Ibrahim Muhawi

A ra b S t r-; cs lie Centerfor Corrtemporary S e t rv ir-e cf F c re iq rr EdlnundA WalshS chrool rsity Un itrr-' Georqctc-rwn (O2CC9

Contexts of Language in Mahm oud Darwish

lbrahim Muhawi

Ibrahim Muharvirvitsborn in llamallah,Palestine, anclreceivecl his higher ecticatiotritr lrnglishliterature at the Universityof'California. l{e hastirtrght at ur-riversities in Clanacia, the .lvlidclle llast,North Africa, lhe Unitetl States, Scotiaitd, atrd(ierman,v. He is the authol of a nurnberof booksand articlcsrln l)alestinian arnd Arabic folkloreand literatrLre, including (rvith Sharif'l(anaana) Spcak, Birrl, (i989) ancl(rvithYasirSuleinran) A{oin: Polestininn Spetrk Aralt Folktttlcs Litcroture and licttittt't in thc Nliticlle Enst(2006). Fleis alsothc translutor <>f iv'lolrmoud 'lanrer'sIlreokireKnccs (199-5) I)orv'islish4etrtorl'_f or I:orgct-firlircss and Zakar"ia (2 008) , and is c r - r r rc n tln yo rk i n g o n a tra u s l a ti o n o l I)arl vi sh'ls of' rutOrtturrral riinary Grie/. 'Ihis patrrer (lassidvils a pilper lr'onr its was eclitt'db,vN1inriKirlt ancl'l'rarriss gir.,e origir-ral fbrmat irsa 20-rninute tall<, n on the occasior-r o1a tribute to thc lif'c atrdrvorli of N'lal'rrrouci [)aru'ish.

IBRAHIM MUHAWI

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies EdmundA.Walsh Schoolof ForeignService 241 Intercultural Center Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057 - 1020 202.687.5793 http ://ccas. georgetown. edu @2009 by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Atl rights reserved.

IN MAHMOUD CONTEXTS OF LANGUACE DARWISH

MahmoudDarwishwasborn in Al-Birweh,Palestine, in 1942.With theadventof the Israelioccupation in 1948, hefled with hisfamily to Lebanon. Thefamily returned to their homelandthefollowing year,only to find an Israelisettlercolonybuilt on the ruins of their home.Darwish left Israelin 1970andfor 26 yearslived in exile in Moscow,Cairo,Beirut, Tunis,Paris,and Ramallah.Hisfirst volumeof poetry,Birds Without Wings, waspublishedwhen he was 19.Other collections of hispoetry and (1966),Memory for proseincludeLeavesof Olives (1964),Lover from Palestine (l 985),and In the Presence In 1996 Forgetfulness of Absence(2006). he movedto Ramallah. MahmoudDarwishdiedfollowingopen-heart surgery on August9, 2008.

This paper explores three contextsof language in Mahmoud Darwish's poetry. performative The seconddealswith reading The first is Darwish's useof language. poet.The third is Darwish's Darwish asa resistance death,which I interpretaspart This lastpoint is speculative interestin view of of his language. but of considerable the role he assumed asthe poeticvoiceof Palestine.

he more we know about Darwish, the more we realizethe depth of his engagement with the Arabiclanguage. In his book Mural,we find this cry "Therefore to the goddess Anat: sing, my noble Goddess/ Oh Anat, I am the quarry and the arrows/ I am language."' If language is both the quarry and the arrows,then language usesitself to hunt itself.Darwish is undoubtedlya difficult poet to understand. He pushesthe very limits of what language into obscurity. can say, sometimes descending In his 1985 book Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish explainshow he usesobscurity:"The obscure heaps up on the obscure,rubs againstitself, and ignites into clarity."2 There is an element of wonder in this. If you rub two dark flints againsteach other,you will get a spark.And if you rub two dark thoughtsagainsteachother,a new meaningwill result.This is Darwish'sironic way of proposinga new kind of in which an obscure dialectics thesisrubs against an obscure antithesis, resulting in a luminous synthesis. We find thinking by dialectic everywherein Darwish. Indeed,the titles of his two magnificentworks of prose, Memoryfor Forgetfulness and In the Presence reflectthis. In both, more meaningemerges of Absence, from the combination of the two obscure elementsthan from each element on its own. Like all poets, Darwishgrappled with language new meanings to create andfresh

