Annie Patton's Project Proposal
I am from there, I am from here
but I am neither there nor here
I have two names which meet and part
I have two languages, but I have long
forgotten which is the language of my dreams"
-Mahmoud Darwish, elegy to the late Edward Said
My final mapping project will chart the forced migrations of Mahmoud Darwish, a revered Palestinian poet who, like many of his people, never truly knew what it was like to live a life outside of exile. In the course of his life, Darwish lived in more than eight different places but never ceased to allow his physical, and subsequently political and cultural, borders to restrain his poetry. For this, his heartbroken country could find a sense of community that was otherwise and continuously suffering from an uncontrollable diaspora. For this, the resistance was kept alive. For this, Palestine remains alive.
On this map, we will begin and end as Darwish did. Each plot point will be at yet another place of his exile and through each of these physical locations we will explore how his surroundings (or lack there of) influenced his work, and ultimately, his people and the world forever. In combining his physical world with the abstract, we will see how Darwish's devotion became the everlasting metaphor for the power of the human spirit: you need not the physical to destroy that which is the physical.
Works Cited:
--"Tibaq" "[Counterpoint]" Mahmoud Darwish, 2003
