Ibrahim Muhawi

Centerfor CorrtemporaryArab Str-;clies EdlnundA WalshSchrool cf FcreiqrrSetrvir-e Georq ctc-rwn U n itrr-' rsity (O2CC9 Contextsof Languagein MahmoudDarwish

lbrahim Muhawi

Ibrahim Muharvirvits born in llamallah,Palestine, ancl receivecl his higherecti- catiotritr lrnglishliterature at the Universityof'California. l{e hastirtrght at ur-ri- versitiesin Clanacia,the .lvlidcllellast, North Africa, lhe UnitetlStates, Scotiaitd, atrd(ierman,v. He is the authol of a nurnberof booksand articlcsrln l)alestinian arndArabic folkloreand literatrLre,including (rvith Sharif'l(anaana) Spcak, Birrl, SpetrkA{oin: PolestininnAralt Folktttlcs(i989) ancl(rvith Yasir Suleinran) Litcro- tureand licttittt'tin thc NliticlleEnst (2006). Fle is alsothc translutor<>f iv'lolrmoud I)orv'islish4etrtorl'_f or I:orgct-firlircss(199-5) and Zakar"ia'lanrer's Ilreokire Knccs (2008),andis cr-rrrcntlynorking on a trauslationol I)arlvish'sltturrral of'rut Or- riinary Grie/.

'Ihis patrrerwas eclitt'db,v N1inri Kirlt ancl'l'rarriss (lassidv ils a pilper lr'onrits origir-ralfbrmat irsa 20-rninutetall<, gir.,e n on the occasior-ro1- a tributeto thc lif'c atrdrvorli of N'lal'rrrouci[)aru'ish. IBRAHIMMUHAWI

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies EdmundA.Walsh Schoolof ForeignService 241 Intercultural Center Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057- 1020 202.687.5793 http ://ccas.georgetown. edu

@2009 by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Atl rights reserved. CONTEXTSOF LANGUACEIN MAHMOUDDARWISH

MahmoudDarwish was born in Al-Birweh,Palestine, in 1942.With theadvent of the Israelioccupation in 1948,he fled with hisfamily to Lebanon.The family returned to their homelandthe following year, only to find an Israelisettler colony built on the ruins of their home.Darwish left Israelin 1970and for 26 yearslived in exile in Moscow,Cairo, Beirut, Tunis,Paris, and Ramallah.His first volumeof poetry,Birds Without Wings, waspublished when he was 19.Other collectionsof hispoetry and proseinclude Leaves of Olives (1964),Lover from Palestine(1966), Memory for Forgetfulness(l 985),and In the Presenceof Absence(2006). In 1996he movedto Ramallah.Mahmoud Darwish died following open-heart surgery on August9, 2008.

This paper exploresthree contextsof languagein Mahmoud Darwish'spoetry. The first is Darwish'sperformative use of language.The seconddeals with reading Darwish asa resistancepoet. The third is Darwish'sdeath, which I interpretas part of his language.This lastpoint is speculativebut of considerableinterest in view of the role he assumedas the poeticvoice of Palestine.

he more we know about Darwish, the more we realizethe depth of his engagementwith the Arabiclanguage. In his book Mural,we find this cry to the goddessAnat: "Thereforesing, my noble Goddess/ Oh Anat, I am the quarry and the arrows/ I am language."' If languageis both the quarry and the arrows,then languageuses itself to hunt itself.Darwish is undoubtedlya difficult poet to understand.He pushesthe very limits of what languagecan say, sometimes descending into obscurity.In his 1985 book Memory for Forgetfulness,Darwish explainshow he usesobscurity: "The obscure heapsup on the obscure,rubs againstitself, and ignites into clarity."2 There is an element of wonder in this. If you rub two dark flints againsteach other,you will get a spark.And if you rub two dark thoughtsagainst each other, a new meaningwill result.This is Darwish'sironic way of proposinga new kind of dialecticsin which an obscurethesis rubs against an obscureantithesis, resulting in a luminous synthesis.We find thinking by dialectic everywherein Darwish. Indeed,the titles of his two magnificentworks of prose,Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presenceof Absence,reflect this. In both, more meaningemerges from the combination of the two obscure elementsthan from each element on its own. Like all poets,Darwish grappled with languageto createnew meanings and fresh IBRAHIMMUHAWI

