Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
Return to Contents>>
Darwish's Revenants / Anthony C. Alessandrini
As for me, I have gone.The man you see is no longer myself!
I am my ghost.
Mahmoud Darwish, "Mural" (Unfortunately 158)
Prologue: In the Presence of Absence
<1> I began thinking about and writing this piece in the spring of 2004, after having had the chance to take part in a seminar on Palestinian and Israeli literature given by the distinguished Lebanese novelist and critic Elias Khoury, with the participation of the equally distinguished American poet, translator, and critic Ammiel Alcalay. In the time that has passed since then, as I have continued to think about the work of Mahmoud Darwish, and about political and cultural issues related to the situation in Israel-Palestine, I occasionally turned back to this essay, thinking, in a rather vague way, that I should try to finish writing it. But when I finally came back to give it my full attention this year, the fact had more to do with the exigencies of academic life than with circumstances in Palestine. So it was a strange coincidence (if there is such a thing as coincidence) that I was once again carefully reading and re-reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish when the news arrived of his untimely death at the age of 67 on August 9, 2008.
<2> Suddenly, this article, which had begun years ago as a meditation on the ghosts that haunt Darwish's poems, became itself haunted by his tragic loss, a loss felt by Darwish's readers around the world. As I turned back to his poetry, I could no longer feel myself, as I had become accustomed to doing, in the artistic presence of a restless, resolutely living and resolutely lively writer who continued to transform himself and develop new voices and new depths with each new poem. Instead, like the thousands of others whose lives have been marked by Darwish's words, I found myself (to quote the title of his recent prose memoir, Fi hadrat al-ghiyab) "in the presence of absence." And just as suddenly, these words that I was (in the tradition of academic prose) writing and re-writing and re-re-writing took on a new significance. Darwish has joined his ghosts, something that he had been anticipating, in his poetry and prose, for many years. This leaves us, his readers, with a pressing responsibility; to recall Auden's words from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," after the death of the poet, "He became his admirers" (Auden 247). In this sense, Darwish's legacy rests in our hands, and while thinking of this, I recalled the words that Darwish wrote in his long poem "Tibaq" ("Counterpoint"), written in memory of his friend Edward Said, who died (also at the age of 67) in 2003. [1] Much of the poem is written in the form of a dialogue between Darwish and Said, and at one point the two reflect directly upon their approaching deaths:
He also said: If I die before you,
my will is the impossible.
I asked: Is the impossible far off?
He said: A generation away.
I asked: And if I die before you?
He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,
and write, "The aesthetic is to reach
poise." And now, don't forget:
If I die before you, my will is the impossible. ("Counterpoint" 16-17)
While Darwish gives these words to Said in the poem, it is fair to say that this willing of the impossible against the everyday brutality of military might and political oppression was something that both men shared; they both insisted on the need to fight continuously with their words on the side of the victims against the victors, and to defend "the right of Troy / to share the narrative" ("Counterpoint" 17). Darwish's writings, like Said's, leave us with the responsibility to take up this seemingly impossible task of justice.
<3> I will be returning to these questions of responsibility and justice throughout this essay, because I think that the only sort of reading that could do justice to Darwish's poetic ghosts is one that, quite literally, focuses on a particular question of justice that haunts these poems, as indeed it haunts all of the many discussions of justice in Israel-Palestine: the question of the Right of Return. The Right of Return was first set out in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 in 1948. Article 11 of the Resolution states, in part, "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." [2] In the sixty years that have followed this resolution, there has of course been endless controversy about how to interpret these words, and how an implementation of the Right of Return would affect the identity of the state of Israel and the lives of those who are currently living in Israel-Palestine. Darwish's poetry intersects with these larger political questions, not as a direct intervention into international law, but as an overarching ethical question: How can we deal with a past that continues to haunt the present and the future?
<4> Darwish's own life gave him ample experience of the displacement that marks the life of a refugee. He was born in 1941 in the village of Al-Birweh near the Sea of Galilee, at a time when Palestine was under British Mandate rule. In 1948, he and his family were forced to flee to Lebanon when the village came under attack by the Israel army; like many Palestinian villages, Al-Birweh was subsequently destroyed and an Israeli town was built over the ruins. [3] One year later, Darwish and his family returned from Lebanon and settled in Deir Al-Assad, near the traces of their destroyed village. Darwish thus became an internal refugee in the very place he was born, and under Israeli law, was placed in the paradoxical category of "present-absent aliens": that is, those who were considered absent at the time of the founding of the state of Israel (in many cases because they had been forced to flee or go into hiding) but were later discovered to be present. As Sinan Antoon wrote in his tribute to Darwish days after his death: "The harrowing experience of losing his home and being an internal exile in his land at such a young age would haunt Darwish's poetry and become a central theme with rich and complex variations running throughout his oeuvre" ("Farewell" 1).
<5> My concern regarding the reception of Darwish's poetry is that while sympathetic readers from outside Palestine will be able to register the tragic nature of his and his family's loss of their homeland, they will not make the larger connection between Darwish's experience and that of other Palestinians. Admiration for Darwish as a poet and as a person might not translate into an ethical understanding of the nature of the loss that he tried again and again to represent in his poetry, and even those moved by his words may not take the necessary step of examining their own responsibility in addressing the situation that he describes, one which still affects tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees. In part, this concern comes from the positioning of Darwish's work within the framework of what Salah D. Hassan has called "the politics of appeasement" (15-16). In the wake of the process begun with the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993, Hassan argues, there was an attempt to position Palestinian literature and culture "as part of a broader agenda that sought to rehabilitate and domesticate the Palestinian cause, to make it fit within the framework of the U.S.-sponsored peace process" (3). In the context of the particular political moment that Hassan is discussing, this attempt to win over an American audience was understandable ("appeasement" strikes me, frankly, as too strong a word for this process, although I agree with Hassan's larger point). But the cost of such a strategy has been similar to the cost of the capitulations that were occasioned by the "peace process" itself: a failure to address many of the issues that matter most to Palestinians, whether it be those who are living under military occupation in the Occupied Territories, those living as second-class citizens in Israel, or those living as refugees throughout the world. The right of return is the foremost of the principles that have been abandoned in this process.
