Cry No More For Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish

In the Palestinian imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land, it is also a metaphor for the loss of the home that never was. Mahmoud Darwish, who is widely considered the national poet of Palestine, has developed this metaphor to richly lyrical effect. His voice is that of the silenced lamentation for the loss of Eden. In his poetry, the ever present dispossessed subject introduces himself or herself as a foreigner who is twice exiled. As in the case of the late Edward Said, another Palestinian exile who died in exile, the search is for the "logic of irreconcilables." Like a jealous child, Darwish is reluctant to share his homeland with anyone, let alone with a ruthless occupier. Having set down for Pasletine perhaps the saddest, most beautiful and enduring lines, he reacts: "I want, both as a poet and as a human being, to free myself from Palestine. But I can't. When my country is liberated, so shall I." The intention (and method) is to paint the suffering of a people while offering a direct approach to doubt, desire, and the isolation of human existence. In contrast to his lyric and epic poetry, Darwish's mas ra (predicament) tell, by some other way of telling, of dislocation, rootlessness, and the practice of everyday life in a harsh environment. To do so, he uses high language to paint the plight of a people struggling to come to terms with a desolate reality on the ground. Suffice it to add that the poet consumes his Self in the "we" of the "I" before leaping toward a new freedom. This emancipation helps him create a flexible margin between the patriotic, the political, the national, the daily, the cultural, and the literary. In the meantime, will he be able to write a book of love when color falls on the ground in autumn? Maybe. For now, though, the wordsmiths strike with iron in his soul, and the metal bars ring out to dismantle all the words to construct a single one: a watán (homeland). It is in this sense that his poetry travesties the idea of a single narrative. It is founded and built in the language he uses to describe the exile's most private anguish, hopes, impediments, dreams, nightmares, and surroundings. From which mysterious perennial does he draw his endless energy? How to carry the "I" of the "We" without betraying one perception for the other? How are we to answer the question posed by Darwish: "Am I another you / And you another I?" are questions that "Cry No More" will attempt to answer.