Like him, like me
La Ta'tadhir 'Amma Fa'alt
(Don't Apologise for what you Did), Mahmoud Darwish,
Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2004. pp170
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"For Mahmoud Darwish, prose is a razor-sharp Aristotelian instrument. His knowledge of the language is so virtuosic and natural that he can be both eloquent and clear by virtue of his gift for not needing fillers, or tiresome verbosity, or display for its own sake"
Edward Said
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Just when one felt that life no longer had any room for poetry, Mahmoud Darwish has given us this book, his latest collection of poems, which is marvelously unapologetic, not only in its title but also in its overall tenor. The poems express a determination to live by and to live up to choices made, along with, perhaps, an admission that apologies are now irrelevant. A return to Darwish is thus a return to poetry in these utterly unpoetic times.
However, La Ta'tadhir 'Amma Fa'alt, is in many ways also a return for Darwish to poetry as poetry. Not that he has ever left poetry properly so-called, but he has so often been labeled a "poet of resistance" that some have tended to lose sight of the fact that the essence of Darwish's poetry is always poetry, even when resistance is its subject-matter. While Darwish's last published volume before the present collection, the long poem Halit Hisar (State of Siege), had an obvious political content, most of the poems contained in this new volume are not "political poems" in quite the same way, or according to a narrow definition of the term. However, all are imbued with a sense of the urgency of the present moment in Arab history, and all are very much Palestinian. Indeed, the Palestinian predicament is discernible even in the book's epigraph, made up from quotations from the 9th century Arab poet Abu Tammam and 20th century Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca:
"Neither you are you,
Nor are the houses houses,"
said Abu Tammam.
"And now neither I am I,
Nor is the home mine,"
said Lorca.
Was it simply the case, Darwish asks, that these two poets, ostensibly so different, shared similar thoughts, or was it that they shared, in some sense a common destiny? If the latter, the reader might go on to ask, do they now share this destiny with him or her? Darwish has always shown a willingness to situate himself within the pantheon of world poets, both contemporary and historical. Aside from the above-mentioned quotations, in the present volume he also invokes the voices of Abu al-Tayyib al- Mutanabbi, Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, Amal Dunqul, Yanis Ritsos and Pablo Neruda:
And I, even if I be the last
Have found enough words...
For Darwish, the present US-led occupation of Iraq has provided a kind of parallel for the Palestinian condition, and his invocation of Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab in this connection is therefore very à propos. Though al- Sayyab himself did not live to see this latest episode in his country's unhappy history, he too experienced exile. Darwish writes:
I remember al-Sayyab ... Poetry is born in Iraq:
Be Iraqi to become a poet my friend!
I remember al-Sayyab: he did not find life as he
Imagined between the Tigris and the Euphrates: he didn't think,
Like Gilgamesh, of the leaves of immortality,
And he didn't think of resurrection afterwards ...
[...]
I remember al-Sayyab, when I am struck with fever
And hallucinate: my brothers were preparing supper
For Hulagu's army. No servants but they ... my brothers!
I remember al-Sayyab: we did not dream of the
Food that bees do not deserve.
A characteristic motif in his work to which Darwish here again returns is that of doubles, negatives, reflections and shadows, the idea of an object being both itself and its opposite at the same time. In the poem La kama yaf'al al-sa'ih al-ajnabi (Not as the foreign tourist does), for example, Darwish writes that:
I walked, as does the foreign tourist ...
With me a camera, my guide a little book
Of poems describing this place
By more than one foreign poet.
Were it not for the differences in rhyme
I would have felt myself the speaker
And said:
I am my other.
Have Palestinian and Israeli become the negatives of each other, doubles, yet mutually unrecognised? Similarly, in Huwa hadi', wa ana kadhalik (He is serene, and so am I), the narrator watches himself, and his other, in the mirror in a café:
He is serene, and so am I.
He drinks tea with lemon;
I drink coffee;
This is what's different between us.
He is wearing a wide striped shirt, like me;
And I am reading the evening papers, like him.