<6> Darwish himself was painfully aware of the dangers of becoming the "representative" voice of the Palestinian people, and of the possibility that his poetry could be admired without the necessary understanding of and sympathy for its political context. In his poem "I Talk Too Much," published in 1986, he portrays himself as a poet who wanders from country to country, asking the same question: "I ask: Is it true, good ladies and gentlemen, that the earth of Man is for all human beings / as you say? In that case, where is my little cottage, and where am I?" While the poem, like much of Darwish's work, is written in a gently self-mocking tone (this is made clear by the title) that undercuts any sentimental calls for sympathy, the clear-eyed irony of the last lines is quite direct, and should give even the most sympathetic of Darwish's readers pause:
The conference audiences applaud me for another three minutes,
three minutes of freedom and recognition.
The conference approves our right of return,
like all chickens and horses, to a dream made of stone.
I shake hands with them, one by one. I bow to them. Then I continue my journey
to another country and talk about the difference between a mirage and the rain.
I ask: Is it true, good ladies and gentlemen, that the earth of Man is for all human beings? (Unfortunately 13)
<7> During the 1990s, these concerns came to the forefront of Darwish's poetic work, and also became the basis of his stance towards the process of political negotiations that were underway. While Darwish had been close to the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for decades, he, like many Palestinian intellectuals (including Said), became disenchanted with the direction taken during the "peace process" of the early 1990s, and he resigned from the executive committee of the PLO in 1993. One important way of understanding his subsequent collection of poems entitled Lematha tarakt al-hosan wahidan? [Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?], published in 1995, is as "a response of sorts to the challenges and threats of Oslo" (Antoon, "Farewell" 2). [4] The refusal to address the right to return, and the continuing need to press for the rights of those who lost their homeland, is something thematized throughout the poems in the collection. One of the ways that Darwish attempts to represent this theme metaphorically (since it is rarely invoked directly in the book) is through the recurring appearance of ghosts. So, I will argue, it is an attention to the ghosts that haunt Darwish's poems, in this collection and elsewhere, that will lead us as readers past a facile and sentimentalized reading of Darwish's poetics and will allow us to read his work instead with a concern for the sense of responsibility that is due to these ghosts from the past that continue to haunt our present.
I. Scenes of the Ghost: Past, Present, and Future
<8> It is striking that Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? begins and ends with ghosts. The first poem in the collection, "Ara shabahi qadman min ba'id . . . " ("I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . "), features a speaker who repeats "I look out" again and again, with the line "I look out like a balcony on what I want" interspersed throughout. All this gazing, all this seeing from afar, culminates in one final sight, whose shock and drama is emphasized by the placement of the words on the page:
utulu 'ala shabahi I look out on my ghost
qadman coming
min from
ba'id . . . a distance . . . (Darwish, Lematha 11-15; Why 2-7) [5]
The final poem in the book, " . . . 'Anduma yabta'id" (" . . . As He Draws Away"), does not contain so explicit a ghost. Indeed, the poem seems to tell of a much more straightforward encounter, with no supernatural elements, between an Israeli solider and a Palestinian speaker, a speaker who uses "we" rather than "I." But within the poem is a recurring sense that what passes between the two is not a dialogue, but rather the haunting of the scene by what remains unsaid on one side and unheard on the other: "These words that we'd wished / to say at the door . . . he hears them, / hears them well, but hides them in a quick cough / and tosses them aside" (Why 192-96).
<9> Darwish's use of ellipses in the titles of the first and last poems in the collection explicitly links them: it is tempting to imagine them as a single, though perhaps paradoxical, interconnected sentence: "I see my ghost coming from afar as he draws away." This connection is reinforced by the fact that the concluding word of each poem is a form of the word "ba'id" (a word that implies, in all its various forms, a movement away or a sense of distance) followed by an ellipsis: the final lines of "I See My Ghost Coming from Afar . . . " have been noted above, and " . . . As He Draws Away" (as well as the collection as a whole) concludes with the lines: "thuma talama'u / azraru sutratihi 'anduma yabta'id . . . " ("The buttons / of his uniform sparkle as he draws away . . . ") (Lematha 164-68; Why 196).
<10> I will return to a more detailed reading of these two poems in the final sections of this essay, but to begin, I want to spend a moment considering the relationship between ghosts and hauntings, on the one hand, and justice and the right to return, on the other. I will argue that Darwish's work is full of ghosts, or better, of revenants, in the full sense of the word - literally, those who come back, but also those who have been killed or driven away but nevertheless remain present; also, those who threaten to return; and, finally, those who are being called upon to return. As Jacques Derrida notes in his reading of two other texts (Hamlet and The Communist Manifesto) that are explicitly framed and haunted by ghosts, the revenant is a figure that contains all of these meanings:
I knew very well there was a ghost waiting there, and from the opening, from the raising of the curtain. . . . The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking. Still more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparation, but a reapparition of the specter as apparation for the first time . . . (Derrida 4, italics in original)
In this sense, the revenant is a figure that also brings together past, present, and future. The ghost comes from a past that has been buried, forgotten, or actively obscured; he returns to haunt the present precisely as a reminder of this forgotten past and as a vision of a just future that might redress the crimes of the past. The scene of the ghost is the scene of the destruction visited upon Palestine by the nakba, a history that the victors have done their best to obliterate, to bury, and to disallow.
