The great Palestinian and World Poet Mahmoud Darwish has passed away. In my opinion he was far and away our greatest contemporary poet, a Neruda for our times. Below is a review I wrote for the Stinging Fly of his latest work The Butterfly’s Burden, published by Bloodaxe.
Review of ‘The Butterfly’s Burden’ Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah, Bilingual Arabic- English edition November 2007
‘(to a critic): Do not interpret my words
with a teaspoon or a bird snare…
(Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege)
Mahmoud Darwish’s writings are aimed less at impressing scholars and reviewers than at sustaining the longing for justice of what western commentators sometimes patronisingly refer to as the ‘Arab street’. He sees himself as a medium through which the traumatised historical experience of the contemporary Middle-East gathers itself up and reflects upon itself. His poetry is not for capturing, dissection and labelling, but for participating in. Darwish’s intended audience praises his work best by using it, by reading it and sharing it, and so proving its efficacy as a moral and spirtitual sustainer.
The Middle East offers a huge and highly literate audience for poetry, an audience that, in the intensity of its literary engaement as well as its size is beyond the wildest dreams of western poets . The structural distinctions of middle-eastern poetry, it’s rich music , it’s incantatory style, its many song-like devices, and its mutually enriching synergy of language and symbolism drawn from both sacred and secular traditions, leading to layer upon layer of evocationa and suggestion, can all be accounted for by its long-term and evolving engagement with a mass audience. That audience finds its inter-generational experience of ‘shock and awe’, of partition, dislocation and enforced exile reflected in a poetry suffused with metaphysical longing for various semi-mythical homelands and states of peace and visionary union with the other. That longing for joyful union, with its ever-present erotic overtones, often appears in poetry cloaked in the guise of conceits such as ‘the stranger’ or ‘the beloved’, figures which provide a focus for the complex mixture of political, spiritual and erotic cravings thrown up by historical trauma.
Darwish’s return to Ramallah in 1996 after decades of the enforced wanderings common to many an ecriture engagee of the 20th century prompted the desirous outpourings of ‘The Stranger’s Bed’, the first in the trilogy of books excellently translated here by Fady Joudah, himself an award- winning poet, under the overall title of ‘The Butterfly’s’ Burden’.
‘The Stranger’s Bed’ is putatively a book of powerfully erotic love poems addressed to an unknown lover. But in the throes of a Blakean excession, inspired by the unnamed ‘stranger’ the desire of the lover overflows his being to circulate and oscillate among everything within his fields of vison and comprehension.
‘There is no limit to me
if I want.
I widen my field with a grain of wheat
and widen this space with a Turtledove.
Let my body be my country’
(Drought)
‘A bit of night near you is enough for me to get out of Babylon and into my essence- my other. No gender for me within me
and all of you is you. And what overflows from you is I the free and Kind’.
(Sonnet 111)
Love is presented as a state of endless openess and dissolution in which things are in a continous flow of mutual penetration and redefinition. Meaning and identity, self and other, life and death, fathers and daughters, soldiers and victims, all give way and swap places before Darwish’s synergising vision. Nothing stays withing its own bounds. Everything flows.
‘when you walk barefoot rhyme abandons copulating speech, and meter breaks in the climax of experience
(Sonnet 111)
and I move into you as astronomers move
from one planet to another.
My soul looks upon my body through your ten fingers….
….echo in echo and I moved into you
as a name moves from one creature to another’
(Wedding Song)
Darwish shares this elucidation of world in ceaseless flux with another great work of of the anti-imperialist canon, Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth. As Neruda does in his classic work, Darwish transforms the experience of exile into a visonary condition . Arising from a ground of permanent homelessness, rootlessness and instability, Exile affords the poet an affinity with and insight into the quantum indeterminacy and flux which is at once the reality and the mystery of existence..
But Darwish does not write merely in order to proclaim to the world the undoubtedly superior powers of his own personal perception. Indeed, ‘the personal is political’ in the Middle-East in a way which may be incomprehensible to those who have not directly experienced war . There is no academic reverie of pure intellect, no Kavanaghesque parish idyll into which the middle-eastern poet can dreamily wander in order to evade the impact of world politics. In the Middle-East the personal becomes political in the form of an electrode attached to your extremities or a bomb-burst through the roof of the local hospital.
Darwish’s figuring of a borderless and boundlessly eroticised imaginary stands in defiant contradiction to the armed imposition of unnatural borders and the continual repartition of the middle-east according to the priorities of Western Imperialism. His foregrounding of mutabilty and the transforming power of desire and the poet’s language is aimed at provoking a consciousness of and a hope for a political metamorphoses, at fuelling the desire for a future free of waterboarding and cluster bombs, and yes, needlessly and deliberately massacred infants:
‘another day will come, a womanly day diaphonous in metaphor,
diamond and processional in visitation, sunny, flexible, with a light shadow…
(Another Day Will Come)
This daily reality of state terror in Palestine makes itself felt in ‘State of Siege’, a series of short poems written out and reflecting on the carnage and encirclement that followed on the great Palestinian uprising of the year 2000. These short, aphoristic lyrics effectively communicate the alternate moods of frustration, resignation, anger, vengeance and despair which are the lot of the besieged. They offer us a vivid psycho-geography of what it is like to live, among thousands of others, literally at death’s door:
‘The soldiers measure the distance
between being and non-being
with a tanks scope’
In ‘State of Siege’ Darwish shows how the poet’s art leans heavily under historical duress but continues to fly as a sign of hope to his besieged community. This is ‘The Butterfly’ s Burden’ of the title. Perhaps the great
‘To resist means to be certain of the well-being
of heart and testicles and of your chronic illness, the illness of hope’
In the last of the three books ‘Don’t apologise for what you’ve done’
Darwish continues and expands his lyric meditations on the menage a trois between the poet, hope and history. In the effusive opening lyric ‘Cadence chooses me’ Darwish informs us that:
‘Cadence chooses me, it chokes on me.
I am the violins regurgitant flow and not its player
I am the prescenc of memory.
the echo of things pronouces through me
then i pronounce’
What different people see as the function and aim of poetry is always rooted in material contexts. In Ireland poetry answers no urgent social need. Darwish, on the other hand, is responding to the overpowering need for someone who is definitively not a paid liar or lackey, and who shares in the general antagonism to the temporal Powers, to articulate the howling rages and sorrows just about everyone in the Middle-East must feel. No wonder Darwish feels that powerful forces beyond his control are flowing through him. This experience, of a poet being actually necessary to the moral and spiritual sustenance of a people has long been either unavailable to or unwanted by Irish poets, though its abscence was the subject of a great longing in Michael Hartnett’s luminous Inchicore Haiku.
In the end I would not like to try to describe the experience of reading Darwish as much as recommend it for those whose minds – and bodies- are open to exploring a poetry that, in its form and subject matter, its politics and its artfulness, its intentions and effects is genuinely and thrillingly different to what we are used to over here on our little island of peace and prosperity.
Tags: Darwish, Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine, Palestinian Poetry, Poetry, The Butterfly's Burden
