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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Tied by water
Mahmoud Darwish is without doubt one of the greatest Arab poets of the 20th century. Together with Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Salah Abdel-Sabbour, Abdel-Moeti Hegazi and Amal Donqol, he has been responsible for bringing home to its native speakers the potential of this single language, without ever abandoning the quest for a universal human discourse. He is both a prolific "inspired" writer and a dedicated craftsman in full control of his linguistic tools. His poetry rings true in the ears of the unlettered -- when Darwish gives a poetry reading, he always fills the house -- just as it excites and delights the literary specialists and scholars with its verbal complexity and intellectual sophistication. Like all great poets of our time, he has consistently shown himself able to give voice to two of the most prominent personas of the century: the diasporic, mobile, homeless person, on the one hand, and on the other, the nostalgic and/or progressive utopianist, who dreams of a return to a place of peace and quiet and joy called "home".
His poetry has moved with the times. When "nationalism", "nations" and "united nations" came to prominence in the discourse of the lettered, his verse took on a "nationalist" flavour, even though it continued to draw on many different literatures, mythologies and cultures. Imagery and allusions were deeply rooted in a specific locale -- a land inhabited by Arabic-speakers and occupied by a military settler-colonialist state which had displaced or marginalised its inhabitants. Palestine. His earlier poems, such as "A Lover from Palestine", were unambiguously resistance poems -- poems which gave expression to dissonant experiences and realities which jarred with received wisdom and the status quo, to sore thumbs and odd balls who just won't listen to reason and accept that the way things are will never change. Yet they also reflected the times in which they were produced. Deeply rooted in specific geographies (for example, a village called Kafr Qassem) and particular historical moments (such as the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982), they inevitably lose much in translation. Though he strove for a degree of universality, the earlier Darwish was still firmly anchored in -- or, if you prefer, encumbered by -- concrete particulars. It was this tension between the particular and the universal that moved and delighted his first readers, in the period between the 1960s and the early 1990s.
The times, however -- and with them the readers, writers, what they read and what is written -- they are a'changin'. The past is another country. Even the late '90s is not the place it was five, eight, ten years ago. With the awesome development of communication technologies linking so many human beings across the globe, and the consequent advent and growth of a universal language that all, whether literate or illiterate, can understand, the other country that is the end of the 20th century is a place where nothing, not even a pledge of allegiance, is required for entry. The world is smaller. Time flies. Setting aside that elusive, impossible-to-pin-down ingredient of "irony" -- who knows where the line between irony and transparency lies? -- Mahmoud Darwish's most recent collection of poetry, Sereer Al-Ghariba (A Strange Woman's Bed) is an uncanny looking glass in which the latest zeitgeist may, perhaps, be able to get a glimpse of its elusive self.
The collection tells a story. There is no epic bard; no banquet at which the bard sings of the deeds of gods and men; no third person -- except "our third one/death". A man addresses a woman; a woman addresses a man. He is an exile -- wanderer, traveller or refugee? -- a poet who is unsure if his words and gestures ever meant anything. She waits for him patiently, offering as consolation the universality of the human need for sleep. He is not sure whether he will ever make it home, whether he ever had a home -- if "home is where the heart is" and if you have lost heart on the way, then where is home? He cannot tell whether it is night or day, spring or winter, here or there. He cannot remember why he ever set out, cannot even see whether he had "once upon a particular time and place" set out or whether things were always this way. Details make feeble, perhaps futile, attempts to remind him of something. What? No one seems able to remember.
But she, the faithful Penelope, knows what is what. Her body is her home, raft, island and miracle wand. She knows, as she weaves and unweaves, that after Calypso and the sirens, after Scylla and Charybdis, there is always Penelope. And before them, too, there was always Penelope. She knows that, as with the weird sisters in Macbeth, "the end is sister to the beginning." She knows that no matter how far away a man runs, no matter how many words he lets fly in the face of the Cyclops, the last word is Nothing. There is nowhere else to go and nothing else to say. No other lands beyond the never-never land of the here and now. The strange woman in whose bed the protagonist is tempted is beyond place and time.
Has wily Odysseus lost his cunning? Was the "first love,/when we played out the story of Romeo and Juliet/ in order to learn the dictionary of Shakespeare" merely a mindless game? Or can the letters of the alphabet add up to something beyond a post-Babel Babel?
One of the virtues of this collection of poetry is that, compared to Darwish's earlier collections, it is easily accessible to non-native speakers of Arabic, will lose very little in translation and makes very few allusions to stories we might not have heard before. Whether a stealthy, stubborn, resistant sense of irony pervades the collection or not -- a sense of irony that might, today, be one of the few remaining ways in which old-fashioned "seriousness" can still make itself heard -- is simply impossible to determine.
Words wrought into poetry by Mahmoud Darwish are worth taking time out for, and this collection is well worth the read. For some of Darwish's readers, the grain of his poetic voice will seem so lined with the texture of history, so troubled by questions that may or may not be worth asking in this day and age, that even a collection as bleakly nihilistic in its discourse as this will still fail to convince them of the necessity of despair.
Who am I without exile?
A stranger on the banks of the river, like the river... Water
Ties me to your name. Nothing returns me from my distance
To my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
Brings me into the book of gospels. Nothing...
Nothing glows from the coast of ebb
And flow between the Tigris and the Nile. Nothing
Brings me down from Pharaoh's ships. Nothing
Carries me or makes me carry an idea: not yearning
And not the promise. What shall I do? What
Shall I do without exile and a long night
Peering at water?Water
Ties me
To your name...
Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dream
To my reality: not dust and not fire. What
Shall I do without the flowers of Samarqand? What
Shall I do in a town square which polishes the singers with its moonstones?
We have become as light as our houses
In the distant winds. We have become friends with the strange
Creatures between the clouds... and we have been let loose from
The gravity of the land of our identity. What shall we do... What
Shall we do without exile and a long night
Peering at water?Water
Ties me
To your name...
Nothing is left of me except you, and nothing is left of you
Except a stranger touching the thigh of his strange one: O
Stranger! What shall we make of what is left for us
Of quiet... and a sleep between two myths?
And nothing carries us: not the way and not the home.
Was it that this way was the way it is from the very beginning,
Or was it that our dreams found a horse among the Mongols'
Horses on the hill and switched camps?
And what shall we do?
What
Shall we do
Without
Exile?Translated by Nour Elmessiri