<11> This scene appears again and again in Darwish's poetry, especially in the poems from the second half of his poetic career. An emblematic example can be found in his long poem "The Tragedy of Narcissus, The Comedy of Silver," published in 1990, where he describes the "shattered absolute around their tents: / helmets, armor, a blue ewer, weapons, human / remains, a crow, an hourglass, / grass covering a massacre" (Adam 181). This vision of a past that haunts the present in spite of the attempt to pave it over or cover it with patches of grass, and the need to remember this buried past, can be found, in a similar key, in a fragment from the Israeli author Oz Shelach's collection of interconnected short sketches entitled Picnic Grounds, published in 2003. Shelach notes that even the acts meant to inculcate young Israelis (like himself, since much of the book is explicitly autobiographical) with a sense of belonging to the land are infused with a semblance of the "ghosts that haunt the soil" due to the buried violence of the past:
The fourteen-year-old seniors of the Young Guardian youth movement learned to taste the land by boiling water in an enamel pot with freshly picked Za'atar stalks and a lot of sugar . . . they let the teapot boil, and poured into little tin cups. They drank carefully, in little sips, like ghosts that haunt the soil, which is soaked with blood, where vines stretch out over ruins and persist like the claims - big sweet green grapes, rich in seeds, tall fig trees - of the farmers we drove away. ("Tea Outdoors," in Shelach 77)
In both cases, the presence of ghosts in the present attests to the existence of a blood-soaked past which may no longer be visible, thanks to the official Israeli attempt to obliterate this history with grass and trees that "cover a massacre." [6] The ghosts are thus compelled to remain, to "persist like the claims" of those killed or driven away. It is not surprising, then, that Darwish ends "The Tragedy of Narcissus, The Comedy of Silver" with a vision of return, although it is a return that is still rendered as phantasmatic and ghostly:
They were about to go down to their houses.
What dream would they dream?
From which dream would they emerge?
How would they enter their gardens
while exile is still exile?
They knew their way to its end,
and they dreamt it . . .
They knew and dreamt and returned and dreamt.
They knew and returned and returned and dreamt.
They dreamt and returned. (Adam 201-03)
<12> Of course, there are many kinds of ghosts that can emerge from the past, just as there are many contested versions of history, some of them more frightening than others. In his memoir Memory for Forgetfulness, published in 1987 and dealing with his experiences during the siege of Beirut, Darwish reflects upon one particular ghostly return: the scene of Menachem Begin celebrating his birthday in a festivity that explicitly links this celebration with the occupation of Lebanon. Darwish writes: "It is a fact that Begin doesn't live in this age or speak a modern language. He's a ghost, come back from the time of King Solomon, who represents the golden age of Jewish history that passed through the land of Palestine" (143). While the return of a ghost from "the golden age" represents a victory from one side, Darwish also reveals the terrifying consequence that accompanies the arrival of this ghost from the past: the erasure of Palestinian history, indeed of any Palestinian presence, from Palestine itself: "in the mind of the king of the legend everything has been frozen as it had been, and since that time history has done nothing in Palestine . . . except wait for the new king of the legend, Menachem" (144). The struggle in the present over the past, the struggle over which ghosts (not to mention which people) will be allowed to return to or remain on the land, is thus a life or death struggle over history in which even the dead play a role: "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious" (Benjamin 255, emphasis in original). These words of Walter Benjamin's, written about another struggle over competing versions of history, find a haunting echo again and again in Darwish's work: as he notes elsewhere in Memory for Forgetfulness: "They're even shelling our martyrs in the cemetery, restaging their death" (151).
<13> This brings us to the present tense of the ghost. Here the revenant finds himself a spectator, looking upon what has been taken away from him. Encountering the people who he sees as having taken his place, he looks upon those who are living the life that he was meant to be living, the life that should in fact be his at this very moment. The speaker of " . . . As He Draws Away," addressing an Israeli solider who has gone back to his home (a home which used to belong to the speaker), gives eloquent expression to this claim of being unjustly replaced by an occupier:
Good evening to you! Say hello to our well
and to our fig trees! Tread gently on
our shadow in the barley fields. Say hello, higher up, to
our pines. . . .
Say hello to our house, stranger
Our coffee cups
are still as they were. Can you smell
our fingers on them? (Why 192, 196)
Here the past does its best to make itself known in the present, even if only in the smell of fingers on coffee cups or shadows in barley fields, which persist (like ghosts themselves) in defiance of reality and in apparent violation of the laws of the material world.
<14> What of the future of the revenant? There is much to be said about this. My argument is that in Darwish's poetry, the appearance of the ghost is often a glimpse of a future that will bring justice to those who have had their history stolen from them; what is glimpsed in the future, along with these ghostly figures, is a ghostly glimpse of return. This power of the revenant to bring the injustices of the past into the present and to point towards a justice that must come in the future - that is, a power to unite the stolen inheritance of the past with a vision of return in the future - has been noted by others as well, for example by Derrida in his reading of the specters of Marx and Hamlet:
If I. . . speak at length about ghosts, inheritances, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. . . . It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (Derrida xix, emphases in original)
But perhaps it is better to come to this point about the return of ghosts as a way to imagine a justice yet to come by inviting some of the revenants from Darwish's poetry into this essay. This point about justice and the future will be addressed more specifically in the final two sections of the essay, through a reading of the two poems - "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . " and " . . . As He Draws Away" - that begin and conclude Darwish's book Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
II. "I Am Not Mine": The Ghost and the Self
<15> There are many hauntings to be found in Darwish's work, many more than can be justly considered in this short essay. For example, in addition to the two poems already mentioned from Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? there are numerous sightings of ghosts in other poems in the book. In the poem "The Well," which looks back towards both the recent past of an old village well and also towards the more distant past of Gilgamesh and Babylon, the speaker declares: "I found no one but my ghost to continue" (Why 76). In "The Raven's Ink," there is both the sighting and the refusal of a ghost: "The unknown pushes me, I push it / It lifts me, I lift it toward the ghost suspended like / a ripe eggplant" the speaker declares, but then adds: "I wasn't a ghost for them to trace / my steps upon my steps" (56). And "A Cloud in My Hand" ends with both a ghost and a clear echo of the question asked by the title of the collection as a whole about why those who became exiles (like Darwish's family) were forced to leave their ancestral houses with such suddenness:
They saddled the horses
They didn't know why
But they saddled the horses
at the end of the night, and waited
for a ghost rising from the cracks of the place . . . (14)
<16> A different sort of haunting takes place in those poems, such as " . . . As He Draws Away," that feature a speaker who doesn't say the words that he wishes to say - which, in a number of cases, calls into question whether this non-speaking speaker actually exists as anything other than a flickering apparition. For example, in the poem "Helen What a Rain," the speaker declares: "What I didn't say to Helen I said / to others, and what I said to others / I didn't say to Helen" (146). The poem also features a figure who is (not) addressed by the speaker's unspoken words, and who nevertheless hears and is haunted these words but tries to deny them. Helen, like the Israeli soldier in " . . . As He Draws Away," does her best to ignore the ghosts of the past in her own opportunistic rewriting of history:
But Helen
knows what the stranger doesn't say . . .
