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Abstract
This paper examines Mahmoud Darwish's exploration of the political, geographical, existential, and metaphysical dimensions of displacement, banishment, and statelessness in his 2005 lyrical epic “Exile.” The paper offers an analysis of Darwish's treatment of dialectic, heteroglossia, the juxtaposition of the national and the existential, and conflicting temporalities, as well as political uncertainty and metaphysical fear. With particular reference to the paradoxical portrayal of space in “Exile”—the juxtaposition of the near and far, real and illusory, localized and dispersed—I also examine the ways in which Palestinian identity, as narrated in this poem, is destabilized and dispersed by what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopic space.”
Notes
1 Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, trans. Fady Joudah (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
2 Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago Books, 2011), p. 42.
3 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 332.
4 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 332.
5 Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, p. 62.
6 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 332.
7 Fadia Suyoufie, “Mahmud Darwish's Athar al-farashah: The Poetics of Proximity,” Journal of Arabic Literature 46, no. 1 (2015): p. 98.
8 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 185.
9 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 162.
10 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 171.
11 Erica Mena, “The Geography of Poetry: Mahmoud Darwish and Postnational Identity,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7, no. 5 (2009): p. 116.
12 Sinan Antoon comments on both the political and existential significance of Darwish's works and more broadly the practice of self-representation in terms of reclamation and of articulating presence. See Sinan Antoon, “Mahmud Darwish's Allegorical Critique of Oslo,” JPS 31, no. 2 (Winter 2002): pp. 66–77.
13 Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, p. 84.
14 Mena, “The Geography of Poetry,” p. 115.
15 Edward Said, “Criticism, Culture, and Performance,” in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 99. Italics in the original.
16 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 171, 174.
17 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 175.
18 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 165.
19 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 181.
20 Mahmoud Darwish, “A Memory for Forgetfulness,” in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma K. Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 647.
21 In 2017, The Electronic Intifada published a translation in English. See Mahmoud Darwish, “Welcome: A Letter from Mahmoud Darwish,” Electronic Intifada, 17 July 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/content/welcome-letter-mahmoud-darwish/21081.
22 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 149.
23 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 161.
24 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 160.
25 Edward Said, “Interiors,” in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, p. 726.
26 Said, “Interiors,” p. 726.
27 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 336.
28 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 150.
29 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 336.
30 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 1.
31 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 2.
32 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 163.
33 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 169.
34 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 165.
35 Beshara B. Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” in The Israel/Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappé (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 15.
36 Najat Rahman offers a very comprehensive and illuminating analysis on the political-existential significance of the aesthetic—poetry, art, and music—in rearticulating, reasserting, or reclaiming a political and national presence in the absence of a true politics in the post-Oslo period. See In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015). See also Khaled Mattawa's Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
37 Mourid Barghouti, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, trans. Humphrey Davies (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 141.
38 Nur Masalha, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (London: Zed Books, 2018), p. 359.
39 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 173.
40 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 162.
41 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 165.
42 Hanan Ashrawi is a Palestinian scholar, activist, legislator, and member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
43 Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 29.
44 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 164.
45 Darwish, “A Memory for Forgetfulness,” p. 643.
46 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 162, 150.
47 See Jeffrey Sacks's analysis of the relationship of the poetic to dispossession, erasure, and personal/collective loss in Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
48 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 163.
49 Edward Said, “My Right of Return” in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, p. 457.
50 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 165.
51 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 161.
52 Mena, “The Geography of Poetry,” p. 115.
53 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 162.
54 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 161.
55 Ahmad H. Sa‘di, “Representations of Exile and Return in Palestinian Literature,” Journal of Arabic Literature 46, nos. 2–3 (2015), p. 237.
56 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 167.
57 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 160–61.
58 Meron Benvenisti is an Israeli columnist, political scientist, and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem (1971–78). He is a prominent critic of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and a notable advocate of the idea of a binational state.
59 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Oakland: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 4–6, quote at p. 4.
60 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 118.
61 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 177–78.
62 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 173.
63 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 173.
64 Said, “My Right of Return,” p. 456.
65 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 150.
66 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 163.
67 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 162.
68 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 174.
69 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 60.
70 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 153.
71 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 151.
72 Rashad Abu Shawar, “O Beirut,” in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, p. 620.
73 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 149.
74 For example, this line in his poem “We Travel Like Other People”: “We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling is the way of clouds.” Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People,” in Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, trans. Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 2005), p. 31.
75 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 173.
76 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 180.
77 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 150, 151.
78 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 149.
79 Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden, trans. Fady Joudah (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2007), p. 89. Ellipses in original.
80 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 163.
81 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 186.
82 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 155.
83 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 162.
84 Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 10.
85 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 159.
86 Darwish, If I Were Another, pp. 155, 169.
87 Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 179.
88 Darwish, If I were Another, p. 185.
89 Darwish, If I Were Another, p. 186.
90 Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 186.
91 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 336.