The Butterfly's Burden

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Post Scriptum: Mahmoud Darwish passed away on August 9, 2008. May he now rest in the peace he so longed for. Looking, in our minds, toward his grave in Palestine, we may see many butterflies there. What space can the poet claim after the loss of a supplanted homeland except the space of a poem? Poetry is the closest thing to granting a sense of belonging for the poetic voice that poses it as a question.

While poetry of politics and protest may wither past its time, the poetry of love can be timeless. What Darwish does is join the two together, as in “I Waited for No One”: When one has lost so much, love has no choice but to follow suit. Throughout Darwish’s work, we witness lovers torn apart by circumstance. Such passages are all the more heart-wrenching because Darwish’s language (and Joudah’s translation) is so quiet, so simple and unassuming: In the Arab world, poets are considered persons of vision and prophecy, feared not only by Israel but also corrupt Arab leaders. With only exile and no homeland, Darwish has often re-invented ancient myth, as if the reshaping of myth itself might become a new homeland, a “land made of words.” In so doing, he may astonish those in the West ignorant of how much common ground we share with the Arab world, such as Darwish’s allusions to Adam, Jericho, the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. As Darwish well knows, poetry sometimes allows a journey between different cultures and languages. By reshaping ancient stories, Darwish has attempted to form a bridge between cultures, so that a new version of an old story becomes “a counter-text, a kind of replacement of the original text by a new understanding, thus enabling the reader to confront the canon of the ‘other’ with a newly established or newly affirmed canon of his own.” Consider how Darwish retells the story of Adam and Eve: Darwish has written as he has lived, with the emotion of exile perhaps best described by Edward Said: For Darwish, this no man’s land is one in which “I cannot enter and I cannot go out.” The bitter irony is that the refugees of the Holocaust resulted in the refugees of Palestine. This reality is often at the center of Darwish’s thinking; he rejected the Oslo Accords because it would lead to the apartheid of two separate states. Unlike Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, Darwish apparently advocates “Israeli and Palestinian coexistence in a binational state with equal rights and secular citizenship.” In other words, he seeks the right of return to his homeland, with the full rights of a citizen to vote and otherwise participate in self-government.Once upon a time, in the days of the Sufis—Islamic mystics whose poetry flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries—Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi composed these lines: “say who / I am. Say I / am You.” The Sufis believed in the merging of identities: we are all one, for we are one in God. Skipping ahead to the 20th century, we see Mahmoud Darwish exclaim, “how much of me is you, my love / how often! Who am I!” In Darwish’s poetry, too, identities shift and merge. But Darwish’s weaving together of selves is not the divine one of the Sufis: rather, it has to do with an irreparable loss of self, and with a yearning for an undefined, and perhaps indefinable, other, who at times seems long lost, at times, just within the poet’s reach. If I had to capture the essence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in one brief passage, these are the verses I would choose. They are from the poem “Low Sky” in the latest collection of the wonderful Palestinian poet’s work, The Butterfly’s Burden. The translator from the Arabic, Fady Joudah, compiled three of Darwish’s books in this collection: The Stranger’s Bed, A State of Siege, and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done. The result is a collection of poems that reads as one would ‘read’ a butterfly’s wings; what one encounters is elusive, heart-breaking, wistful, yet hopeful. This is all the more true because The Butterfly’s Burden is a bilingual edition: the Arabic on the left, presumably illegible to many western readers, appears mysterious and lovely. If that definition of poetry is at the same time an evocation of exile, it should come as no surprise that Darwish is also a great love poet: one for whom longing is always more than romantic desire. The Stranger's Bed, the first book in this volume, explores even the most intimate of gestures in imagery resonant with the exile's desire for Palestine: "in your closed up gardens // Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white" yet "I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place" ("Sonnet V"). Longing is the note that bridges these two moments - of achieved and still-unsatisfied desire; of the actual and the imagined. Indeed, the extraordinary plasticity of Darwish's imagery allows him to create a continual interplay between the figures of home and beloved, presence and absence: "[...] take me so that my self is serene / in you, and that I reside in the serene land". Much more than simply a vocabulary for personal isolation, this symbolic oscillation is, as in the oldest poetry, a form of sympathetic magic which enables Darwish to imagine, not a remedy, but a healing: "No blood on the plows. A virginity renewing itself. / There is no name for what life should be / other than what you've made of my soul and what you make ..." ("The Stranger's Land/the Serene Land") Rain Taxi | 1998-2022 | Rain Taxi Review of Books and its authors. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of the summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable.

In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges.” In “Two Stranger Birds in our Feathers,” a woman asks a stranger to slowly undo her braids, saying:For, let us not forget: Mahmoud Darwish is a poet of exile. And, being a poet of exile, he has no choice but to be a poet of loss. He spent most of his life far from his homeland, living in Lebanon, France, Egypt, and other countries. Interestingly, the poems in this collection were all published after 1996, the year of his return to Palestine. But the sense of exile and nostalgia remains as strong as ever. He writes:

Born in a village in Galilee in 1942, at age six Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon in the 1948 war, only to return a few months later to the new state of Israel to find his village gone. Growing up in Israel, he lived under the legal status of “absent-present alien” despite having been born there. For publishing and reading his poetry, he suffered house arrests and imprisonment, until his self-imposed exile to Egypt in 1970. From there he moved to Beirut, only to be expelled with the PLO in the 1982 Israeli invasion. Finally, after the Oslo Accords, he returned to Ramallah in 1996 to live in the occupied West Bank, where he later endured the 2002 siege of the PLO headquarters. As one essayist asserts:This potentially discomfiting, albeit powerful, poem is framed by the work we are more used to when we think of Darwish: nostalgic and lovely—love-ly. The majority focuses on the human being, on our hopes and fears, our essence, rather than on the horrible things we can do to one another. It presents images that set our conscience and imagination free: lapis lazuli, lilac nights, olive trees, birds, moons, bodies of water. I end this review with a passage that brings together many of these images, a passage that reminds us that, despite everything that has been lost and may never be regained, Mahmoud Darwish is ultimately a poet of hope: Even in “State of Siege,” Darwish ultimately yearns for peace. He writes, “When the fighter planes disappear, the doves fly / white, white.” Like Adam, the [poem’s] speaker even cedes a part of his body to make the creation of his female companion possible. The new Eve, Adam’s companion who is thus emerging and who receives her name through the poet’s creation act, is none other than Palestine.