This article by James Burkinshaw is based on a talk given to the Literary Society in this term's series of lectures on 'Literature Through a Critical Lens'.
 |
| Edward Said (left) and Mahmoud Darwish (right) |
During the post-colonial era, following the Second World War, writers in countries formerly colonised by European states, from Africa to Asia, sought (in the words of Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe) "to write our way back into our own history.” At the same time, literary theorists began exploring the "hegemony of Western discourse" in European and American literature of the colonial era (primarily the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The seminal work of post-colonial criticism was Edward Said's Orientalism, which examined the ways in which writers in Europe, dating back at least to the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, constructed the concept of the 'East' (or 'Orient'):
"The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other . . . The Orient has helped define Europe/the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience . . . A large number of writers, artists, journalists, soldiers, economists, civil servants and politicians have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions and political accounts, concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind”, destiny and so on . . . Because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action . . ."
The pervasiveness of the discourse Said identified in 1978 is evident from the fact that, even today, some US commentators discussing events in the Middle East will use Orientalist phrases such as "the Arab mind." In one of the last poems he wrote before his death, 'More than Empathy' (2006), the poet I am going to discuss today, Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian then in exile in Lebanon, presents the feeling of being 'Otherised' by Western media. He describes the the way that the conflict in his home country is presented under the unsparing glare of TV cameras in a way that leaves him restricted by the narratives of others ("besieged from land, sky, sea and language"). The speaker is deconstructed not just by the bombing but by the camera lens and television screen:
Smoke rises from me,
I stretch my severed hand to grasp my scattered limbs from so many bodies
. . . I am besieged from land, sky, sea and language.
The plane took off from Beirut airport
and placed me in front of the television,
to watch the rest of my death, with millions of viewers.
Born in 1942, in Birweh, Galilee, Darwish was forced, aged six, to flee the land of his birth, along with his family and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians. Upon returning in 1949, the Darwish family found their village demolished and depopulated, with Israeli settlements built on its ruins. Darwish later recalled that "my grandfather chose to live on a hill overlooking his own land, occupied by settlers, a place he was unable even to visit." In 'Earth Presses Against Us' (1986), Darwish describes the experience of exile within his own land:
Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?
Where should plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We write our names with crimson mist!
We end the hymn with our flesh.
Here we will die. Here, in the final passage.
Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees.
Borders are presented as arbitrary and unnatural, in contrast to the the olive trees, which, in both Jewish and Islamic (as well as Greek Orthodox Christian) religious and cultural tradition symbolise not only rootedness but also peace and regeneration. But the writing of names in "crimson mist" introduces a theme that will increasingly preoccupy Darwish: language as an alternative form of rootedness but something simultaneously ephemeral, vulnerable to erasure.
In his early twenties, Darwish was arrested and imprisoned several times, for reciting poetry and for travelling between villages without a permit: for traversing literary and territorial boundaries. In 1970, he went into exile, in Lebanon and Egypt, where he was more free to work as a journalist, poet and literary editor. He became a close friend of Edward Said, the author of Orientalism. In 2008, Darwish died, aged 67, still in exile.
In 'Who Am I, Without Exile?' (1999), Darwish presents Palestinians and Israelis ("us") with a shared history of experience that has become part of the identity of each ("What shall we do without exile?"):
We have become weightless,
As light as our dwellings in distant winds.
We have, both of us, befriended the strange beings in the clouds.
We have both been freed from the gravity of the land of identity.
What shall we do?
What shall we do without exile
And long nights of gazing at the water?
Darwish's image of "The strange beings in clouds" alludes to shared religious origins (Jewish, Islamic and Christian), but also suggests an ephemerality, perhaps an unreality, relating to their religious beliefs in contrast to the physical reality of the land that they share. He implies that it is religion that has alienated them not only from each other but from themselves. "Long nights of gazing at the water" seems to allude to Narcissus, presenting an exilic mentality as one in which it is too easy to become entrapped and embattled.