IBRAHIM MUHAWI

exPression. Darwish alsoharnessed language's performativepower to embodyhis homeland of Palestine. As such,he usedlanguage itself as a metaphorand ire* on its grammar and structurefor concepts that addedphilosophicaldepth to his work. "My language is the metaphorfor metaphorl'hewrites ii Mural.t So many havedubbedDarwishthe poet of Palestine that doing so hasbecome clich6.Even Time magazineacknowledged this at the end of 2008when it called him "the unofhcial voice of Palestine." The lines in Time'sobituary from the poem"I BelongThere" providean opportunityto examine Darwishsembodiment "I have learned all the words, and torn them all apart, of Palestine: to createa single word: / homeland."a Paying attention to the /k/ sound that characterizes the lines in Arabic, we note the musical rubbing that occurs in the words, and that is lost in translation:taallamtu kull al-kalaami wa fakkaktuhu kay urakkiba kalimatan wahida I hiya-I-watan. Moreover, there i; a direct, metaphorical equationof homelandand language. The imagereceived is that of a poet with the god-likePowerto tear language asunderand create a new beingfrom the disorder he has imposed upon it. Essentially, Darwish presentslunguige metaphorically as having materiality,and the homelandtakesits form from that bodv.A kind of incarnationseems to arisefrom this poeticperformance.

"If you rub two dark flints against each other, you wilt get o spark.And if you rub two darkthoughtsagainsteachother,i nr* meaning will result. This is Darwish's ironic way of proposinga new kind of diolecticsin which an obscurethesis rubs against-an obscure antithesis,resultingin a luminous synthesis.,,
This is not as absurdas it sounds. To understand the notion of the materialitv of language' we turn to Memoryfor Forgetfulness.This book is a collageof highly poetic Prosepieces that includescitationsfrom other sources. The most relevant citation for the purposesof this paper is that given below from theal-Mukhassas, a dictionary cum thesaurus compiled by Ibn Sidah,who died in 1066. At one point during the siegeof West Beirut in the summer of lgi2, the Israeliarmy cut off the water,and that becamethe occasionfor an extendedreflectionon the "For me,"Darwish says, meaningof water. andothers like me who have burned with thewounds of water, Ibn Sidah hasset out the names of waterandits attributes. Whatfollows is only a drop from that flood:water, waters, waterfall, rapids, cataract, cascade, snowice,hail,backwater, backwash, aqueduct, canal, droplet, drizzle,cloudburst, rain, and so on, addingup to I 12 synonyms.t

CONTEXTS OF LANGUAGE IN MAHMOUD DARWISH

If the water is cut off in West Beirut, it has not been cut off in the dictionary, where there is a river of synonymsfor water.Clearly,Darwish thinks of words as objectswith a separate existence, asthings in themselves. Language is a flood that can overflow material reality.Water is as much there in the imaginativeuniverse of the poet as it is not there in the material world, and who ultimately is to tell which world is more real?"Oh fast-movingtimej'Darwish cries out in Mural, "You'vesnatchedme away / from what the obscurealphabetis telling me / The actualis the imaginedindeed."6 In the 112words for water,we alsoseethe power of synonymyto createa meaningthat engulfsphysicalreality. Theorganization of sound into rhythmic patternsis anotherway of incarnating the homeland.Darwish gloried in the inherent musicalityof Arabic, in which new meaning is createdby altering the rhythm of the basicroot of words-that is, by vocally rubbing the consonants againsteachother.We saw this processat work in the examplegiven abovethat hingeson the rhythmic elaborationof the sound represented by the letter /k/. Everything that Darwish wrote, including his prose,is suffusedwith rhythm. The whole first sectionof Don't Apologize for What You've Done,consistin g of 47 poems( 121pages out of 157)is titled,"On the Passionfor Rhythm."The first sectionof that sequence declares: Therhythmchooses me;it chokes on me I'm the tempoof theviolin,not its player I'm in the presence of memory Whenthe echoof things in me speaks I speak.T Memory and Presence are two of the most significant themes in Darwish's Poetry,as we can seefrom the titles of the two books,Memoryfor Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence, the first written in mid-career(1982-85), and the second towardsthe end of his life (2006).An earlier work, lournal of an Ordinary Grief (1973),exploresDarwish'smemory of his early years and how in the processof the transformation of the homeland from Palestineto Israel he became a present-absent person. The phrase"in the presenceof" has a reverentialconnotation,and memory refersto everythingthat connectsDarwish with Palestine. Therefore, when he is "in the presence of memoryi' the complex emotional/psychological statethat is Palestine is present in his consciousness and he is in an unusuallyreceptiveframe of mind, such that it is not he but the "echo of things" that organizes the rhythm of his words. Part of the problem with translation, evenat its most rhythmic,is that it cannot conveythe samerhythms.We sawthat with the /k/ example. Of course, rhythm is part of the very structure of Arabic. However,the poet has to be there to receive the vibrations from nature,which he then turns into patternedlanguage, almost