She knows what the stranger says to a scent
broken up in the rain
She says to him:
The Trojan War didn't happen
It never did
Never . . . (Why 146, ellipses in original)
<17> Against this attempt by the victors to obliterate the history of the defeated, Darwish consistently reminds us of the need to remember these almost-lost narratives; this is, as I suggested in my introduction, the need to defend "the right of Troy to share the narrative" against the attempt to assert that "The Trojan War didn't happen." [7] A similar sense runs through the series of poems "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia," published three years before Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Here the lost history of Andalusia becomes a metaphor for the stolen history of Palestine, and the need to reclaim this history. The series eloquently expresses a sense of the price to be paid if such a history is not recorded: "Soon we will search / in the margins of your history, in distant countries, / for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves: / Was Andalusia here or there? On the land . . . or in the poem?" ("Eleven" 213). Embedded in this last question is a fear that runs throughout Darwish's work: while he is a master of metaphor, it is often possible to sense a fear of metonymy; the exiled poet's attempt to imaginatively re-create a connection to the lost homeland could all too easily come to replace actual and concrete efforts to reclaim the stolen land. Again, we find Darwish's concern with becoming a "representative" voice, and with readings that would allow the poems themselves to somehow replace an understanding of the concrete historical injustices that need to be addressed and rectified. This is one of the reasons why Darwish consistently undercuts the tragic mode with bursts of irony and black comedy: the reader must not be lulled into a false sense of tragic catharsis, when the preferred mode would be one of outrage and a taking up of responsibility for the injustices of the past. [8]
<18> This responsibility to restore and protect a stolen history sometimes takes on a more personal note in Darwish, as in his eloquent address "When the Martyrs Go to Sleep," published in 1986: "When the martyrs go to sleep, I wake to protect them from professional mourners. . . . / I hang your names wherever you wish, so go to sleep. Sleep on the trellis of that sour vine. / I protect your dreams from your guards' knives" (Unfortunately 22). It should be noted that such addresses to martyrs in Darwish's poetry, indeed all his addresses to ghosts, have neither a morbid nor a celebratory tone. The intended effect is of mourning, respect, and even a request for forgiveness made by those who continue to live, addressed to those who have given their lives in a struggle for their very existence. This can be found embodied in a martyr's address to the speaker in one of Darwish's more recent poems, "State of Siege," published in 2002:
The martyr explains: I have not searched beyond the distance
For eternity's virgins, I love life
On Earth, among the pines and figs,
But I had no access to it. I've searched
For it, using every last thing I own: blood in a body of azure. ("State" 4)
<19> More ghosts appear elsewhere, often as a work draws to a close: towards the end of Memory for Forgetfulness, for example, Darwish converses with the ghost of Izzeddine Kalak, who had been assassinated in 1978. In their exchange, the ghost of Kalak suggests that the sort of living death being experienced by Palestinians under the siege of Beirut is not unlike the existence of a ghost:
"Izzeddine," I ask, "what are you doing here? Weren't you assassinated? Didn't I write your obituary? And didn't we walk in your funeral in Damascus? Are you alive or dead?"
"Like everyone here."
"Izzeddine," I ask, "suppose I tell you we're the living; does that mean you're dead?"
"Like everyone here."
"Izzeddine," I ask, "suppose I say to you we're the dead; does that mean you're alive?"
"Like everyone here." (162)
And nearing the conclusion of the long poem Mural, a dialogue with death written after Darwish's long struggle with a near-fatal illness in 2000, the ghosts multiply and proliferate. The first ghost is seen outside the self: "Do you know me? I asked a shadow near the rampart. / A girl in a dress of flames saw me, and said: Are you speaking to me? / No, I said, I was talking to a ghost that haunts me" (Unfortunately 157; italics in original). As the poem concludes, the references to ghosts begin to suggest the speaker's split self, and his inability to find wholeness: he tells a prison guard: "As for me, I have gone. / The man you see is no longer myself! / I am my ghost" and the guard replies: "You are a prisoner of yourself, a prisoner of longing. / The man you see before you is not me. I am my ghost" (158-59). In the poem's final lines, an evocative repetition of all that is his and all that is not, the speaker reveals with his last words the haunting sense of a split self, of a loss that has not yet been redeemed:
This sea is mine. This fresh air is mine.
This sidewalk, my steps and my sperm on the sidewalk are mine.
The old bus station is mine.
Mine is the ghost and the haunted one. . . .
What was mine: my yesterday.
What will be mine: the distant tomorrow,
and the return of the wandering soul as if nothing had happened. . . .
And my name, though I mispronounce it over the coffin, is mine.
As for me, filled with every reason to leave,
I am not mine.
I am not mine.
I am not mine. (161-62)
The tragic final statement - "I am not mine" - comes from a self that is caught in the present, in the experience of dispossession and injustice; this is the very essence of finding oneself "in the presence of absence" - in the presence of one's own absence, in fact. But this passage also contains a claim made on both the past and the future - both "my yesterday" and "the distant tomorrow" - as well as the ultimate desire for a future reuniting of the divided self, in which self and ghost will no longer be separate: "Mine is the ghost and the haunted one."