exPression.Darwish alsoharnessed language's performative power to embodyhis homelandof Palestine.As such,he usedlanguage itself as a metaphorand ire* on its grammar and structurefor conceptsthat addedphilosophical depth to his "My work. languageis the metaphorfor metaphorl'hewrites ii Mural.t Somany havedubbed Darwish the poetof Palestinethat doingso hasbecome clich6.Even Time magazineacknowledged this at the end of 2008when it called "the him unofhcial voice of Palestine."The lines in Time'sobituary from the poem"IBelong There" provide an opportunityto examineDarwishs embodiment "I of Palestine: have learned all the words, and torn them all apart,to createa single word: / homeland."aPaying attention to the /k/ sound that characterizes the lines in Arabic, we note the musical rubbing that occurs in the words, and that is lost in translation: taallamtu kull al-kalaamiwa fakkaktuhu kay urakkiba kalimatan wahida I hiya-I-watan.Moreover, there i; a direct, metaphorical equationof homelandand language.The imagereceived is that of a poet with the god-likePower to tearlanguage asunder and createa new beingfrom the disorder he has imposed upon it. Essentially,Darwish presentslunguige metaphorically as having materiality,and the homelandtakes its form from that bodv.A kind of incarnationseems to arisefrom this poeticperformance.

"If you rub two dark flints against each other, you wilt get o spark.And if you rub two darkthoughtsagainst each other, i nr* meaning will result. This is Darwish's ironic way of proposinga new kind of diolecticsin which an obscurethesis rubs against-an obscureantithesis, resulting in a luminous synthesis.,,

This is not asabsurd as it sounds.To understandthe notion of the materialitv of language'we turn to Memoryfor Forgetfulness.Thisbook is a collageof highly poeticProse pieces that includescitations from other sources.The most relevant citation for the purposesof this paperis that given belowfrom theal-Mukhassas, a dictionary cum thesauruscompiled by Ibn Sidah,who died in 1066.At one point during the siegeof West Beirut in the summerof lgi2, the Israeliarmy cut off the water,and that becamethe occasionfor an extendedreflection on the meaningof water."For me,"Darwish says,

andothers like me who have burned with thewounds of water,Ibn Sidahhas set out the namesof waterand its attributes.What follows is onlya dropfrom that flood:water, waters, waterfall, rapids, cataract, cascade, snow ice, hail, backwater, backwash,aqueduct, canal, droplet, drizzle,cloudburst, rain, and so on, addingup to I 12synonyms.t CONTEXTSOF LANGUAGEIN MAHMOUDDARWISH

If the water is cut off in West Beirut, it has not beencut off in the dictionary, where there is a river of synonymsfor water.Clearly, Darwish thinks of words as objectswith a separateexistence, as things in themselves.Language is a flood that can overflow material reality.Water is as much there in the imaginativeuniverse of the poet as it is not there in the material world, and who ultimately is to tell which world is more real?"Oh fast-movingtimej'Darwish criesout in Mural, "You'vesnatched me away/ from what the obscurealphabet is telling me / The actualis the imaginedindeed."6 In the 112words for water,we alsosee the power of synonymyto createa meaningthat engulfsphysical reality. Theorganization of soundinto rhythmic patternsis anotherway of incarnating the homeland.Darwish gloried in the inherentmusicality of Arabic,in which new meaning is createdby altering the rhythm of the basicroot of words-that is, by vocally rubbing the consonantsagainst each other. We saw this processat work in the examplegiven abovethat hingeson the rhythmic elaborationof the sound representedby the letter /k/. Everything that Darwish wrote, including his prose,is suffusedwith rhythm. The whole first sectionof Don't Apologizefor What You'veDone, consistin g of 47 poems( 121pages out of 157)is titled,"On the Passionfor Rhythm."The first sectionof that sequencedeclares:

Therhythm chooses me; it chokeson me I'm thetempo of theviolin, not itsplayer I'm in thepresence of memory Whenthe echo of thingsspeaks in me I speak.T