IBRAHIM MUHAWI

choking from the excess of passion. Therefore, if Palestine incarnates in Darwish's poetry as language, perforceit has to be the Arabic language that embodiesthat incarnation. To someextentthis process parallels the kind of manifestation of the Divine in the Arabic wordsof the Qur'an. The first stanzaof the poem titled "For Our Country" further demonstrates the incarnationof the homelandvia the chaosof language: "For our country I Close by the word of God / There's a roof made of clouds."8 An abstractthing, the word of God, is presented metaphorically as an incarnate objectin space; so is the homeland.Here is God'sword, and here,right next to it, is the homeland. The holinessof the homelandis a constanttheme in Darwish.In Memory for Forgetfulness he calls Palestinethe "object of worship": "Beirut is not creating its song now, for the metal wolvesare barking in every direction.And the sung beauty,the object of worship,has moved away to a memory now joining battle againstthe fangsof a forgetfulness made of steel."e In Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish also elaborateson the association of languageand divine speech.He cites a passage from the book A Universal Historyby the medievalhistorianIbn Athir, who died in 1233.IbnAthir writes, "Then God, having createdthe Pen and commandedit, so that it wrote into being everythingthat will existtill the Day of fudgment,created delicate clouds . . ."r0The Pen (al-Qalam)is the name of Sura68 in the Qur'an,and it is used metaphorically in Sura 96,al-Alaq (The Embryo),in which God is said to teach by the Pen.In Christianity,the Word was at the beginning,and in Islam the pen wrote the universeinto being. According to The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, "the qalam is ...symbolically the instrumentof creation, inscribingexistlnceon the cosmictable(lawh))'t to the Sansk rit purusha(form) ' The qalamcorresponds and the lawh to prakrti (substance). History is thus conceived in terms of the metaphorof writing. If the Penwrote it, it will comeinto being;if it'snot written, it won't happen. While Islam providesthe poet with a meansto understand history through writing, Christianity offers him an event that changedhistory. It is clear that Darwish was inspiredby the universaldimensionof Palestine as the birthplace of Christ and the home of the Incarnation,the placewhere the mythological eventthat alteredhistory took place. His tribute to poetry was to baseit on this mythological dimensionof Palestine, and his tribute to Palestine was to adopt it as the centralmetaphor, icon,and symbolof his myth-makingpoetry. On a more concrete level, Darwish'slanguageinhabited and articulated a specificcultural context,and he could never shakeoff the label of "resistance poetj'thoughhe foughtagainst it until the end of his life.Thelastoccasion wasin an interview he gaveto the Haifa newspap er Al-Ittihad (for which he had worked when he lived in the city),ashe waspreparing to takehis memorable trip to Haifa to readhis poetryon fuly 15,2007,after an exileof 37 years."Those who attack