Darwish writes that "Exile is not a geographic state. I carry it everywhere, as I carry my homeland." Jewish scripture is structured around exile: the expulsion from Eden; exile and slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon. In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, forcing Jews into exile and slavery. In rabbinical Judaism, the images of Exile and the Temple evolved further as contrapuntal metaphors for spiritual alienation and spiritual rootedness. Exile as a fundamental human spiritual and psychological state also shapes Christian belief through reinterpretation of Jewish scripture by Paul and others in the first and second centuries CE. For Jews, in the Diaspora, language had become 'home' - as it did nearly 2,000 years later for exiled Palestinians, including Darwish who described language as "a country of words".
Indeed, in much of his later poetry, such as 'Mural' (2000), Darwish presents language as the only country he inhabits, suggesting limitlessness but also a disembodiment:
I don't want to return to anyone. I don't want to return to any country.
After this long absence, I want only to return to my language in the
remotest depths of the dove's cooing
. . . Every time I listen to the heart the words of the Unseen flood me,
and trees grow tall in me.
I fly from dream to dream but I am without end.
A few thousand poetic years ago, I was born in the darkness of white linen,
But I could not distinguish between the dream of myself and my self.
The "few thousand poetic years" suggests the burden of his cultural inheritance, his sense of both duty and frustration in relation to the past. He has a yearning to be free of such inheritances and obligations and, in some ways, exile seems to offer the chance of rebirth: "Here in this no-here and no-there, I am free." In The Poetics of Exile, Kevin Carollo suggest that "the central question of Darwish's poetry lies in continuously reworking the question "Who am I?" Darwish may not always envision himself as the "I" of the poems - it could be Palestine, it could be the voice of the refugee and it could be you."
Darwish was certainly conscious of writing within a broader literary tradition; he saw the French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud and the Jewish-American Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg, as key influences on his own work. However, Darwish reserved a particular admiration for the work of Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, acknowledging that "his poetry put a challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better? . . . I don't have a pure Arab cultural identity. I'm the result of a mixture of civilisations in Palestine's past. I don't monopolise history and memory and God . . . We shouldn't fight about the past. Let each one tell his narrative as he wants. Let the two narratives make a dialogue." As literary theorist Zakaria Mohammed observes, "The whole of Darwish's poetry is a conversation between him and the Israelis to find a spot where they can reconcile."
In his poem, 'Ivory Comb' (1995), Darwish seems to find some sort of solution to this question of identity, memory and narratives by absorbing within himself the extraordinarily diverse and vibrant cultural history of his homeland, where, over thousands of years, so many cultures have left their legacies: "this land is mine, with its multiple cultures: Canaanite, Hebraic, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Arab, Ottoman, English and French. I want to live in all these cultures":
I enter from its stone embrace the way waves enter timelessness.
I cross from one age to another as if from room to room.
I see in my self's time certain familiar things:
The mirrors of the daughter of Canaan, ivory combs,
An Assyrian soup bowl, the sword of the soldier
Who guards his sleeping Persian master.
However, another poem written in the same year, 'The Owl's Night', reflects on the "struggle between two memories" that Darwish described. He begins, as in so many of this poems, by wishing to be freed from history, from language itself:
Perhaps speech could become transparent, so we could
see open windows in it, and perhaps time could hurry along with us,
carrying tomorrow in its luggage . . .
There is, here, a timeless present, and here no one can find anyone.
But there is a shift towards the end, as that sense of forgetting, of freedom from the past, seem to threaten fragmentation, even erasure:
No one remembers how we went out of the door like a gust of wind,
and at what hour we fell from yesterday, and then
yesterday shattered on the tiles
in shards for others to reassemble into mirrors
reflecting their images over ours.
 |
| Heba Abu Nada, poet |
Comments
Post a Comment
Comments with names are more likely to be published.