Memory and Presenceare two of the most significantthemes in Darwish's Poetry,as we can seefrom the titles of the two books,Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presenceof Absence,the first written in mid-career(1982-85), and the secondtowards the end of his life (2006).An earlierwork, lournal of an Ordinary Grief (1973),explores Darwish's memory of his early years and how in the processof the transformationof the homeland from Palestineto Israel he became a present-absentperson. The phrase"in the presenceof" has a reverentialconnotation, and memory refersto everythingthat connectsDarwish with Palestine.Therefore, when he is "in the presenceof memoryi' the complex emotional/psychologicalstate that is Palestineis presentin his consciousnessand he is in an unusuallyreceptive frame of mind, suchthat it is not he but the "echo of things"that organizesthe rhythm of his words. Part of the problemwith translation,even at its most rhythmic,is that it cannot conveythe samerhythms. We sawthat with the /k/ example.Of course,rhythm is part of the very structureof Arabic. However,the poet has to be there to receive the vibrations from nature,which he then turns into patternedlanguage, almost IBRAHIMMUHAWI

choking from the excessof passion.Therefore, if Palestineincarnates in Darwish's poetry as language,perforce it has to be the Arabic languagethat embodiesthat incarnation.To someextent this processparallels the kind of manifestationof the Divine in the Arabicwords of the Qur'an. The first stanzaof the poem titled "For Our Country" further demonstrates the incarnationof the homelandvia the chaosof language:"For our country I Close by the word of God / There'sa roof made of clouds."8An abstractthing, the word of God, is presentedmetaphorically as an incarnateobject in space;so is the homeland.Here is God'sword, and here,right next to it, is the homeland. The holinessof the homeland is a constanttheme in Darwish.In Memoryfor Forgetfulnesshe calls Palestinethe "object of worship":"Beirut is not creating its song now, for the metal wolvesare barking in every direction.And the sung beauty,the object of worship,has moved awayto a memory now joining battle againstthe fangsof a forgetfulnessmade of steel."e In Memory for Forgetfulness,Darwish also elaborateson the association of languageand divine speech.He cites a passagefrom the book A Universal Historyby the medievalhistorian Ibn Athir, who died in 1233.IbnAthir writes, "Then God, having createdthe Pen and commandedit, so that it wrote into being everythingthat will existtill the Day of fudgment,created delicate clouds . . ."r0The Pen (al-Qalam)is the name of Sura68 in the Qur'an,and it is used metaphoricallyin Sura96, al-Alaq (TheEmbryo), in which God is saidto teach by the Pen.In Christianity,the Word was at the beginning,and in Islam the pen wrote the universeinto being.Accordin g to The ConciseEncyclopedia of Islam, "the qalamis ...symbolicallythe instrumentof creation,inscribing existlnce on the cosmictable (lawh))'t ' Theqalam corresponds to the Sanskrit purusha (form) and the lawh to prakrti (substance).History is thus conceivedin terms of the metaphorof writing. If the Penwrote it, it will comeinto being;if it'snot written, it won't happen. While Islam providesthe poet with a meansto understandhistory through writing, Christianity offers him an event that changedhistory. It is clear that Darwish was inspiredby the universaldimension of Palestineas the birthplace of Christ and the home of the Incarnation,the placewhere the mythological eventthat alteredhistory took place.His tribute to poetry wasto baseit on this mythologicaldimension of Palestine,and his tribute to Palestinewas to adoptit asthe centralmetaphor, icon, and symbolof his myth-makingpoetry. On a more concretelevel, Darwish'slanguage inhabited and articulated a specificcultural context,and he could never shakeoff the label of "resistance poetj'thoughhe foughtagainst it until the end of his life.The last occasion was in an interview he gaveto the Haifa newspaper Al-Ittihad (for which he had worked when he livedin the city),as he waspreparing to takehis memorabletrip to Haifa to readhis poetryon fuly 15,2007,afteran exileof 37 years."Thosewho attack CONTEXTSOF LANGUAGEtN MAHMOUDDARWISH me are of two kinds,"he said to the interviewer:"the Palestinianwho wishesto imprison me in my old poems,and the Arab who wantsmodernism for himsell and bad poetry for me."r2 However,though Darwish did not like to be calleda "resistancepoet," he did not objectto beingthe poetof Palestine.In fact,he continuallycast himself in that role and fulfilled it until the end of his life.When Palestinecalled, he alwaysrose to the occasion.Memory for Forgetfulness,for example,is a powerful indictment of the Israeliinvasion of Lebanonin 1982.His long poem"state of Siege,"written in 2002on the occasionof the Israelisiege of Arafat'sheadquarters in Ramallah, is a passionateaffirmation of Palestinianendurance and humanity. Darwish wrote the eloquentPalestinian Declaration of Independence,which wasadopted by the PalestineNational Council at its historicmeeting in Algiersin Novemberof 1988. He alsowrote a passionateplea to stop the bloodshedwhen civil war brokeout betweenFatah and Hamasin 2006.t3