CONTEXTS OF LANGUAGE tN MAHMOUD DARWISH

me are of two kinds,"he said to the interviewer:"the Palestinian who wishesto imprison me in my old poems,and the Arab who wantsmodernismfor himsell and bad poetry for me."r2 However, though Darwish did not like to be calleda "resistance poet,"he did not objectto beingthe poet of Palestine. In fact,he continually casthimselfin that role and fulfilled it until the end of his life.When Palestine called,he alwaysrose to the occasion. Memoryfor Forgetfulness, for example, is a powerful indictment of the Israeliinvasionof Lebanonin 1982. His long poem"stateof Siege," written in 2002on the occasionof the Israelisiegeof Arafat'sheadquarters in Ramallah, is a passionate affirmationof Palestinian endurance and humanity. Darwishwrote the eloquentPalestinian Declaration of Independence, which wasadopted by the Palestine NationalCouncil at its historicmeetingin Algiersin November of 1988. He alsowrote a passionate plea to stop the bloodshed when civil war broke out betweenFatahand Hamasin 2006.t3

"Essentially, Darwish presents language metaphorically as having materiality, ond the homelnnd takes itsform from that body.A kind of incarnation seems to arise from this poetic performonce."
Darwish'sobjection to others reading him as a poet of resistance harkens back to the Arab tradition in which the poet was the public voice of the tribe. The importanceof this context to the public adorationof Darwish cannot be underestimated. Darwish's poetry is an affirmationof identity.To the Palestinians he gavea national voice around which to unite. But Darwish was not only a Palestinian but also an Arab nationalist. The very first words of "Identity Card," the poem that propelledhim to instantfame,are:"Record He also I I am Arab."ra "The State wrote the following sentence from the Declaration of Independence: of Palestine is an Arab state, an integraland indivisible part of the Arab nation,at one with that nation in heritage and civilization, with it alsoin its aspiration for liberation, progress, democracy and unity."rs For the general Arab public,Darwisharticulated a collective identityto which many Arabs aspire. The fact that this nationalArab identityhas repeatedly come under attack,not only from Israeland Westernpowersbut from within the Arab world as well, is sufficient cause to considerDarwish a resistance poet.Not only Memoryfor Forgetfulness, but all of his work servesthe purpose of enshrining this identity in magnificentlanguage. For thesereasons it seems that Darwish's objection to being labeleda resistance poet stems from his desire not to be pigeonholed. He wantedto be readasa poet of a Palestine that is part of the Arab "tribe." nation,not asa mouthpiece speaking for the PLO

IBRAHIM MUHAWI

When I met Darwish in Ramallahduring the summerof 2005,he saidhe did not seeany horizon for the Palestinians. He expressed the samesentimentin an interview with the Israeli newspaperHaaretz on fuly 14, 2007:"The situation today is the worst one could haveimagined.The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feelswith certaintythat today is betterthan what the daysahead will hold. Tomorrow alwaysheraldsa worsesituation."16 On the 60th anniversary of the Nakba,Darwishwrote a magnificent elegy, titled 'At the Stationof a Train That Fell Off the Map."It echoes the styleof pre-Islamic poetry,with its pauseover the ruins, the so-caLIed waqfa'alaal-atlal.Specifically, he echoesthe Mu'allaqa of the sixth-centurypoet Imru' al-Qays,which begins: "Let us stop,my friends,and lament the memory of a love and her abode..."r7 Darwish had many occasions to pauseover the 500 or so Palestinian villagesthat had been reducedto ruins by the new stateof Israel.The grass, solid air, thorns, and cactusthat we readin the first line of 'At the Station" areexactlywhat a person encounters at the site of one of thesedestroyed villages:
Grass, solid air, thorns and cactus On the tracks.Therein the absurdityof no-form The form of things chewson its shadow Nothingness is theredocumented, surrounded by its opposite ...

