Darwish's geography (original) (raw)

Interventions, 2016

Abstract

Mahmoud Darwish, the preeminent poet of Palestine, once said that his poems have built houses in a metaphorical landscape. For a poet who saw coffee as geography, it is difficult to imagine how one can separate Darwish, the individual, from the very idea of Palestine, which he sought to keep alive in almost every line he wrote, regardless of how personal the situation was that occasioned the writing of the poem as witnessed by his epic masterpiece, Mural. For Darwish, negotiating a Palestinian space, place and identity represents a lifelong project that he saw as an ongoing process or ‘under construction’ to use the poet's words from his long prose poem Memory for Forgetfulness. This essay shows how Darwish's poems become the ‘imagined geography’ of Palestine, to use Edward Said's term, to which the poet returns in Mural, reuniting the Palestinian with the land from which he was violently and unnaturally separated and returning the poet to his word. In addition to Said's ideas on geography, I use Benedict Anderson's idea of an imagined community and Edward Soja's concept of the thirdspace to help decipher Darwish's poetics of space, which combine the political, social, spatial and historical.

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