<20> So we might identify two interconnected themes in these different haunted scenes. On the one hand, Darwish's use of ghosts refers to those who defy and resist the repeated attempts of the victors in the present to ignore, steal, bury, or obliterate history. In these poems, the ghost (perhaps it is better to use the word "revenant" again here) is the figure that represents the continuing existence of this suppressed past in the present, and the call of the poem is to restore and protect those who have been dispossessed so as to allow for their return. On the other hand, and in other parts of Darwish's poetic oeuvre, the ghost represents part of a split within the self. In these poems, figures who are living a present that is marked by injustice and dispossession nevertheless try to find their way towards a future that will contain the sense of justice that can restore them to themselves - uniting the ghost and the haunted one. These two sets of ghosts can both be found, very explicitly, in "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . " and " . . . As He Draws Away," so I will now move to a more detailed analysis of these two poems from Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
III. "I See What I Want": The Return of the Revenant
<21> In "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . ," the speaker begins by comparing himself to an inanimate object high above the city: "I look out like a balcony on what I want" (Why 2). There is an echo here of the title of Darwish's 1990 collection, Ara ma urid, a title that contains the meaning "I see what I want to see" (which is how it has generally been translated) but also, more simply and directly, "I see what I want (to have)." Similarly, here the link between looking and desiring is, intentionally, broken apart. This is important, since in the remainder of the poem, the suggestion is that the speaker has in fact already been removed from this place upon which he nevertheless gazes. It is a passive gaze at best, which explains the unusual comparison that drives the poem: the speaker is "like a balcony" in that he can only hang (ghost-like) above the scene below, not become a part of it.
<22> In fact, the first description of what is seen from this vantage point contains within it a sense of the dead watching the living, with some hint of the envy that is often attributed to ghosts watching life on earth: "I look out on my friends carrying the evening mail / wine and bread / novels and records . . . " (Why? 2). There is something reminiscent here of the scenes in Memory for Forgetfulness in which Darwish imagines watching his own funeral and observing the reactions of his friends to his death:
I want a funeral with an elegant coffin, from which I can peep out over the mourners, just as the playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim wanted to do. I want to sneak a look at how they stand, walk, and sigh and how they convert their spittle into tears. I also want to eavesdrop on their mocking comments: "He was a womanizer." "He was a dandy in his choice of clothes." . . . "The poet is dead and his poetry with him. What's left of him? His role is finished, and we're done with his legend. He took his poetry with him and disappeared. Anyway, his nose was long, and his tongue." I'll hear even harsher stuff than this, once the imagination has been let loose. I'll smile in my coffin and try to say, "Enough!" I'll try to come back to life, but I won't be able. (26)
<23> At the same time, the speaker of "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . " seems destined to watch while changes are forced upon the place he gazes upon and the things which he desires, and new people come to take his place: for instance, he looks out on "the trucks of soldiers / changing the trees of this place" and "the dog of my neighbor who emigrated / from Canada a year and a half ago..." (Why? 2). Behind these seemingly straightforward observations can be found the truth of settler colonialism, in which landscapes are transformed by armies in order to kill the memories of what existed before, and neighborhoods are "cleansed" and repopulated by settlers, thus giving a bitterly ironic sense to the word "neighbor." The scene becomes increasingly ominous as the poem continues, as the speaker begins to hint at the dangers posed by the night; he suggests that those whose sleep he watches, those who have taken his place and now sleep in the houses over which he gazes, are enemies who wish to destroy him: "I look out on trees that guard the night from itself / and guard the sleep of those who want me dead..." (2).
<24> There is also a sense of doubleness in the speaker of the poem, who seems able not only to gaze upon himself, but also to watch the split in himself as it occurs: "I look out on my image fleeing from itself." But it is a very specific image of himself that is being gazed upon, an image seemingly from childhood; the speaker watches his image fleeing "to the stone staircase, carrying my mother's scarf / trembling in the wind" (4). There is a loss here, but also a sense of the self one might have been if not for the fact of being displaced by the violence of a forced exile. The question of this split, as the speaker watches not just himself as he is but the self he might have become, culminates in the question of return, both in time and in space: "What would happen, were I to return / to childhood? And I to you . . . and you to me" (4) (the translation here is faithful to the line break in the original text, which means that clearly embedded in the question "What would happen were I return to childhood?" is the haunting question: "What would happen were I to return?"). The return here seems not so much to an individual or a family but to a place and a time that has been left behind, or from which the speaker has been removed. What is striking here is that what is being sought is not only his return to the land but, in a larger sense, the land's return to him. Once again, we see the ghost simultaneously embodying past (that which has been lost), present (the split present moment in which the figure watches), and future (the future that is opened up, in a conditional way, by the question "What would happen were I to return?").
<25> The poem ends with the speaker's gaze falling upon "my ghost / coming / from / a distance . . . " (6). But it may be fair to ask who is the real ghost here: the ghostly presence that has been watching, or the body that is being viewed? Perhaps this is precisely what has broken down in this poem. What the speaker is viewing, I would suggest, is his own revenant, the self that desires (or threatens) to return but is unable to do so. While the ghostly presence above can only watch the scene, the real revenant is the one walking the earth below, whose return would bring with it a sense of justice and reconciliation. "Who will bury our days after us: you . . . or they?" asks the speaker of "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia," another of Darwish's poems of loss ("Eleven" 218) [9]. In this case as well, it seems that the ghostly speaker can only watch the scene from afar, and has no power to bury the dead or affect the living. But the very act of watching nevertheless differentiates the ghost from the dead:
Even if one wanted to, one could not let the dead bury the dead: that has no sense, that is impossible. Only mortals, only the living who are not living gods can bury the dead. Only mortals can watch over them, and can watch, period. Ghosts can do so as well, they are everywhere where there is watching; the dead cannot do so - it is impossible and they must not do so. (Derrida 174-75, emphases in original)
Beyond this, though, the true ghost, the revenant, is the one who returns at the end of the poem, "coming from a distance." This is the revenant as the bringer of justice. While the gazing speaker above may seem to be the more "real," like a balcony, it is the ghostly figure below, the figure who returns at the end of the poem, that brings the idea of change, and of justice, to the scene. The revenant here is the one that is more "real," the one that transforms the desire from an object lost in the past that can only be gazed upon from afar, to something concrete that belongs to the future, a future containing the justice that is to come. An elegiac reading of this revenant (and of this poem more generally) will not do it justice; it demands more of us, and of the future.