"Essentially, Darwish presents language metaphorically as having materiality, ond the homelnnd takes itsform from that body.A kind of incarnation seemsto arise from this poetic performonce."

Darwish'sobjection to others readinghim as a poet of resistanceharkens back to the Arab tradition in which the poet was the public voice of the tribe. The importanceof this contextto the public adorationof Darwish cannot be underestimated.Darwish's poetry is an affirmationof identity.To the Palestinians he gavea nationalvoice around which to unite. But Darwish was not only a Palestinianbut alsoan Arab nationalist.The very first wordsof "Identity Card," the poem that propelledhim to instantfame, are:"Record I I am Arab."raHe also wrote the followingsentence from the Declarationof Independence:"The State of Palestineis an Arab state,an integraland indivisiblepart of theArab nation,at one with that nation in heritageand civilization,with it alsoin its aspirationfor liberation,progress, democracy and unity."rs For the generalArab public,Darwish articulated a collectiveidentity to which many Arabsaspire. The fact that this nationalArab identityhas repeatedly come under attack,not only from Israeland Westernpowers but from within the Arab world aswell, is sufficientcause to considerDarwish a resistancepoet. Not only Memoryfor Forgetfulness,but all of his work servesthe purpose of enshrining this identity in magnificentlanguage. For thesereasons it seemsthat Darwish's objection to being labeleda resistancepoet stemsfrom his desirenot to be pigeonholed.He wantedto be readas a poetof a Palestinethat is part of theArab nation,not asa mouthpiecespeaking for the PLO"tribe." IBRAHIMMUHAWI

When I met Darwishin Ramallahduring the summerof 2005,he saidhe did not seeany horizon for the Palestinians.He expressedthe samesentiment in an interview with the Israeli newspaperHaaretz on fuly 14, 2007:"The situation today is the worst one could haveimagined. The Palestiniansare the only nation in the world that feelswith certaintythat today is betterthan what the daysahead will hold. Tomorrow alwaysheralds a worsesituation."16 On the 60th anniversaryof the Nakba,Darwishwrote a magnificentelegy, titled 'At the Stationof a Train That Fell Off the Map."It echoesthe styleof pre-Islamic poetry,with its pauseover the ruins, the so-caLIedwaqfa'ala al-atlal. Specifically, he echoesthe Mu'allaqa of the sixth-centurypoet Imru' al-Qays,which begins: "Let us stop,my friends,and lament the memory of a love and her abode..."r7 Darwish had many occasionsto pauseover the 500 or so Palestinianvillages that had been reducedto ruins by the new stateof Israel.The grass,solid air, thorns, and cactusthat we readin the first line of 'At the Station"are exactly what a person encountersat the siteof one of thesedestroyed villages:

Grass,solid air,thorns and cactus On the tracks.There in the absurdityof no-form The form of things chewson its shadow Nothingnessis theredocumented, surrounded by its opposite...

