said in an inter-view: Poems cant establish a state. Butthey can establish a metaphorical home-land in the minds of the people. I think mypoems have built some houses in this land-scape (Politics of Poetry 1). In Mural hewrites: I dont want to return to any coun-try. / After this long absence, I want only toreturn to my language (

Unfortunately

145). The community constructed throughpoetry, and the identity based in that com-munity is essential for the poet. In TheLast Train Has Stopped Darwish asksWhere can I free myself of the homelandin my body? (

Unfortunately

15). The desireis to be free of the borders of history and na-tion, to find an un-colonizable, un-occupia-ble, lasting source for identity. Later, inThe Hoopoe he asks: A boundarywithin a boundary surrounds us. / What isbehind the boundary? (Unfortunately 34).The answer is language, words, poetry. Be-

cause his identity exists first in language,outside of the restrictions of time and geog-raphy, it is unconquerable, indestructible,and transportable. It is also accessible tothose who would be placed outside a com-munity based in national borders, or ethnicheritage. Denied the recognition of citi-zenshipDarwish settled on language ashis identity, and took upon himself the taskof restoration of meaning and thus, home-land (Darwish, Unfortunately xvii). Wehave both been freed from the gravity of theland of identity, he writes in Who Am I,Without Exile? and the freedom he speaksof is this freedom of self from the land ofidentity, the ties to the physical borders ofthe nation (Darwish, Unfortunately 115).

The postnational, though related to thepost-colonial, is quite distinct. Postnational

communities exist outside of the bound-aries of the nation, both the physical bor-ders and the temporal progression that

enclose a nations people. Postnationalcommunities also determine identity by in-clusivity, rather than by opposition and ex-clusivity, and are not limited by linguistic,geographic or historical borders but ratherinvite all to participate in a collective imag-ining. Darwish developed a postnationalcommunity through his work by necessity.His identity and his community are formedinherently outside of the borders of the na-tion, but in this location he finds thestrength and power of the postnationalcommunity equally important to his anti-

colonial project.The poet sees that the adopted, im-

posed or adapted model of national author-ity cannot, as Said wrote, merely replaceold authority with new authority, but mustbe transcended in order to establish a trulyself-determinate and free community. Dar-wish is able to do so in large part because ofthe form he work in. Poetry works to con-struct postnational identity because it is al-ready outside of the control of causalhistory and a limited exclusive national ex-perience. This does not mean that it is not

rooted in the specific. Rather the differentexpectations and functions of the form al-low the poet to make universally accessiblethe individual or specific experiences re-lated.

In this way, Darwish is a poet of thepeople (Unfortunately xviii) and writes inMural: I wish to live. I have work to doon this volcanic bit of geography (Unfortu-nately 139). Though his use of the word ge-ography invokes ties to specific nationalborders, it seems in context to encompassmore than just the Palestinian territory. Thework that Darwish is referring to is not re-stricted to the physical borders of geogra-phy, but occurs also in the abstractgeography of community constructedthrough poetry. Darwish expresses his obli-gation towards their community to work,


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through their words, to be a voice for thevoiceless (and to create a state for the state-less, if only in abstraction). Darwish writes

later in the same poem: Wewho are ca-pable of remembranceare capable of lib-eration (Darwish, Unfortunately 151). It isthe poet who remembers for the people,and who makes possible the liberation ofhis community. In liberating his people,Darwish is also making it possible to de-velop broader communities. In an inter-view Darwish said: The first step of realpeace is to know the other side, its cultureand creativity (Omer 2) and in a differentcontext: Poetry and beauty are alwaysmaking peace. When you read something

beautiful you find coexistence: it breakswalls down (Saith 2).

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Lon-don and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Para-dise. Trans. and Ed. Munir Akash andCarolyn Forch with Sinan Antoon andAmira El-Zein. Berkeley, Los Angeles,London: University of California Press,2003.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Memory for Forgetfulness.Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi. Berkeley, LosAngeles, London: University of Califor-nia Press, 1995.

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Darwish Critical Studies