IV. "Blood that the Night Will Never Dry": The Departure of the Colonizer
<26> What of " . . . As He Draws Away"? The poem's title and its placement at the end of Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? gives it a valedictory feeling (although, interestingly, the editors of The Adam of Two Edens, one of the first major anthologies of Darwish's poetry translated into English, place this poem at the beginning of their collection). Whereas in "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . ," located at the beginning of Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, a ghostly figure is seen approaching from afar by the speaker of the poem, here in the collection's final poem a very concrete figure, that of an Israeli soldier, is viewed walking away from the speaker at the end of the book. The opening poem consists of a disembodied speaker describing all that he gazes upon without ever coming into contact with the people and things he describes. The concluding poem has a far different sense, as the encounter between speaker and soldier appears from the beginning to be solid, embodied, and real:
The enemy who drinks tea in our shack has
a mare in smoke, a daughter with
thick eyebrows, brown eyes, long
hair like a night of songs over her shoulders. (Why? 192)
Two questions arise upon reading these opening lines. First, why does the speaker use the first person plural "we" rather than "I" ("our shack")? Second, why is this speaker so willing to discuss personal details about his self-proclaimed enemy, and why does he possess such confidence in describing him and his family, as if prepared to show off knowledge of him?
<27> The first question might be easily dismissed: after all, it is commonplace to refer to "our shack," and in later lines, to "our tea," "our bread," and "our cat" in this way. I will return to this point, since this use of "we" and "our" becomes more striking as it is repeated over the course of the poem. The second question, however, contains a bit of a puzzle from the beginning, for the speaker displays knowledge not just of things that are easily visible or understandable about the Israeli soldier - for instance, it is no mystery that the speaker can describe the soldier's daughter, since "Her image / doesn't leave him when he comes over to ask for tea" - but from the beginning, the speaker also displays an uncanny ability to fathom what the soldier does not say, and what is not visible: "But he / doesn't speak to us about her evening chores, or about / a mare abandoned by songs at the top of a hill . . . " (192). However, it is possible to lose sight of this uncanny ability while reading the first section of the poem, which ends with a spoken exchange between speaker and soldier: "He always says to us: / Don't blame the victim! / Who is the victim? We ask him / He answers: Blood that the night will never dry . . . " (192). With this cryptic line, the soldier walks away: "the buttons on his uniform sparkle as he draws away" (192).
<28> The poem then switches registers, with the speaker hailing the soldier and inviting him to greet and bless "our well," "our fig trees," "our shadow," "our pines," and advising him not to "forget the horse's / fear of airplanes" (192, 194). This horse, the "mare in smoke . . . abandoned by songs at the top of a hill" of the first part of the poem, is recognizable as the same horse, "abandoned on a hilltop," that readers have encountered earlier in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (and indeed in the title of the book itself) in the poem "The Eternity of Cactus," in which a son asks his father: "Why did you leave the horse alone?" and is told: "To keep the house company, my son, / Houses die when their inhabitants are gone . . . " (30). "Who will live in the house after us, father?" the son asks, and the father responds: "It will remain as it is, as it has always been, my son!" (28). And so it has remained, suggests the speaker of " . . . As He Draws Away," with the exception that the enemy is the one who now lives there among horse and well and fig trees and pines. "And greet us, there, if time allows . . . " the speaker calls defiantly to the soldier as he walks away (194).
<29> Except that we learn immediately that these words are never in fact spoken at all: "These words that we'd wished / to say at the door . . . " (194). We discover that the poem has, after the initial "real" (and, at least on the part of the speaker, almost wordless) exchange between speaker and soldier, been documenting a speech that was never in fact spoken aloud. But adding to the uncanny nature of the scene, these words that are not spoken are nevertheless heard by the soldier: "These words that we'd wished / to say at the door . . . he hears them / hears them well, but hides them in a quick cough / and tosses them aside" (194). Far from being a dialogue, we come to realize that this is in fact the scene of a haunting. The Israeli soldier cannot escape from the words that he does not want to hear but nevertheless hears from outside of himself, even though they are never spoken by those who wish to say them.
<30> We are now in a position to return to the two questions asked previously. The speaker takes on a multiple voice, the voice of the "we," in order to represent a collective voice of displacement, dislocation, and loss. [10] It is as though all the voices of all the speakers who have been displaced from the village that is the subject of the poems in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? come together to form this "we" in the collection's final poem. These are the voices that continue to haunt their former home, "our stone house, there, at the edge of the plain" where the enemy now lives (194). These are the voices that the enemy tries to muffle, wave aside, even reason away with phrases such as "Don't blame the victim," but is ultimately unable to evade. And as in "I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance . . . ," here there also seems to be a split in the speaker, between the "real" speaker who talks to and interacts with the Israeli soldier, on the one hand, and this ghostly speaker whose words can be heard even when unspoken; it is the latter speaker who is able to observe the soldier, to look into his thoughts and watch him from above. In short, as in the first poem of the book, we have a speaker who is, at least in part, a revenant, and a land that is haunted by ghosts that gaze upon what they desire, what they once possessed before it was taken from them; now, they are condemned to watch those who have taken their places.
<31> Like a good ghost, the speaker asks penetrating questions: the soldier seems to want to shrug off the voices around him, but in that case, our ghostly speaker asks, "why does he visit the victim every evening? / And memorize our proverbs, like us? / And repeat our songs of / our own appointments in the holy place?" (194). Embedded here in these questions about why the soldier feels the need to be near the victim is a deeper sense of oneness, in the suggestion that even though the speaker claims ownership of "our proverbs," there is still the fact that both speaker and soldier must memorize them by heart - in principle, it is implied, the proverbs might have had the chance to belong to them both. This is echoed in two lines that occur directly in the middle of the poem: "Were it not for the gun / the flute would pass into the flute" (194) (an earlier translator has rendered these same lines, equally plausibly, as "Our flutes would have played a duet / if it weren't for the gun" [Adam 52]). Glimpsed here is the lost possibility of a present that would open onto a different future, one that might have replaced the sense of either/or (the land can be inhabited either by the speaker or by the soldier) with the possibility of both/and, a present and future of co-existence.