He does not see me when I look up surreptitiously;
I don't see him when he looks up surreptitiously;
He is serene, and so am I.
He asks the waiter something,
I ask the waiter something ...
[...]
He is seer and seen;
I am seer and seen.
[...]
I wonder: Is he the mirror that I see myself in?
And then I look to his eyes,
But I don't see him.
I leave the café in a hurry.
I wonder: perhaps he's a killer; perhaps
He's a passer-by who thinks I'm a killer.
He is scared, and so am I!
Allied to the idea of the double in Darwish's work is that of the simultaneous existence of ugliness and beauty, the idea that within peace there sleeps a powerful violence waiting to awake: "in the afternoon the pigeons sleep in a tank/ That is deserted if they don't find a nest/ In a lover's bed." With this dualism, however, comes the promise of a kind of redemption, though one that is difficult to attain. Memory and forgetting also recur: to remember is to be; and remembering is one way of being, constructing memory and personal and political identity through writing. And yet memory also involves forgetting as its double: "Do not write history as poetry, for the weapon is the historian."
Part of the Palestinian struggle is the struggle to survive in the face of almost unbearable odds, and the struggle to appreciate the simple, ordinary things and experiences that others perhaps can take for granted. In Darwish's poem Atadhakar al-Sayyab (I remember Al- Sayyab), he writes:
I remember al-Sayyab. Poetry is experience and exile:
Twins. And we haven't dreamt of a life more than
Life, and to die our own way.
'Iraq;
'Iraq;
'No place but Iraq.'
Later, in Fi mithl hadha al-yawm (On a day like this), Darwish writes:
I say: I am not a citizen,
Or a refugee,
And I want one thing, nothing else,
One thing:
A simple, quiet death
On a day like this,
[...]
I want death in a garden:
Nothing more, nothing less.
However, even such reduced desires are hard if not impossible to attain: for the Palestinian even death cannot be calm or ordinary. The constant struggle to be Palestinian in the face of the odds is tiring, exhausting, even boring:
"I don't like anything,"
Says a passenger on a bus -- not the radio,
Not the morning papers, not the fortresses on the hills.
I want to cry/
The driver says: Wait until we arrive at the station,
Then cry alone as much as you want/
A lady says: I too. I don't
Like anything. I led my son to my grave;
He liked it and slept inside, and didn't bid me farewell/
The student says: And I, I don't
Like anything. I studied archaeology without
Finding an identity in stone. Am I
Really I?/
A soldier says: I too. I don't
Like anything. I am always laying siege to a ghost
That is besieging me/
The anxious driver says: Here we are
Approaching our final stop, prepare yourselves
To descend .../
All shout out: We want what comes after the station,
Drive on!/
I say: Let me off here. I
Like them, don't like anything, but I am tired
Of traveling.
Journeys of this kind are a recurring motif in Darwish's poetry. Invoking both Neruda and Ritsos he writes:
In Pablo Neruda's house on the coast
Of the Pacific I remembered Yanis Ritsos
In his home. At that time he was entering
One of his legends, telling one of the goddesses:
If there has to be a journey, let it be
An eternal one!
The exhaustion of the continual demand to be oneself and the physical consequences of aging also come through in this collection. Again in La kama yaf'al al- sa'ih al-ajnabi, the narrator, watching a young woman reading a book of poetry, wishes he were younger that he might speak to her, but:
... I was not emotional, or a "Don Juan",
So I did not stretch over the grass,
Said in secret: But O that I were young again,
Twenty years younger,
I would have shared water and sandwiches with her,
And taught her how to touch a rainbow.
In contrast to the final verses of Darwish's famous poem Jidariyya (Mural), where the poet stands defiant before approaching death ("This sea is mine/ This humid air is mine /And my name -- /Even if I misspell it on my coffin -- /Is mine"), here one senses a desire for reconciliation with death, even if accompanied by a determination to have the final word:
And every poem a dream:
I dreamt I had a dream.
It will carry me, and I will carry it,
Until I write the last line
On the marble tombstone:
I slept ... that I might fly.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
