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Mahmoud Darwish(APA images<\/a>)<\/div>\n<\/div>\nIt is hard to talk about modern Palestinian culture without mentioning\u00a0Mahmoud Darwish<\/a>. The late Palestinian \u201cpoet laureate,\u201d one of the greatest poets writing in Arabic in the twentieth century, Darwish\u2019s brilliance looms large, six years after his death.<\/p>\n It is surprising, then, that until now there has been no accessible account of his life and work. Volumes of academic analysis exist, but with\u00a0Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet\u2019s Art and his Nation<\/em>, Libyan poet and critic Khaled Mattawa offers lay readers the first overview of the man, his writing and their place in the cultural landscape.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a biography. Although one would be fascinating, Darwish always insisted that his poetry should represent his life story. So this book doesn\u2019t feature salacious speculations into the identity of his Israeli lover, \u201cRita,\u201d or probing into his marriages. Rather,\u00a0The Poet\u2019s Art<\/em>\u00a0takes the events of Darwish\u2019s life as a framework within which to fit discussions of his writing and its political and cultural context.<\/p>\n Aside from some introductory framing, the book is laid out chronologically, beginning with the well-known story of Darwish\u2019s family fleeing to\u00a0Lebanon<\/a>\u00a0during the\u00a0Nakba<\/a>, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, returning later to find their village destroyed.<\/p>\n Mattawa traces the influences of life under the early State of Israel on Darwish\u2019s poetry, including his experiences of imprisonment and house arrest for writing and traveling \u201cwithout a permit\u201d to deliver his poems to audiences across the\u00a0Galilee<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mattawa describes the tensions within Darwish\u2019s feelings about literature during this period. On the one hand was his belief in\u00a0adab al-itizam<\/em>, the \u201ccommitted literature\u201d of the 1960s which was firmly rooted in political practice, emphasizing the need for art to be accessible to \u201cthe people.\u201d On the other was the desire to write poetry that came from within.<\/p>\n One result of this was the way in which much of Darwish\u2019s work in this period eroticizes and feminizes Palestine: she is a beautiful, desirable woman, lost or stolen away. To a detached reader, these could be the poems of a lusty young man, but once placed in the context of Darwish\u2019s daily life, their subtext becomes clear. The ambiguity was also a means to smuggle nationalist sentiments past the Israeli censor.<\/p>\n Mattawa also looks at the unusual creative situation in which Palestinian poets of the time \u2014\u00a0Samih al-Qasim<\/a>,Tawfiq Zayyad<\/a>\u00a0and others \u2014 wrote.<\/p>\n They were largely cut off from new trends in Arabic literature, with occasional books and magazines smuggled into Israel. So, despite their political differences, Darwish came to admire and love the work of Haim Bialik, the Zionist poet who preached Jewish self-defense after witnessing the aftermath of pogroms in the Ukraine. According to Mattawa, Darwish read the revolutionary Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in Hebrew translation for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n This mirrored the complexities of Darwish\u2019s relationships with Israeli artists. He worked to bring Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli writers together and was criticized by some Arab commentators for his sympathetic portrayal of Israeli figures. As Mattawa puts it, \u201cDarwish instinctively knew that in order to assert the humanity of his people, he needed likewise to assert the humanity of his adversaries.\u201d But Darwish also believed in the political necessity of \u201cpenetrating Israeli intellectual circles,\u201d and supported the armed Palestinian resistance.<\/p>\n Although Mattawa is fundamentally an admirer of Darwish, celebrating his blend of technical mastery and vivid images, his book is not a hagiography on the personal or aesthetic levels. He admits \u2014 as Darwish himself did \u2014 that his poetry of the 1970s erred too far on the side of politics over aesthetic excellence, and that like the Palestinian resistance itself, Palestine\u2019s cultural representatives found themselves needing to spend the 1980s seeking routes for renewal and revivification.<\/p>\n One of the ways in which Darwish achieved this was through his work alongside the great Palestinian writer and critic\u00a0Edward Said<\/a>. As Mattawa puts it, Darwish and Said produced two \u201cmasterpieces\u201d of Palestinian culture almost contemporaneously \u2014 Darwish\u2019s\u00a0Lesser Roses<\/em>\u00a0and Said\u2019s\u00a0After the Last Sky<\/em>. The two men certainly influenced one another, and worked closely to create the declaration of Palestinian independence in 1988, crafting the Arabic and English versions together.<\/p>\n This makes it all the more striking that both Said and Darwish were amongst the most prominent critics of the\u00a0Oslo accords<\/a>\u00a0signed by the\u00a0Palestine Liberation Organization<\/a>and Israel in the mid-1990s. Although Darwish lived the rest of his life based inPalestinian Authority<\/a>-ruled\u00a0Ramallah<\/a>, artistically he spent that time exploring new limits, fighting creative rather than political battles.<\/p>\n As Mattawa points out, this included \u201cundermin[ing] a paradigm he had championed for years,\u201d moving away from the idea of Palestine as romantic beloved as \u201can unsatisfactory solution to collective trauma.\u201d In the reverse of Darwish\u2019s early works, inThe Stranger\u2019s Bed<\/em>, Penelope, wife of Ulysses, says \u201cI am not a land\/ or a journey\/ I am a woman, no less and no more.\u201d<\/p>\n And although Darwish\u2019s more \u201cdifficult\u201d later poetry may never have been as popular as his earlier work, Mattawa sees him as having \u201coffered \u2026 his credibility as a cultural figure to bridge a public reared on traditional poetics to the new poets\u201d of Palestine. This highlights one of this book\u2019s most important acts: deconstructing the idea of a monolithic body of work labeled \u201cMahmoud Darwish,\u201d and allowing the changing circumstances, ideas, politics and artistic practices of the poet\u2019s life to show through in all their complexities.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a lengthy book \u2014 the text comes in at 174 pages \u2014 but it acts as a useful bridge between the academic scholarship on Darwish and the general reader. It is particularly useful in that as well as applying literary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Gayatri Spivak to Darwish\u2019s work, Mattawa engages with Arabic literary criticism from figures such as Raja al-Naqqash, Ahlam Yahya and Adel Usta \u2014 important, insightful writers whose work is largely inaccessible to Western audiences.<\/p>\n For the reader seeking a clear-eyed, unsentimental, yet admiring and in-depth look at Darwish\u2019s work and the historic events in which he wrote, this is an excellent book. For an academic publisher, the price tag isn\u2019t outrageous, but it is to be hoped that Syracuse University Press make a paperback edition available in the near future.<\/p>\n Sarah Irving<\/a>\u00a0is the author of a\u00a0biography of Leila Khaled<\/a>\u00a0and of the\u00a0<\/em>Bradt Guide to Palestine<\/a>\u00a0and co-editor of\u00a0<\/em>A Bird is not a Stone,<\/a>\u00a0a collection of contemporary Palestinian poetry in translation. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Via Electronic Intifada: An accessible look at Darwish\u2019s life and work, at long last Sarah Irving The Electronic Intifada 1 July 2014 Mahmoud Darwish(APA images) It is hard to talk about modern Palestinian culture...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,36,37,91],"tags":[1086,499],"class_list":["post-12140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-criticism","category-cultural-studies","category-poetry","tag-khaled-mattawa","tag-mahmood-darwish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12140"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12146,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12140\/revisions\/12146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Tensions<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\nPalestine\u2019s cultural representatives<\/h2>\n