I stoppedat the station,not to wait for the train Or for my feelings buried in the beauty Of a distant something But to find out how the seawent crazy And how the placebroke like a room made of porcelain To know when I was born, where I lived And how the birds migratedsouth or north. Is what remainsto me enoughfor etherealimagination To triumph over corrupt reality?'8 This is the story of Palestine: the sea going crazy, the birds migrating, the country broken. The destroyed Palestine,which, in the absurdity of no-form, is the documented nothingness that chews on its shadow. While'At the Station"chroniclesthe destruction of his homeland, Darwish'slast book of poetic prose, In the Presenceof Absence(2006),addressesthe destruction of the self. In it Darwish describes himself as a text stretched out on the page.The Arabic word he employs, musajjan, LSused for a corpse stretched out in a coffin. With this book, Darwish wrote his own obituary. In the earlier long poem, Mural, Darwish also addresses the self. He says, echoing Christ's injunction, "seek and

CONTEXTS OF LANGUAGE IN MAHMOUD DARWISH

you shall find": "I am he to whom the obscurelettershavesaid / write, and you will be,I read,andyou will findl'reHis being washis writing. Darwish'sdeath must be viewed in the context of his life, and the context of his life is his work as a poet. Therefore, his death is part of his poetry.Darwish went into open-heart surgeryfor the third time on August6, 2008,to repairhis severely damaged arteries, and he died on August9. He had severe heartproblems and needed to have surgery,but his condition didn't constitutean emergency. He could have had the surgery a week earlier or even a month later.So, why chooseAugust 6? For an answerwe return to Memoryfor Forgetfulness, which, as noted earlier,is about the Israeli invasionof Lebanonand the 88-daysiegeof Beirut.At one point, the Israeliair forcedroppeda vacuum,or concussion, bomb on a twelve-storybuilding, leveling it to the ground. This was a completelynew kind of weaponthat made buildings collapseby creatinga vacuum inside them. The book, however,condenses the whole siegeinto a single day: August 6. Why August 6? The answerlies in the book: The vacuumbomb.Hiroshima. Manhuntby jet fighter. Vanquished remnants of the Nazi armyin Berlin.. . Headlines thatjumblepastwith present, urging the present to hurry on.A futuresoldin a lottery. A Greek fatelyingin waitfor youngheroes. . . On thisday, on theanniversary of theHiroshima bomb, theyare tryingout thevacuum bombon our flesh, andtheexperiment is successful.

A Hiroshima tomorrow. Hiroshima is tomorrow.20

From these citationsit is clear that Darwish did not draw a line between himself and his work. The last act of his life is therefore alsopart of his work. I feel confidentthat his choiceof Hiroshima Day wasa deliberate act-a statement that documentsthe nothingness he sawlying aheadfor the Palestinian people. Darwish died on August 9, which is Nagasaki Day.It is not givento us to know the hour of our death,and if Darwish died naturally on that day,then destiny was helping him make his statement. But I understandthat he had given definite instructionsnot to be revivedif he wasgoing to comeout of the surgerymentally impairedand destinedto spendthe rest of his life in a wheelchair. In essence, it wouldnt be surprisingif he consciously madea nuclearstatement with his death. He was the complete poet;his life washis poetry. In conclusion,while the absurdityofno-form in Darwish's elegy'Atthe Station" is an ambiguous constructionthat doesnot yield an easyinterpretation, one can almost understandhow, when one looks at the scorchedearth of Gaza, where nothingness is documented,the form of things can chew on its shadow. Forms

MUHAWI IBRAHIM

begin to chew on their shadowsas the sun sets.By nightfall, there is neither form noi shadow-the absurdity of no-form. Darwish had such total identification with palestinethat he saw her condition as his condition, and his as hers.When he wrote theselines,he knew he was heading towards Permanentdarkness. If I had to attach an overall label to Darwish'swork, especiallyafter 1982,I would call his vision ironic. But his is a very dark irony, an entropic irony of the everything headingtowardsdissolution.I do not concur with straight line that sees I am a student of TheArabian Nights,abook that is the mother this vision because of ironies, but irony of the circle rather than the straight line. TheArabian Nights is constructedin cyclesof storiesthat echo eachother in theme and content.Most storiesin the Nightsexistwithin the framework of the larger story that constitutes a particular cycie.As such,there is no beginning, middle, and end, as there is in another story until one cycle is complete,at Gieek tragedy.One story generates which time another cycle begins.This arrangement,in affirming the supremacy of an ironic fate,defeatsthe tyranny of time, since the end is another beginning. I supposeat one time or another we are all victims of history, but if one'sview is that of the circle, there will alwaysbe another story to tell.

