The Poetics and Politics of Coffee and Tea in Mahmoud Darwish’s Works

ABSTRACT This article examines the interrelation between Mahmoud Darwish’s allegorical figuration of coffee and tea and the poetics of exile that permeates his oeuvre. Coffee and tea are not mere quotidian beverages but polyvalent motifs whose semiotic density traverses cultural, political, and psychological registers. Darwish deploys coffee as a recurring trope of homeland, continuity, and resistance, transfiguring it into an emblem of identity and collective memory. Through its symbolic associations with dawn, geography, maternal presence, and fragile truces, coffee functions as an allegorical index of resilience and existential defiance, revealing the dialectic between the lyrical self and the historical condition of dispossession. Conversely, tea often signifies alterity and defeat, marking the “other” within the poet’s symbolic economy and reinforcing a poetics of estrangement. The café, reconceptualized as a heterotopic space, dramatizes exile and alienation while simultaneously serving as a locus of critique, intertextual resonance, and cultural memory. Ultimately, this study argues that Darwish mobilizes the symbolic poetics of coffee and tea as aesthetic devices to articulate an exilic consciousness, transforming everyday rituals into vehicles of allegory, identity, and cultural resistance.