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University of Cambridge
Remembering Mahmoud
Darwish: Poetry and the Poet
in National Narrative
I am not mine
I am not mine
I am not mine
1
Rema Hammami and John Berger’s translation of the concluding lines of Darwish’s
“Jidariyya”, taken from: “Mural (1999 – An Excerpt),” Middle East Report 248 (Fall
2008)
by a clamorous public forms the existential canvas for much of his
creativity; indeed his poetry, which is ever bespeaking and questioning
of the particularities of his existence, imparts a complex and nuanced
insight towards the nature of his relationship to the world in which
these poems resonated. His death in August 2008 is a point at which
this relationship was crystallised in the form of eulogy, mourning and
obituary. His absence presaged what can be regarded as the inverse of
the metaphysics of “Mural”—gone is the conscious subject of Darwish,
moderator of his own fame, and in his stead comes a license for the
world to reply to that act of self-expression through the public acts and
texts of “tribute” that followed his passing. This profusion of public
expression has taken diverse forms; front page newspaper headlines
across the Middle East: lengthy articles devoted to his life and poetry—
a state funeral in Ramallah comparable to that of Yasir Arafat—
commemoration ceremonies held across the world from Iran to
America—a score of tribute poetry. It cannot be denied that these
gestures constitute an outpouring, in what might be regarded as a
hegemonic moment, of “spontaneous” identification with Darwish. It is
the project of this paper to demystify this outpouring—not in an
irreverent sense, but with a view to elucidating the rhetoric implicit
within its structure. By exploring the socio-cultural and semiological
mechanisms of commemorative discourse, it will be seen that the
sacralised public space devoted to honouring and remembering the
dead, whilst ostensibly organised according to codes of propriety, is
fraught with the forays of politics and ideology; and as the
particularities of Darwish’s posthumous treatment testify, there are
few political struggles in which the control of memory is so precious a
resource and weapon as it is in the Palestinian one.
2
See Bourdieu 1984:72, Butler 2003:32-4, Fowler 2002, Schwartz 1982, Olick 1998,
Connerton 1989.
3
Halbwachs 1992.
4
Ibid 24.
5
Terdiman 1993, 33-34.
2
contingent, discursive. However, the Orwellian notion of history-
control articulates what has been Machiavellian wisdom since time
immemorial, for, as Le Goff demonstrates in History and Memory
(1992), political ideologies must validate themselves through a specific
interpretation of history and therefore seek to stage-manage the
production of memory. Thus, for example, commemorative fervour and
the introduction of archives, libraries and museums accompanied the
rise of Romantic nationalism in Europe (Garval 2004, 30). Following
this paradigm, different ways of memorialising Darwish may be
accounted for by understanding the ritual of commemoration as a
mechanism of collectivising memory, and by situating the
particularities of Palestinian poetry and politics within the overarching
structural process of collective memory, the public act of
“remembering Mahmoud Darwish” is, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s
imagery, an act of telescoping the past through the inexorable politics
of the present 6 .
6
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project, MIT Press 1999, 291: Benjamin saw that just as historical documents reflect
the particular situations and politics of chroniclers, our modern day interpretations of
them reflect our own. In this case, just as Darwish’s early reputation reflected the
politics of his advocates, posthumous interpretations of his biography (as a corpus) are
nuanced by the contingent concerns of interpreters.
3
Mahmoud Darwish and other Palestinian poets formed an integral
element of this collective reclamation of the past (Said 189).
8
Kafah Zaboun, 2008, “Palestinians mourn Darwish”, Asharq Al-Awsat, 14 August.
9
Kafah Zaboun, 2008, “Palestinians of the interior unsatisfied with decision to bury
Darwish in Ramallah”, Asharq Al-Awsat, 13 August.