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CONTEXTS OF LANGUACE IN MAHMOUD DARWISH

ENDNOTES 1. Mahmoud Darwish, Mural: A Poem (lidariyya: Qasida) (Beirut: Riyad ElRayyes, 2000),46-47. 2. Mahmoud Darwish,Memoryfor Forgetfulness (translated with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi) (Berkeley and LosAngeles: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1995),17. 3. Darwish, Mural:A Poem,op. cit.,13. 4. Translation by the author.Time(fanuary5,2009,155)has:"I havelearnedand dismantledall the words in order to draw from them a singleword: Homel' from Mahmoud Darwish, Llnfortunately,It Was Paradise:Selected Poems (translated and editedby Munir Akashand CarolynForchd)(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof CaliforniaPress,2003),7.Ihe originalArabic appeared in Mahmoud Darwish,FewerRoses (WardunAqall) (Beirut:Al-Mu'assassa AlArabiyyali-l-Dirasatwa Al-Nashr,1987),15. 5. Darwish,Memoryfor ForgetfuIness,op. cit.,36. 6. Darwish, Mural:A Poem,op. cit.,26. 7. Mahmoud Darwish,Don't Apologize Done (Beirut: Riyad Elfor What You've Rayyes,2004), 15. g. Ibid.,39. 9. Darwish,Memoryfor Forgetfulness,op. cit., 146. 10. Ibid.,42. 11. Cyril Glass6, TheConcise Encyclopedia of Islam (SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, "Qalam." L999), s.v. I 2. Interviewavailable at: http://jehaat.com/vb/showthread.php ?t=30 I 5. 13. Mahmoud Darwish,AI-Hayafnewspaper, ]uly 17,2006. 14. Mahmoud Darwish, CollectedWorks (Diwan Mahmoud Darwish), Vol.l (Beirut:Dar Al-Awada,1996), 7 l. 15. The Declarationis available at: http://middleeast.about.com/od/documents/a/ me081 115f.htm. 16. Interviewavailable at: http://www.haaretz.comlhasen/spages/881350.html. 17. Translationby the author.The full text of the poem in Arabic is available at: http://www.library.cornell. edu/colldev/mideast/elqys.htm. 18. Mahmoud Darwish,A/-Qrzds AI-Arabinewspaper, May 15,200g,12. 19. Darwish,Mural: A Poem, op. cit.,25. 20. Darwish,Memoryfor ForgetfuIness, op.cit.,84-85.

l,

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CONTEXTSOF LANGUAGEIN MAHMOUD DARWISH

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ccAS occasional Papers are essays, tectures, research notes, and other items of interest to students, scholars, and friends of beorgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

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Centerfor Contemporary For nearly35 years,GeorgetownUniversity's has enjoyed internationalrecognitionas a leader Arab Studies(CCAS) in research,teaching, and scholarshipabout Arab society, culture, urgent to comprehendthe and politics.At a time when it is especially historical and sociopolitlcalspecificitiesand transformationsof the Arab world in all of their complexity, CCAShas played a key role in illuminatingthe dynamic interactionof the Arab world with the West. CCAS is helping to prepare new generationsof scholars,diplomats, business leadeis, teachers, citizens, and policymakers capable of critical thought, constructivedialogue,and creativeengagementwith Arab world. of the contemporary the richesand challenges by its rigorous is distinguished The Center,locatedin the nation'scapital, Edmund Arabic languagetraining. lt is part of CeorgetownUniversity's the oldest school of international A. Walsh Schoolof ForeignService, affairs in the United States.ln recognitionof the Center'sfirst decade the late SenatorJ. William Fulbright observedin 1985 of excellence, that "with remarkableforesight, CeorgetownUniversitymoved to fill the Arab people by creatingthe Centerfor the need for understanding a significantcontributionto our contemporaryArab studies...offering country." Since Lgg7, CCAS has formed the core of Ceorgetown University's funded by a Title Vl grant Centeron the Middle East, NationalResource from the U.S.Departmentof Education. Few regionsof the world now command as much attentionas the Arab of this vital area with world. CCnShas fostered deeper understanding energy and distinction, illuminatingthe lives and experiencesof the the future role of the Arabs in a Arabl today, while also researching changingand challengingworld.

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