<32> But in the present that actually exists, the gun prevents this: " . . . The war will last as long as the earth / in us revolves around itself!" (194). In this violent context, the speaker deftly measures the different mechanisms for rationalization attempted by the soldier, who is haunted by the voices that he cannot brush aside, cannot avoid, cannot silence or dismiss. So the soldier's attempts to explain or argue the voices away continue: for example, the attempt to demand "goodness" of the Palestinian inhabitants of the soldier's "home" - "Let's be good then. He used to ask us / to be good" (194) - which echoes the rhetoric of those who, like Moshe Levinger, Benny Elon, and other supporters of Israeli colonial settlements, declare that "foreign residents" (their term for Palestinians) will be "allowed" to remain in the occupied territories on the condition that they "behave themselves" (Goldberg 49).
<33> Beyond this, the soldier works to try to reclaim the sense of victimization from those he is victimizing: "He'd read the verses / of Yeats's Airman: Those that I fight / I do not hate, those that I guard / I do not love. . ." (194). The soldier tries his best, using a distinguished literary allusion (Yeats is a favorite reference point for Darwish), but his analogy does not quite fit: the speaker in Yeats's poem, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," has been forced to fight on behalf of the British because they have colonized his land, and so he is made to fight England's enemies for England's benefit, in a war which will bring no good to his own countrymen. But the solider simply speaks these lines and walks away without pondering the false analogy. Like his assertion about "Blood that the night will never dry," which calls to mind the lasting traces of historical wounds that are still fresh, he simply makes an assertion of victimhood to counter the haunting sense that in the present tense, he in fact might be the victimizer of those whose place he has taken. We are shown that this is an assertion of victimhood with no attempt to understand the current situation, for after speaking of Yeats, the soldier would "leave our wooden shack / and walk eighty meters" to what he thinks of as his home, though the speaker of the poem still refers to it as "our stone house" (194).
<34> It is this sense of simultaneously inhabiting the same space, a space which the historical victor now occupies but which is still haunted by the presence of the victims - that is, by the demand for justice by and for these victims - that is brought out beautifully as the poem moves towards its conclusion:
Will you tell your daughter with
her long braid and two thick eyebrows that she has
an absent friend
who would like to visit her? For nothing . . .
but to enter her mirror and see his secret:
How she follows, after him, the course of his life
in his place? Say hello to her
if time allows . . . (196, ellipses in original)
Throughout his poetry, Darwish has often referred to a desired but ultimately impossible connection with a young Israeli woman. His love poems to "Rita" are the most famous example of this desired but failed human connection, one that is made impossible by the continuing history of victim and victimizer; as he puts it in "Rita and the Rifle," published in 1969: "Between Rita and my eyes / There is a rifle." In " . . . As He Draws Away," the failure is one that keeps the speaker not only from realizing the possibility of friendship or co-existence with this unnamed Israeli woman, the daughter of the soldier, but also separates him from a basic sense of self; he cannot even find "his secret," since the victor is the one who possesses the mirror. "The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors: / enter them so we may exit completely," declares the speaker of "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia," in a similar vein ("Eleven" 213). In this present, the winner has taken all. More recently, Darwish portrayed a process by which the colonizer has not just prevented this human connection between a man and a woman, but has actively destroyed it before it can even be born, as in these lines from "State of Siege," addressed to an Israeli soldier who has killed a pregnant woman:
If you left the fetus thirty days
in its mother's womb, things would have been different.
The occupation would be over and this suckling infant
would forget the time of the siege
and grow up a healthy child
reading at school, with one of your daughters
the ancient history of Asia.
They might even fall in love
and give birth to a daughter (she would be Jewish by birth).
What, then, have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow
and your granddaughter an orphan.
What have you done with your scattered family?
And how have you slain three doves in one story? ("State" 4)
<35> Allowing ourselves, as readers, to remain with this theme of oneness and the vision of (seemingly impossible) co-existence that runs throughout these poems also returns us to the question of ethical reading that I raised at the beginning of this essay. We find here a complete transvaluation of the values that normally guide an understanding of the situation in Israel-Palestine, and of the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian, friend and enemy, family and foe. In fact, for readers coming to this situation from the outside, it can help to undermine the very idea of there being two intractably opposed "sides" in the first place. Of course, Darwish's poems dramatically represent the continuing violence of this conflict, and the fact that a massively disproportional amount of suffering has been borne by Palestinians. At the same time, there is, as these poems suggest, an emphasis on a sense of oneness between victor and victim, and a vision of potential co-existence that is the other side of the call to justice and return found throughout his work. In this vision, the victor is shown to be the loser, but in a very different way than the Israeli soldier's attempts to wrap his actions in the mantle of victimhood in " . . . As He Draws Away." In Darwish's poems, it is precisely the violence needed to attain military hegemony that leads to a loss of the human connection that would be the key to co-existence. And whatever the attempts of the victor to disguise, pave over, or obliterate the past, as Darwish continually shows us, there will always be revenants that will return to the scene of the crime, with their unquenchable demands for justice.
<36> This can all be made to sound hopelessly naïve, especially in light of the language of realpolitik that is invariably used for discussing Israel-Palestine. But this is the particularity of poetry, which exists in a realm separate and distinct from that of one- or two-state "solutions," "peace processes," and "roadmaps." Suddenly, through the form of the poem, the "impossibility" of return, and of co-existence in one place - the logic of either/or that has been applied so insistently to Israel-Palestine - opens out onto a vision of a different and more human possibility. It is a possibility that has been effectively killed in the present, as Darwish relentlessly and sadly portrays throughout his work, but it nevertheless exists within the realm of imaginative writing, and it can thus be presented as a possibility that might be part of a different version of the future, if this future is willed into existence. Of course, this can only be possible once the interactions are no longer between soldiers and victims, occupiers and occupied, those who now possess the land and those whose presence and demands for justice continue to haunt this same land.
