Siesta in the midst of siege
Mahmoud Darwish is in Cairo for the first time in two years. He spoke to Amina Elbendary
Click to view caption |
'One of the manifestations of a Palestinian poet's freedom is that he will not be tied down by the conditions placed by the Israelis. It's a sensitive issue and I might even be misunderstood saying this: that I can write a love poem and it is a form of resistance; that I can write about a tree or a beautiful morning and that too is a form of resistance.'
|
Mahmoud Darwish was in Cairo at the invitation of the American University in Cairo's Department of Arabic Studies as part of the activities of the Year of Palestine. He was here, as his host Professor Mohamed Serag said, as the poet of the Palestinian cause. Indeed, in the collective consciousness of Arabs, Darwish is firmly established as the poet of resistance par excellence.
We meet at his hotel overlooking the Nile, the river that makes such a startling appearance in his yet unpublished new collection of poems, on the evening before he is scheduled to read at AUC.
"I don't come with specific expectations nor am I free of expectations," he explained. "This is an invitation purely for poetry. I am keen that through these readings I do not fulfil expectations, though. I am not here to read expected poetry. I am keen on reading what is new. And I am also keen on revising and altering my image in the consciousness of those who appreciate and love poetry. I am coming to offer pure poetry, if there is such a thing as pure poetry. I doubt there is such a thing. I am not a manufacturer of slogans and hamasa, I am here to read poetry and to test my new experimentations. And I am a bit scared when I read something new because it could shock if it is not what is expected -- or it might not. But I am scared."
On Monday evening Ewart Hall, predictably enough, is packed. And Darwish appears far from scared: he is patently comfortable with his audience, enough to suggest a degree of intimacy that does not quite square with his earlier talk of fear.
As inspiring as ever, the selections he chose to read were not necessarily those one would expect from this poet of resistance. But then this is not the first time Darwish has confounded expectations.
He began with sections from Halat Hisar (State of Siege), and ended with sections from Jidariyya (Mural) -- his most recent published works. In between he chose to bewilder his audience with new poetry.
"If I weren't a Palestinian poet? I would have liked to be a love poet, I think," he had said the night before.
But first he lured his audience by offering what was expected; long sections from Halat Hisar, published this year.
Explaining his move from long poems to short, concise ones he said: "My work before last, Jidariyya (Mural), was a long poem about death. I have noticed that after a poem that we could metaphorically call 'epic' I write short poems, as if resting, after which I return to long poems. In Halat Hisar, the situation itself forced me to write it in short parts, closer to diaries. I believe the space for epics in our national life is shrinking; our sentiments thirst for what is normal, the achievements of normal life. Perhaps we are bored of heroism, though this is a daring thing to say, perhaps. The real hero is the one who doesn't know he's a hero. The media paints the Palestinian as a hero and the audience sees him as a hero but he doesn't want to be a hero. He is placed under certain historical circumstances that compel him to be what he is, and he has no option but to resist. But he aspires to a normal life, to sit beneath a fig tree, to rest like Odysseus at the end of the journey. The Palestinian now is trapped by an international and regional impression that he has returned, as if Ulysses has returned. The truth is he has not returned.
"While writing Halat Hisar I didn't see it as poetry; I was writing something akin to diaries, quick impressions, and in truth this is new to me. I have excercised a high degree of poetic economy in this text, I didn't indulge in aestheticism, instead I resorted to sarcasm. On the other hand, Jidariyya, which is a dialogue with the big existential questions of life -- death in particular -- is written as one long poem. It is not an epic though."
So when will the grand Palestinian epic be written?
"Perhaps after the victory. Perhaps after independence, when the story is finished, when we've known the beginning and the end. We are now in an obscure chapter of the epic, a chapter that has fled from the text, it is not under the control of the author, the witnesses or the protagonists. It is a chapter that has been written as if it were the last but it is not. We are all playing roles in the not- last chapter. The sequence of the chapters is still not clear. Epics need distance, so that the beginning and ending of the story become clear. But we have a problem, our beginnings don't end. We are always starting at new beginnings. The accumulation doesn't reach its fruitful limit. We build things to be destroyed, then we build again. The epic context has been destroyed, it needs time. Perhaps it needs a narrative. But then the Palestinian narrative is not over yet. I don't know when Homer wrote his epic, how many years after the Trojan wars, but he must have written after many years had passed.
"Contemplating the universe, contemplating the self, expressing disappointment, self-criticism, all these are new subjects in Palestinian literature and it appears that this is the right time for it. There is also a degree of sarcasm, even sarcasm towards freedom, towards the national flag. We are becoming human beings, we are becoming normal people not symbols. We are becoming poets not historians.
