Book Review – If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

This guest contribution comes from Lauren S., a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS, where she focused on Middle East issues, spent time in the area, and picked up a love for the region’s literature while she was at it.

I first became aware of Mahmoud Darwish years ago through the music of the Lebanese-born artist Marcel Khalife, who drew on Darwish’s lyrical poetry for his songs.  Rita and the Rifle, or Rita w’al-Bundaqiya, as it is sung in Arabic, tells the story of Darwish, who is a Palestinian, and his first lover, a Jewish Israeli woman to whom he gave the pseudonym of Rita.  Darwish evokes a moving nostalgia in the poem on which the song is based, longing for his love and lamenting the politics that separated them.  Rita is a symbol and character who appears periodically throughout Darwish’s poetry.  And the poems’s style – original, tender, and devoid of cliché – is an apt introduction to Darwish’s works.

A new translation of Darwish’s later poems, entitled If I Were Another, spans Darwish’s final works, written between 1990 and 2005, before his death in 2008. His writings are filled with allusions to literature, religion, history, and myth.  Obscure symbols and even Arabic letters make up the characters in his poetry, which occasionally verges on the grandiose. But the reader is able to forgive him for the occasional wordiness because of the tender and introspective portraits he paints.

Darwish’s poetry points to an artist who sets out to write about human stories but ends up tangled in politics. Rita’s Winter is Darwish’s final poem about his former love, written in 1992, decades after he first wrote about her. The poem’s characters are surrounded by political turmoil but seek to isolate themselves in the small details of their lives:

Rita sips the morning tea

and peels the first apple with ten irises

and says: Don’t read the newspaper now, the drums are the drums

and war isn’t my profession. And I am I. Are you you?

Although he was never formally a politician, Darwish was long associated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). He was born in 1942 in a small village of Galilee, and the loss of his village, which was destroyed after the 1948 war, seems to haunt his works.  Darwish was finally forced to emigrate from Israel for good in 1971 after a series of arrests by Israeli authorities.  He has been called a poet of the resistance, but his poetry in this volume is more often muted and steeped in long narrative.

The theme of exile occurs throughout Darwish’s works and refers to both a physical and emotional state.  He writes in Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene:

I will soon exit

the wrinkles of my time as a stranger to Syria and the Andalus.

The earth is not my sky, yet this sky is my evening

and the keys are mine, the minarets are mine, the lanterns are mine, and I

am also mine. I am the Adam of two Edens, I lost them twice.

In the poem, Darwish recounts the purges of Muslims and Jews from Spain in the 15^th century.  It is as if Darwish is bored with his own troubles and more concerned with exploring the abstract and historical dimensions of exile.  And that is in part what makes him so fresh and engaging and his work so universal.

Darwish takes a similar approach in The “Red Indian’s” Penultimate Speech to the White Man, this time more defiant:

What have you promised our garden, stranger?

Some tin roses prettier than our roses? Do what you please, but do

you know the deer will not chew the grass if our blood touches it?

Darwish asks later in the poem, Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

The role of poetry in Darwish’s works is salutary, but it is often overtaken by events too powerful to control.  The ending of Rita’s Winter seems to indicate a triumph of facts over poetry:

Take me to a faraway land

take me to a the faraway land, Rita sobbed, this winter

is long…

And she broke the ceramic of the day against the iron windowpane

placed her handgun on the poem’s draft

threw her stockings on the chair, and the cooing broke…

then she went barefoot to the unknown, and departure reached me.

Finally, in this somber collection Darwish also grapples with the end of his own life.  In Mural, written shortly after Darwish nearly died of cardiovascular disease in 1999, Darwish writes hauntingly of his own inevitable death as well as the uncertain fate of his countrymen:

Death! wait for me, until I finish

the funeral arrangements in this fragile spring,

when I was born, when I would prevent the sermonizers

from repeating what they said about the sad country

and the resistance of olives and figs in the face

of time and its army. I will tell them: Pour me

in the Nun, where my soul gulps

Surat al-Rahman in the Quran. And walk

silently with me in my father’s footsteps,

and on the flute’s stride in my eternity.

But as the piece progresses, Darwish actually challenges death, calling out to it directly, and affirming life:

Death, all the arts have defeated you, all of them,

all the songs in Mesopotamia have defeated you,

the Egyptians’ obelisk, the Pharaohs’ tombs,

the carvings on temple rock, all have defeated you,

and immortality has escaped your traps…

Fady Joudah, who translated Darwish’s poetry, notes in the introduction that Darwish believed in the centrality of Mural in this collection and in its message of hope for Palestinians, humanity, and Darwish himself.  So too, in some way then, Darwish’s collection has cheated death.