<37> As the poem " . . . As He Draws Away" (as well as the collection Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?) comes to an end, the multiple speakers embedded in the "we" of the poem want to address their words to the Israeli soldier, but once again the words are never actually spoken. Nevertheless, once again, the soldier hears them, but again he muffles them with a cough and waves them aside as the poem concludes: "The buttons / of his uniform sparkle as he draws away . . . " (196). But the soldier cannot walk away from the voices, nor can he escape from the haunting. For the "we" that speaks in the poem, the inhabitants of the village portrayed throughout Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, have never truly left: they remain to haunt the place that is now "home" to those who have dispossessed them. "They never left. They never returned. / Their hearts were almonds in the streets. / . . . They were what they had always been," Darwish writes in "The Tragedy of Narcissus, The Comedy of Silver" (Adam 175, 177). But their presence is that of the revenant: while something remains, part of what remains is the call for justice, which would be the call for a true return, a reuniting of the two sides of the speakers in both poems, the "real" speaker who speaks and acts and the ghostly speaker who watches. In the first poem of Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? the ghost returns; in the final poem, the colonizer leaves. Combining these two images, we find perhaps the first signs of the coming of justice. If this justice is to finally come, it must be through the actions of those of us who find ourselves now bereft of Mahmoud Darwish's actual presence, but with the great gift of his poetry. If his will is the impossible, his readers may prove to be the generation that brings it to realization at last.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. "Commitment." Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Verso, 1998.
Alessandrini, Anthony C. "Blow Up." Arab Studies Journal 13-14 (2006).
Al-Allaq, Ali J. "Tradition as a Factor of Arabic Modernism: Darwish's Application of a Mask." Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature. Ed. J. R. Smart. London: Curzon, 1996.
Antoon, Sinan. "Farewell Mahmoud Darwish." Al-Ahram Weekly 14-20 August 2008: 1-2.
---. "Mahmoud Darwish's Allegorical Critique of Oslo." Journal of Palestine Studies 31 (2002): 66-78.
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Bardenstein, Carol B. "Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory." Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England, 1999. 148-70.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Boullata, Issa J. "Review of Why Have You Left the Horse Alone?" World Literature in Review 81 (2007): 70-72.
Darwish, Mahmoud. The Adam of Two Edens. Ed. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2000.
---. Ahad 'ashar kawkaban. Beirut: Dar al-Jadeed, 1992.
---. Ara ma urid. Beirut: Dar al-Jadeed, 1990.
---. "Counterpoint." Trans. Mona Anis. Al-Ahram Weekly 30 September - 6 October 2004: 16-17.
---. "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia." Trans. Mona Anis and Nigel Ryan. In Comparative Criticism 18 (1996): 213-23.
---. Fi hadrat al-ghiyab. Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-al-Nashr, 2006.
---. Lematha tarakt al-hosan wahidan? Beirut: Riad al-Rayyes, 1995.
---. Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
---. "State of Siege." Trans. Amina Elbendary. In Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 April 2002: 4.
---. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. Trans. and ed. Munir Akash et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.
---. Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? Trans. Jeffrey Sacks. New York: Archipelago, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Dyer, Rebecca. "Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish's Genre-Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said." PMLA 122 (2007): 1447–1462.
Goldberg, Jeffrey. "Among the Settlers." The New Yorker 31 May 2004: 46-69.
Hassan, Salah D. "Modern Palestinian Literature and the Politics of Appeasement." Social Text 21 (2003): 7-24.
Hochberg, Gil Z. "Edward Said: 'The Last Jewish Intellectual': On Identity, Alterity, and the Politics of Memory." Social Text 24 (2006): 47-65.
Shelach, Oz. Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003.
Slyomovics, Susan. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.
Taylor, John. "Poetry in Palestine and Israel." Antioch Review 66 (2008): 177-84.
Notes
[1] For a reading of this poem as both an example of and a transformation of the marthiya, the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era, see Dyer; for a rich consideration of Said and Darwish that adheres to some extent to the elegiac mode, see Hochberg. [^]
[2] The full text of the resolution is available via the United Nations' online archive at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/3/ares3.htm. [^]
[3] For an extended analysis of this historical process, and its effects today, see Slyomovics. [^]
[4] Antoon has brought out this point about Darwish's critique of the Oslo process through a close reading of one poem from the collection, "A Non-linguistic Dispute with Imru' al-Qays"; see "Mahmoud Darwish's Allegorical Critique of Oslo." [^]
[5] The English translation cited here is by Jeffrey Sacks; Sacks' translation, unlike most other English translations of Darwish's poetry, also includes the full Arabic text of the poems. I will be referring primarily to English translations of Darwish's poetry throughout, since much of my concern in this essay is the reception of Darwish's translated poems by an English-speaking audience, but I will refer back to the Arabic originals in certain key places. [^]
[6] For a more historical reading of this tendency to cover over the sites of lost Palestinian villages with grass and forests, see Bardenstein 164-65. [^]
[7] This point about the need of Troy for its own poets, and hence its own voice, in the wake of defeat and obliteration is echoed by Darwish in an interview with an Israeli journalist that is included in Jean-Luc Godard's 2004 film Notre Musique. [^]
[8] I have made a similar argument elsewhere, regarding films dealing with Palestinian culture and politics. See Alessandrini, "Blow Up." The relevant source for dealing with the turning of suffering into art in such a way as to effectively obliterate the victims of this suffering is Theodor Adorno's essay "Commitment" (see Adorno 189-90). [^]
[9] Ali J. Al-Allaq has suggested that the speaker of this series of poems is Abu 'Abd Allah al-Saghir, the last Arab king of Granada; this reading is convincing, and gives a stronger context for the sense of loss that runs through the series (al-Allaq 19-20). [^]
[10] In this sense, it is a significant (though understandable) misreading to suggest that Darwish himself is the speaker of all the poems in this volume, as Issa Boullata does in his review of Sacks' translation of Lematha tarakt al-hosan wahidan? (Boullata 70). Such an interpretation privileges Darwish's own family history of displacement, and through this privileging loses the clear sense of a collective voice in these poems. For a more extended (and more contextualized) review of Sacks' translation, see Taylor. [^]
Return to Top»