I stoppedat the station,not to wait for the train Or for my feelingsburied in the beauty Of a distantsomething But to find out how the seawent crazy And how the placebroke like a room madeof porcelain To know when I wasborn, whereI lived And how the birds migratedsouth or north. Is what remainsto me enoughfor etherealimagination To triumph over corrupt reality?'8

This is the story of Palestine: the sea going crazy, the birds migrating, the country broken. The destroyed Palestine,which, in the absurdity of no-form, is the documented nothingness that chews on its shadow. While'At the Station"chroniclesthe destruction of his homeland,Darwish's last book of poetic prose, In the Presenceof Absence(2006),addresses the destruction of the self. In it Darwish describes himself as a text stretched out on the page.The Arabic word he employs, musajjan, LSused for a corpse stretched out in a coffin. With this book, Darwish wrote his own obituary. In the earlier long poem, Mural, Darwish also addressesthe self. He says, echoing Christ's injunction, "seek and CONTEXTSOF LANGUAGEIN MAHMOUDDARWISH

you shall find": "I am he to whom the obscureletters have said / write, and you will be,I read,andyou will findl'reHis being washis writing. Darwish'sdeath must be viewed in the context of his life, and the contextof his life is his work as a poet. Therefore,his death is part of his poetry.Darwish went into open-heartsurgery for the third time on August6, 2008,to repairhis severelydamaged arteries, and he died on August9. He had severeheart problems and neededto have surgery,but his condition didn't constitutean emergency. He could have had the surgery a week earlier or even a month later.So, why chooseAugust 6? For an answerwe return to Memoryfor Forgetfulness,which, as noted earlier,is about the Israeliinvasion of Lebanonand the 88-daysiege of Beirut.At onepoint, the Israeliair forcedropped a vacuum,or concussion,bomb on a twelve-storybuilding, levelingit to the ground.This was a completelynew kind of weaponthat made buildings collapseby creatinga vacuum inside them. The book, however,condenses the whole siegeinto a singleday: August 6. Why August 6?The answerlies in the book:

Thevacuum bomb. Hiroshima. Manhunt by jet fighter.Vanquished remnants of the Naziarmy in Berlin.. . Headlinesthat jumble past with present,urging thepresent to hurry on.A futuresold in a lottery.A Greekfate lying in waitfor youngheroes. . . On thisday, on theanniversary of theHiroshima bomb, they are tryingout thevacuum bomb on our flesh,and the experiment is successful.

A Hiroshima tomorrow. Hiroshima is tomorrow.20

From thesecitations it is clear that Darwish did not draw a line between himself and his work. Thelast act of his life is thereforealso part of his work. I feel confidentthat his choiceof Hiroshima Day wasa deliberateact-a statementthat documentsthe nothingnesshe sawlying aheadfor the Palestinianpeople. Darwish died on August9, which is NagasakiDay. It is not givento us to know the hour of our death,and if Darwish died naturally on that day,then destiny was helping him make his statement.But I understandthat he had given definite instructionsnot to be revivedif he wasgoing to comeout of the surgerymentally impairedand destinedto spendthe restof his life in a wheelchair.In essence,it wouldnt be surprisingif he consciouslymade a nuclearstatement with his death. He wasthe completepoet; his life washis poetry. In conclusion,whilethe absurdityof no-form in Darwish'selegy'At the Station" is an ambiguousconstruction that doesnot yield an easyinterpretation, one can almost understandhow, when one looks at the scorchedearth of Gaza,where nothingnessis documented,the form of things can chew on its shadow.Forms IBRAHIMMUHAWI

begin to chew on their shadowsas the sun sets.By nightfall, there is neither form noi shadow-the absurdity of no-form. Darwish had such total identification with palestinethat he saw her condition as his condition, and his as hers.When he wrote theselines, he knew he was heading towards Permanentdarkness. If I had to attach an overall label to Darwish'swork, especiallyafter 1982,I would call his vision ironic. But his is a very dark irony, an entropic irony of the straightline that seeseverything heading towards dissolution. I do not concur with this vision becauseI am a student of TheArabian Nights,abook that is the mother of ironies,but irony of the circle rather than the straight line. TheArabian Nights is constructedin cyclesof storiesthat echo eachother in theme and content.Most storiesin the Nightsexistwithin the framework of the larger story that constitutes a particular cycie.As such,there is no beginning, middle, and end, as there is in Gieek tragedy.One story generatesanother story until one cycle is complete,at which time another cycle begins.This arrangement,in affirming the supremacy of an ironic fate,defeats the tyranny of time, since the end is another beginning. I supposeat one time or another we are all victims of history,but if one'sview is that of the circle,there will alwaysbe another story to tell.

