Mahmoud Darwish: A Poetry of Transcendence, Aesthetics and the Human Soul (original) (raw)
To read Mahmoud Darwish is an unforgettable and transformative experience, one of beauty and simultaneously of profound pain for it makes the reader vividly aware of the injustice and staggering cruelty that Palestinians have endured for almost seventy years at the hands of Israel, a genocide the entire world is accountable for. The renowned Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka eloquently describes this effect: “Then came silence. Mahmoud Darwish began to read. We did not know a word of Arabic, but we heard his voice reach out and sink deep down to pluck the strings of the Palestinian soul. It was a magical night in Ramallah, the magician’s night in Ramallah, the magician, Mahmoud Darwish, whose spell was cast the way it has been through ages…” In his tireless quest for freedom, Mahmoud Darwish successfully transcends all kinds of borders. Not only those of land and occupation, and the confines of oppression, but also those of country and nationalism. Furthermore, Darwish’s poetry frees his audience from the boundaries of subjective experience, allowing them to access “visions of universal truths in the depths of the mind.” Although Mahmoud Darwish “did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness,” his poetry and prose deal primarily with humanity, “highlighting universal human values through the mirror of the Palestinian experience.”
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