Annie Patton: Introduction Page
Darwish, regarded and revered as Palestine's "National Poet," wrote and published poetry throughout his entire life. It was his work and his political presence/determination that kept alive the culture, memories, and sorrow of and for fellow Palestinians. After leaving what was left of his homeland in Israel during the early 1970s, Darwish traveled through and worked in many cities and countries, namely Lebanon and mediterranean areas. Wherever he went, no shadow followed--for he felt, perennially, like a stranger with no home. He was born into an exile that utlimately came to replace his shadow. And Darwish was not alone in this intensely personal day-to-day schism of peace and war [physically and spiritually speaking], which is why he quickly ascended to a national status. Darwish proved that you can live, even succeed with a broken heart because it is your broken heart, after all, that keeps you alive.
From "Who Am I, Without Exile?"
A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water
binds me to you name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
makes me enter the gospels. Not
a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb
and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing
carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing
and not promise. What will I do? What
will I do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?
This project seeks to explore Mahmoud Darwish's physical journey through time and space so that we may better understand the spiritual journey captured in his poetry. We must understand this process as symbiotic, for the two journies created each other. It would be impossible to define Darwish only in one set of terms, like histroy and geography--if anything, Darwish re-defined these terms for himself and his peers in order to preserve what most will never see again, in any book or on any map. We will follow the footsteps of Darwish, stopping at each major place of exile and/or travel to see what he saw and to thus, read what he wrote during that time. Each plot point will provide a few poems or snipets of poems that pertain to where he was at the time, what he was experiencing, and how it influenced the world around him as it was influencing him. We will review the prevailing motifs and themes of his poems, individually and altogether. By the end, we will no longer be strangers. And we will hear his voice that still rings to this day.