"The problem facing the Palestinian poet is that he carries a heavy burden and works without associates. He has to work in archaeology, mythology, geology, politics, because we don't have historians, archaeologists, or scholars of myth. Often it feels like the poet has to prove everything, his belonging to this land, by becoming an all- embracing poet. But such poets no longer exist anywhere in the world. Poetry is now a world of parts, in the vulnerable sense of the word."
But what does that make Palestinian poetry? Is there such a thing as Palestinian poetry?
"Palestinian specificity is the space where man expresses his existence and freedom. It is not a function of specific aesthetics for the Palestinians. A poet is not defined by what he says, but by the imaginative means he employs when he says it. In the end, when we remove the subjects and circumstances, what matters is not the story or its subject but the aesthetics of the poetry. And where does this come from? Not from the absolute but from the specific."
But Halat Hisar was a product of a specific historical moment that befell Palestinians, one that has had an impact on cultural life as well...
"There is a strange phenomenon, that at the time when our subject seems to be closed the international intellectual conscience is opening up to it. On the ground we are in an extremely bad situation, but that opens up the windows of international public opinion and is becoming part of the international cultural conscience, and this is new. For example, the visit by the International Parliament of Writers to Ramallah in the spring, the articles written in support of Palestinians by major literary figures, the rise -- and fall -- of the Arab street, that the AUC has a whole year in support of Palestine, is one form of the awakening of the conscience, though it is a very slow awakening. And this conscience is shy; intellectuals feel impotent and shy before their limitations.
"We are now at the stage where there is an American administration which, if we were to describe it as reckless might bring grave consequences. We have to be very careful, we have to weigh our words because every citizen, every individual -- not every country -- every individual, is threatened by America. There has not been such a manifestation of international dictatorship since the Roman Empire. America is heading towards direct colonialism -- but it's two centuries late. We're living during a very brutal historic moment in which the Manichaean views of both Christian American and Arab Muslim fundamentalism prevail. The ongoing war is now between two fundamentalisms, and sometimes one fears one has no place in this struggle. The world now seems to be divided into two camps: good and evil, angels and devils. And both Bin Laden and Bush speak the same language. With this dichotomy the intellectual feels impotent, the poet doesn't know where to belong.
"It's not enough to say that we are victims. It's true we are victims. I'm not talking only about Palestinians: as Arabs we're victims; the Palestinians are at least resisting. The Palestinian should not compete with the Israeli over who is more of a victim. This is not our issue. Resistance is forced on the Palestinian to ameliorate the conditions of his freedoms, to seek the conditions for a less-than- normal life, and so the Palestinian condition, from the point of view of morale, is a good omen, that despite all the oppression and the impossibility of talking about a balance of power, that through his body, through what remains to him of hope, he insists on being. The Palestinian knows that he will not 'become' if he is not liberated. He will not really be a human being unless he is free. The Palestinian puts the world before a difficult test now: Will the world's conscience accept this form of obliteration of the basic conditions of life?
"The occupation does not distinguish between various forms of Palestinian presence. It's obvious its war is a war against all dimensions and forms of Palestinian existence, including cultural presence. Cultural institutions have become military targets, but what we must rejoice in is that in the midst of the siege and curfew people still engage in cultural activities, they perform plays, they paint, they organise workshops, artistic workshops, they publish books, they write poetry, they compose music. This is an essential qualitative clinging on to life and is an insistence on liberation. Culture cannot be destroyed even if they attack institutions. Cultural production is carried out individually and collectively. Despite all the destruction the Palestinian people are still producing. They make films, they write, they paint, they sing. At any hour the curfew is lifted people voice their aspirations to a normal life through artistic expression. It is true that the occupation, the curfews, the siege, impede a collective cultural project, but the soul of such a project continues to resist."
That not all the poetry read was directly related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, that it was not all political poetry in the narrow definition of the term, was a choice that Darwish worried might be misunderstood.
"At a UNESCO meeting there was once a debate over the defining of Palestinian literature. A certain professor argued that if we have two poems, one about a rose and the other about a martyr, then naturally the Palestinian poem will be the one about the martyr. I felt quite wounded, as if there were a division of topics: Palestinians get the martyrs and the others get the rose, love, the sky and the rain. No. This shows how far the Palestinian is pre- defined, his topics predetermined.