4
was in fact Darwish’s native village of Al-Birwa, in Israel. The
disparity between different Palestinian interpretations of where
Darwish ought to rest can be clarified by turning to a second funeral,
concurrent with the official one but vastly different in terms of its
aesthetics and mood. This second funeral took place in the countryside
near Al-Birwa and was attended by a few hundred people. Its
organizers stated that it was a “symbolic funeral”: this description
rings true in a number of ways, not least in the fact that the coffin was
empty. Its setting in Darwish’s birthplace evocatively spoke of Al-
‘Awdah; the red, black and white rags casually yet meticulously draped
on the sabra cacti surrounding the site of “burial” alluded to
Palestine’s inseparability from its organic nature; it was intimate,
lacking the vast crowds, the elaborate organisation, the media
presence, and the uniform and pageantry of the official event; and a
singer’s interpretation of ‘To My Mother’, accompanied by oud, set a
reflective and personal tone of remembrance that quietly contrasted
that set by the rifle salutes at Ramallah 10 . One of its organisers quoted
from ‘Mural’ in justifying that this was the funeral which most closely
followed Darwish’s own wishes:
10
According to footage of the event at Al-Birwa from Alarz TV Productions, viewable at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSm10aYF--c
11
My translation
12
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘On This Earth’, from Unfortunately, it was Paradise, trans. and
ed. by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche.
13
Kafah Zaboun, 2008, “Palestinians mourn Darwish”, Asharq Al-Awsat, 14 August.
14
Notably, also, in ‘A State of Siege’ where he discusses the arrangements of his
funeral in some detail.
5
[un]officialness is extraneous—expresses a dichotomy in Palestinian
political feeling that transcends the politics of disagreement between
Israeli-Arab Knesset Members and the Palestinian Authority. It has
been shown not only that death creates national heroes, but that the
nature of their heroism may be determined through the drama of their
death, the dramatisation of the moment at which they become memory,
or artefact. To my mind, this dual funeral must inevitably tease out the
deeper question: what is Palestine? Is it that which the Palestinian
Authority strives to attain through diplomatic and political processes?
Is it a piece of land—the pre-1948, pre-Nakba, pre-historical, pre-
political Palestine? Is it a vision somewhere within the pragmatism of
Oslo? Is it the direct opposite of the sentiment of Oslo? Or is it an
implacable place, the substance at the threshold of metaphor, the
irony of history 15 , the absence of the presence of exile? Darwish’s life
undeniably encompassed the multiplicity of the word “Palestine”:
neither the purely political nor the purely poetical side of its equation
may uniquely claim him, because his legacy entails both attributes.
15
Suleiman 2006, 32: Ibrahim Muhawi suggests that poetics can resolve the
existential irony of exilic identity.
16
Muhammed Ali Farhat, 2008, Al-Hayat, 11 August. My translation.
17
Kafah Zaboun, 2008, “The poet at his last appearance,” Asharq Al-Awsat, 11 August.
6
condition 18 . Kazem challenges the notion that his politics are
indissoluble from him, his life and his poetry.
For Wazin, Darwish finally achieved this ‘freedom’ one month before
he died, whilst giving a reading of ‘Mural’ in France, and passed away
at the pinnacle of his poetic “youth”. The victory of poetry over politics
occurs when the reality of the power of a dream transcends the power
of the reality of the world, and Darwish’s struggle to free poetry from
politics culminated in the ‘Mural’, wherein he found waiting for him his
own realisation that he could ascend to his own metaphorical freedom.
“Politics” here is a trope for the world of limits, which art may
transcend only through the presence-absence of worldliness in
aesthetics 20 . Although his idiom is that of transcendent dialectics, and
his messianic tone perhaps itself metonymic rather than analytic,
Wazin is basically trying to resolve an issue which many writers have
addressed in various ways; the poetics of Darwish’s move away from
politics in search for pure poetry. There is something of a tendency in
Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat to talk about tendencies elsewhere to
misappropriate Darwish by concentrating only on particular stages in
his writing. For many writers, poets and critics, to do so is to do him a
disservice, and does worse than reduce him to his political position; it
reduces him to one’s own political position. Identity-projection,
according to Shawqi Bazi, was what Darwish recognised and resented
most in attempts to idealise and label him. He encapsulates this in a
recollection of how once Darwish responded to one call for “Write
down! I am an Arab” with the retort, “You write down—that you’re an
Arab” 21 .
18
Safinaz Kazem, 2008, “Mahmoud Darwish”, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 14 (quotation
marks indicate my translation).
