A
song of Palestine
à
propos Mahmoud Darwich's
« La
Palestine comme métaphore » (« Palestine
as a metaphor »)
and «
Rien qu'une autre année » (« Nothing but
one more year »)
by
Jean-Michel MAULPOIX
Translated
from the original French by Catherine Wieder
Mahmoud
Darwich's « Nothing but one more year » is the
new edition of a personal anthology published first in
1983, and digging from sixteen years of poetic writing
(1966-1982), « Palestine as a metaphor » having
enlightened his path and sometimes giving us quite a few
clues on his work.
Mahmoud
Darwich's first poems make us listen to a love lyricism
in which the attachment to the native country and the
expression of the feeling of love seem to be merged
together. The part played by natural elements is
decisive. A symbol of motherland, the earth is praised as
being the « first mother ». It also leads to
the search and erection of one's own physical existence
through poetry. A sensory dimension is already present
wherefrom it will never diverge.
Later on,
the political involvement seems far more obvious. Writing
both becomes dramatized and weighed down from a more
complex relationship with myths and symbols.
Then, in his
more mature period, such a writing aims at some
opening.
One
witnesses a rise in power both in efficiency and
simplicity. The voice finds the most naked words and
borrows from the most familiar objects to enunciate its
wrath or its faithfulness : « We shall dispell them
from the flower pot and the washing line », «
my life belongs to those hands that prepare my coffee in
the morning ». It thus perfectly illustrates
Darwich's words according to which « our permanent
literary problem, for us Palestinians, is that we are
doomed to be the children of the immediate instant since
our present never brings itself to either begin or end.
»
Words serve
as a rejoinder to a pain which they dig. Such is the
voice of exile. What does it mean to be a Palestinian but
to know exile on one's own land, to live in one's own
home as a refugee. Darwich is he « who comes from a
country devoid of a country ». Hence an acute
pondering on oddness and otherness. Belonging either to
society, to family or to love, exile is the dominant
theme, i.e. that which calls forth poetry to which the
latter is now compelled to answer. Exile, according to
Darwich, defines the fundamental human
condition.
In a rhymed
and rhythmical language, Darwich, the Galilean, dialogues
with free verse through a classical metrics. Such a
poetry evolves on several registers. Epic lyricism
entails texts in which a complex thematic temporality,
the brisk notation in the pattern of a diary or a camera,
and lyrical incantation are intertwined. The several
dimensions of narrative dramatic dialogue and fable all
dialogue herein together.
Undoubtedly,
such a poetry calls out
on the
injunction mode :
«
Remember me before I forget my own hands
»,
on the
blessing mode :
«
Blessed be he who may abort fire in lighting
»,
on the
prayer mode :
« mercy
for those printing workers,
mercy for
the walls demanding grass,
mercy for
writers in obituaries,
mercy for a
people to whom we had promised access to the rose through
the door of bitter ashes »,
on the
dialogue mode :
« Do
you often die ?
And I do
rise up from the dead. I catch my shadow as I would with
a ripe apple »,
or, more
generally, on the head word mode :
« dear
friends, don't you ever die before apologizing to a rose
you never saw,
to a country
you never visited
to a climax
you never reached
to women who
didn't give the reins with the sea's icon and the
minaret's tatoo ».
One can't
help but being struck by the fire of such a lyricism
daring comparisons and finding gripping phrases : «
They sold my blood as if it were tinned soup »,
« The smell of coffee is a geography », «
Birds are the continuation of morning », « The
river is the hairpin of a suicidal woman
».
Answering
those who turn him into the champion of the Palestinian
cause, Darwich repeats all along his interviews that
political dimension in his poetry which aims at being
discreet, implicit and never proclaimed. He stresses
again and again that « the poet is not necessarily
doomed to offer his reader a political agenda ». The
strength of poetry fits in its extreme frailty. Surely,
the poetic scene is the very stage for History but it is
such that the most multifarious elements are mingled
together and that the enemies are turned into «
loyal adversaries », as Char would say.
If the poet
pays careful attention to History, he also keeps a fixed
look on the initial so as to keep its memory. Both the
intimate and the collective, the love of a woman and that
of a land, the expression of a desire to live and that of
a poetical fight, all telescope themselves. The
specificity of the poem's task is thus to grant Palestine
its identity by multiplying the images that craze its
presence : be it a woman or his own country, it embodies
itself through the twofold lyrical process of figuration
and celebration. It links, allegorizes itself and gives
itself out into numerous examples, thus rebuilding its
own landscape. The imaginary saves what History breaks
up.
Mahmoud
Darwich advocates an open conception of the Arabian
identity not as an identity folded unto itself, but as
seen through the very language viewed as
multifariousness. in his texts, the dialogue with the
major cultures (the Canaanian, the Hebraic, the Greek,
the Roman, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Arab, the
Ottoman, the British and the French) that came one after
the other on the Palestinian land. And here indeed does
the very Voice erect its true national
inscription.
If Mahmoud
Darwich is indeed a Palestinian poet, it is both because
he lends his people his voice but also because Palestine
gradually aims at becoming itself the metaphor of the
human condition.
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