"I once asked, during a discussion in Paris, why the elegy of a butterfly was a poetic subject while the elegy a child was not. The child, too, is a human butterfly. Why do we strip things of their history, their context and their conditions of existence? These are the difficulties of being a Palestinian, and of being a Palestinian poet. You are always asked to present what is expected of you. Where is the adventure then?"
But how does one respond to those who demand to know the whereabouts of the Palestinian cause in his poetry?
"The poet has always to renew his ways of expressing his belonging to the cause of his people. And one of the manifestations of a Palestinian poet's freedom is that he will not be tied down by the conditions placed by the Israelis. It's a sensitive issue and I might even be misunderstood saying this: that I can write a love poem and it is a form of resistance; that I can write about a tree or a beautiful morning and that too is a form of resistance. It is a way of emerging from the siege. We have to try to find -- if possible -- an existential siesta in the midst of this siege. Ultimately a poet is not evaluated by the things he says but by the imaginative and poetic powers he possesses.
"Having said that I have to say also that it is very difficult for me to separate the poet from the politician within me. Especially so given we, the Palestinians, are in a state of national emergency. During such a state the question of the contradiction between the poet and the politician becomes marginal. Every one meets around a common project, around freedom in its most elementary form, freedom and liberation from occupation. And in such a context the poet cannot but be a politician in a certain sense. The difference is over the manner of expression. How does the politician express his commitment to the national question and how does the poet express it?
"Since ours is a 50-year-old emergency it's normal that poetic language, if it were to be always connected to the given moment, would be exhausted. The danger in our case is that the state of emergency has become the norm, this is one of the greatest manifestations of the Palestinian tragedy; every day some of us die, houses are demolished, trees are cut, sieges and curfews are imposed. All this has become part of our everyday life.
"A Palestinian's artistic problem is that he is not the one choosing his topic, his topic is forced on him, so his relationship with his subject is not one of real freedom, it is one of necessity. But he has a strong aspiration to break the stereotype that befell him. When we look at the new movement of Palestinian poets we notice they have transcended the context of national poetry in its traditional sense, that of direct praise of the homeland and the struggle. Now individual selves are searching for their little stories. Poets no longer begin with the public and then move to the personal, they start with the personal. They tell their little stories and from the sum of these the grand Palestinian narrative is formed.
"There is a new poetic sensibility, a parting with pre-existing subjects. This doesn't mean detaching from the issues of freedom and independence, not at all, only the manner of dealing with these issues is different, more modern; a poetic sensibility that is more interested in the way the subject is being expressed rather than the importance of the subject itself. The new generation has moved away from the concept of the national poet in its traditional sense. In the end it is literature itself that narrates the story of man in this world, since man is not independent of his conditions, of history and social circumstances, the abstract man is not there so we are obliged, no matter how we talk about absolutes, we are obliged to return to the relative. This dialectic between the absolute and the relative, the private and the public, is what constitutes the tension in literature in general, but specifically in Palestinian literature."
The audience at Darwish's poetry reading last Monday may well have agreed. They reserved the loudest applause for "A Lesson From the Kama Sutra," one of the unpublished short poems on which he is currently working.
Of his new, yet unfinished work, Darwish explained that it deals with the meaning of return. "Return," in a Palestinian context, is generally assumed to be on the right of sense. Darwish, though, argues for the impossibility of return.
"The new poems are all short, part of a book I started two years ago on the State of Return. What does a notion such as return imply? Can one return to the same place? Can one return to one's self and find one's self twice? The joy of return and the shock of it; the work is more a digging, an excavation, the archaeology of my personal place if one can use such term. It involves looking for my childhood, the legend, and the story. And the work is still not complete and I don't know what conclusion it will reach. The one clear thing to me is that no one returns. No one can return. Return is a metaphorical concept.
"Besides, even my partial return is a wounded one. Return is either collective or a metaphor. This is the area I am investigating and exploring. In this in-progress collection there is more contemplation of the essence of things, the metaphysical dimensions. In terms of structure there is a shrewd attempt to reconcile poetry with what might look like prose. And it retains a high degree of lyricism. Despite the contemplative aspect I am keen on my lyrical voice even though it's often something that is held against me."
Darwish chose to end his evening of poetry readings with a selection from Jidariyya, a collection close to his heart. Unlike many of his poems, he confided, which he would rather see go, this was one he would keep.
"I don't look back equally at my early writing. I distinguish between poems like Ahinn Ila Khubz Ummi (I long for my mother's bread) and Sajjil Ana Arabi (Record, I am an Arab). Ahinn is poetry, Sajjil is rhetoric. Yet I did read Sajjil in Beirut earlier this year because the event wasn't an evening of poetry, it was an event organised in a football stadium, an event of Lebanese solidarity with the besieged Palestinians. In time of emergency one musters all one's elements in defence of one's identity, and one makes aesthetic concessions.