19
My translation
20
Abdou Wazin, 2008, “Veteran of renewal made his own modernity”, Al-Hayat, 11
August.
21
Shawqi Bazi’, 2008, “Beirut, ‘our tent’”, Al-Hayat, 11 August.
7
that they have a relatively low circulation in the Arab world as a whole.
The national Arab press displays somewhat different tendencies in its
articles on Darwish, and it would not be an unfeasible generalisation to
say that most of the references made in Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat
to distorted, simplistic perceptions of Darwish are ultimately directed
at Arab national newspapers. Even Al-Quds Al-‘Arabi, which is
considered decidedly more polemic with regard to matters Palestinian
than its aforementioned transnational peers, published a number of
articles which expressed resentment regarding prevalent
misinterpretations of Darwish. Naji Al-Zahir observes that,
8
culturally-based modes of commemoration may be attributed only
limited significance if one is seeking to understand how
commemoration impacts social attitude in the broadest sense. Cultural,
historical and sociological studies of death suggest that key symbolic
processes occur at the point of death which generally serve to
sacralise the powerful and thus legitimate the social order (Fowler
2007, 41). It is interesting, for example, that the structural style of the
obituary, that of concise biographical narrative, has far-reaching
equivalence within Arabic language newspapers, where by-lined
articles (in contrast to the British tradition of anonymity) announcing
the death of a publicly known person and going on to summarise their
careers are the norm. Such cross-cultural structural similarities may
be explained in part by recognising the socio-historical genesis of the
daily newspaper is being tied inextricably to the rise of nationalism.
Stripped to their essence as ‘spiritual biography’ (Fowler 43),
obituaries and their cross-cultural cognates operate as part of a
nation’s narration of itself.
22
“Mahmoud Darwish”, The Economist, 21 August, 2008.
23
Marty Peretz, 2008, “The Paletinian Che Guevara”, The New Republic, 14 August.
9
the most unforgivable ritual of the radical left—namely that offensive
disparity between adulatory iconic representation and violent reality.
For Peretz, Darwish becomes the dangerous allure of the Palestinian
cause in the West, an allure which he attempts to debunk through
debunking Darwish’s prestige.
10
structural level that situates them antithetically: we see poetry as an
expression as opposed to an exhortation; it appears to remain
distanced from and untarnished by the dialectical interactions of the
socio-political milieu. The West in particular has a tradition of
distinguishing the function of poetry from that of other writing: for
example, Sartre’s classic theory of “committed literature” holds that
poetry “cannot serve the committed writer’s project of “revealing” [in
order to change]: for poets, words have the opacity of objects rather
than the transparency of signs”, meaning that poetic language
functions only self-referentially and to a world of abstract symbols,
thus lacking the instrumentality to engage with world external to
itself 28 . The specificities of the role of poetry in the Arab world,
however, consist in its historic development within unique socio-
political conditions and must be considered on its own terms; when the
philosophy of commitment in literature struck chords in the Arab world
in the mid-twentieth century, Sartre’s distinction was challenged there.
Bayyati said in 1968, “I disagree with Sartre when he exempts the poet
from commitment. In my view the poet is immersed up to his ears in
the chaos and welter of this world and of the revolution of man.”
(Badawi, 208).
11
Arab poetic tradition, unscathed and ennobled by the upheavals of
history, gives voice to the contingent reality of the daily struggle of the
Palestinians and its forbearance mirrors their own enduring
steadfastness 32 . In turn, the arduous and unending challenges of
Palestinian existence provide the ready-made poetic form with a
reservoir of consciousness made acute by adversity and conflict. Thus
it could be said that the Palestinian condition is as indispensable to
Arab poetry as a whole as that whole is to Palestinian expression.
32
Ibid 93: Here Elmessiri demonstrates that the Palestinians’ knowledge of their
rootedness and organic, historic bond to the land is what makes “steadfastness” a
uniquely Palestinian form of resistance.
12
phenomenon—which will forever permeate discussions of and even
sentiments towards it, and perhaps this is why the Arab papers that
are at least partially co-opted by Arab nationalist governments
remember Darwish first and foremost for his earliest poetry.
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13
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14