10 CONTEXTSOF LANGUACEIN MAHMOUDDARWISH

ENDNOTES

1. Mahmoud Darwish, Mural: A Poem (lidariyya: Qasida) (Beirut: Riyad El- Rayyes,2000), 46-47. 2. Mahmoud Darwish,Memoryfor Forgetfulness(translated with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi) (Berkeleyand LosAngeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1995),17. 3. Darwish,Mural: A Poem,op.cit., 13. 4. Translationby the author.Time (fanuary 5,2009,155) has: "I havelearned and dismantledall the words in order to draw from them a singleword: Homel' from Mahmoud Darwish, Llnfortunately,It Was Paradise:Selected Poems (translatedand editedby Munir Akashand CarolynForchd) (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of CaliforniaPress,2003),7.Ihe original Arabic appeared in Mahmoud Darwish,Fewer Roses (Wardun Aqall) (Beirut:Al-Mu'assassa Al- Arabiyyali-l-Dirasat wa Al-Nashr,1987),15. 5. Darwish,Memory for ForgetfuIness,op.cit., 36. 6. Darwish,Mural: A Poem,op.cit.,26. 7. Mahmoud Darwish,Don't Apologizefor What You'veDone (Beirut:Riyad El- Rayyes,2004),15. g. Ibid.,39. 9. Darwish,Memory for Forgetfulness,op.cit., 146. 10. Ibid.,42. 11. Cyril Glass6,The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam(San Francisco: Harper & Row, L999),s.v. "Qalam." I 2. Interviewavailable at: http://j ehaat.com/vb/showthread.php ?t=30 I 5. 13. Mahmoud Darwish,AI-Hayaf newspaper, ]uly 17,2006. 14. Mahmoud Darwish, CollectedWorks (Diwan Mahmoud Darwish), Vol.l (Beirut:Dar Al-Awada,1996), 7 l. 15. The Declarationis availableat: http://middleeast.about.com/od/documents/a/ me0811 15f.htm. 16. Interviewavailable at: http://www.haaretz.comlhasen/spages/881350.html. 17. Translationby the author.The full text of the poem in Arabic is availableat: http://www.library.cornell. edu/colldev/mideast/elqys.htm. 18. MahmoudDarwish,A/-Qrzds AI-Arabi newspaper, l, May 15,200g,12. 19. Darwish,Mural: A Poem,op. cit., 25. 20. Darwish,Memory for ForgetfuIness,op. cit., 84-85.

1l CONTEXTSOF LANGUAGEIN MAHMOUD DARWISH

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For nearly35 years,Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies(CCAS) has enjoyed internationalrecognition as a leader in research,teaching, and scholarshipabout Arab society,culture, and politics.At a time when it is especiallyurgent to comprehendthe historicaland sociopolitlcalspecificities and transformationsof the Arab world in all of their complexity,CCAS has playeda key role in illuminatingthe dynamic interactionof the Arab world with the West. CCASis helping to prepare new generationsof scholars,diplomats, business leadeis, teachers, citizens, and policymakerscapable of criticalthought, constructivedialogue, and creativeengagement with the richesand challengesof the contemporaryArab world.

TheCenter, located in the nation'scapital, is distinguished by itsrigorous Arabiclanguage training. lt is part of CeorgetownUniversity's Edmund A. WalshSchool of ForeignService, the oldest schoolof international affairsin the UnitedStates. ln recognitionof the Center'sfirst decade of excellence,the late SenatorJ. William Fulbrightobserved in 1985 that "with remarkableforesight, Ceorgetown University moved to fill the needfor understandingthe Arab peopleby creatingthe Centerfor contemporaryArab studies...offeringa significantcontribution to our country."

Since Lgg7, CCAShas formed the core of CeorgetownUniversity's NationalResource Center on the MiddleEast, funded by a Title Vl grant from the U.S.Department of Education.

Fewregions of the world now commandas much attentionas the Arab world. CCnShas fostereddeeper understanding of this vital areawith energy and distinction,illuminating the lives and experiencesof the Arabl today, while also researchingthe future role of the Arabs in a changingand challengingworld.

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