"I am never content with my poetry and not just because of a desire for development. I am not content with what I wrote yesterday. My aspirations are always higher. I am never content with any achievement because I feel that poetry is still elsewhere, and poetry cannot be seized, it is desired rather than achieved, an insatiable desire. And whenever we get close to it it flees. I am always searching for better poetry.
"You know, if I hadn't published any poetry till now, I would only publish 100 pages of the 1,000 or more that I've written. Maybe next year if you ask me I would say I'd publish only 10. What I would want to include today in those 100 pages -- definitely Ahinn Ila Khubz Ummi, written more than 40 years ago in an Israeli prison, on a cigarette box.
"I would include Jidariyya too. When I wrote Jidariyya I thought it would be the last thing I write. I had undergone a serious operation and had an overwhelming sense of death, of this being my last work. I wrote it as my poetic will. I recovered my moments of struggle with death intellectually with the same intensity I struggled with death physically. The nightmares and visions in the poems are not products of my imagination, I really suffered these. Under the influence of the strong drugs they administered, I had all sorts of hallucinations and nightmares. I actually saw René Char sitting with Heidegger, I saw Al-Ma'arri and all those other people I mention in the poem. I simply structured what I saw poetically. Therefore I called it Jidariyya, in the sense that this is my mu'allaqa. You might notice that in it I have reused many of my earlier styles and structures. It is a compendium of my stylistic, imaginative and linguistic experience. It's as if this text epitomises my experience, epitomises all of me. I didn't think I'd live after that to write a love book. I was writing under the weight of feeling this was my last work.
"I would also include many poems from Limadha Tatruk Al-Hisan Wahidan (Why do you leave the horse alone?). And many from Sarir Al- Ghariba (The stranger's bed). I wouldn't include anything from my Beirut period. Not even the poem "Beirut". My poetry then didn't hint, it was too direct, too pronounced, it had a loud rhetorical voice and the music was too noisy. The emotions were sincere yes, but the anger was not under control. A poet should not demonstrate too much pain, or too much joy. The linguistic temperature must be measured, neither hot nor cold, so that the poetry remains shy."
Darwish is keen on the traditions of classical Arabic poetry even as he insists that the Arabic tradition, to develop, must open up to other cultures. He is very impressed with the way Greek poets weave legends into their poetry.
"They daily dig into the history of Athens and Greece. In every text there is a historical reference, in all contemporary Greek poetry. Everywhere you walk in Greece you find traces of legends. They have contemporised legends and made the contemporary legendary. This is an area I like to play with, this historical legendary dimension is often found in my poetry, including my love poetry. I resist reality with legends. And also I defend my legend from the dangers of reality and modernity.
"Poetry is ultimately man's search for a particular, intuitive understanding of his place in the universe, the meaning of the universe, his surprise, his continuous childhood. Poetry will always carry primordial questions. The origin of poetry, in all cultures, is preoccupied with the same questions, the same fear of death, the construction of myths to interpret nature and so on.
"Arabic poetry has always been my main reference. But I believe that Arabic poetry cannot develop and modernise without acknowledging its historical context and in relationship with other cultures. I am one of the greatest defenders of metre. I believe Arabic poetry is lucky in its metrical wealth: we say there are 16 metres but that's not true; in the Muwashahat there are more than 300. In this respect I consider myself a conservative: I will never give up this wealth, nor do I believe in the internal music of prose poems. The source of such music is by definition unmusical, it is external. Music for many now comes only from prose. I respect their experiments but I am a conservative. I believe I have a fortune that has not been spent. Even in forming relationships between certain metres you get a new metre. One could employ four similar metres in one text. Since I can absorb and adapt this rhythm why should I give it up?"
The climax of the evening came when Darwish read the last lines of Jidariyya. And in bringing them to life it appeared as if the poet was once more battling Death -- and defeating him.
Mine
Is what used to be mine: my yesterday, and what will be mine
My far away tomorrow, the return of the lost soul
As if nothing ever was
As if nothing ever was
A small wound in the arms of the absurd present...
And History mocks its victims
And its heroes...
He throws a glance on them and passes...
This sea is mine
This humid air is mine
And my name --
Even if I misspell it on my coffin --
Is mine.
As for me -- full as I am
Of all the reasons for parting
I am not mine.
I am not mine
I am not mine...
