The Butterfly's Burden

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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. Though the love poems hovered just out of my grasp, A State of Siege insinuated itself right in my gut.

It is quite likely that Darwish’s poems pull deeply from the well of the love poetry of the Jahili (pre-Islamic) and Sufi traditions, rich in symbols and metaphors. Later, echoing Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s “Wildpeace,” Darwish predicts that “This siege will extend until/the besieger feels, like the besieged,/that boredom/is a human trait” (143). Yet to do so, as The Butterfly's Burden demonstrates over its 300-odd pages, would be to give an incomplete account of a world-class poet. If I had to capture the essence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in one brief passage, these are the verses I would choose. 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.From the courtly and ecstatic love lyrics of The Stranger’s Bed, to the diaristic and penetrating political poem of A State of Siege, to the colloquial meditations on mortality, history, and the future in Don’t Apologize, The Butterfly’s Burden bears witness to the generous breadth of Darwish’s poetic and cultural achievement.

Yet he bears across the often dizzyingly complex linguistic, poetic, and cultural associations embedded in Darwish’s poetry into an increasingly satisfying and, at times, breath-taking poetry. If such imagery, for some, might quickly dissolve into anti-Semitism, Darwish asserts that the victims of the Holocaust do not have a monopoly on victimhood, and that the reshaping of myth is intended to remove us from the assumptions we’ve made about them and their “suffocating knowledge,” and to expand the dialogue among us all. Growing up in Israel, he lived under the legal status of “absent-present alien” despite having been born there. State of Siege,” a book-length poem placed in the middle of the collection is an exception to that, showing an angrier side to Darwish. Over the course of the next sixty years, he has lived all over the world, participated in the political and cultural life of Palestine as an exile, and then finally was able to come back, post-Oslo Accords, to live in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1996.Because reality is an ongoing text, lovely / white, without malady", as A State of Siege (2002), a book-length poem of the second intifada, points out. If we, as Americans, wonder why Hamas lobs rockets from Gaza into Israel, consider how we, as Americans, reacted to Arabs flying planes into the Twin Towers—we invaded two countries. For those who might question the intent of such a dialogue, it bears repeating that Darwish, as a young man, fell in love with a young Jewish woman—even though he later recognized such a love was “impossible to live,” and “located in sites impossible to inhabit.

Elsewhere, the tensions between difference and similarity are neither articulated nor explained but entered into.The motifs and concerns of his work seen here — the position of exile, the longing for a lost land, the haunting past, the quest for identity — merge in Don’t Apologize with a confrontation with mortality and the final erasure that it promises. Yet, to my ear, some of these poems seem lost in translation, foundering in their gentility, courtly gestures, and spiritualism. 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.

It summons many different voices — the voices of the neutral, the voices of the outraged, the voices of future bombers, the voices of victims — and each slips into the next in such quick passages that following the poem is something like chasing someone running through a labyrinth. If Darwish and others still long for their homeland, sixty years after losing it, why should we be surprised?There is no name for what life should be / other than what you've made of my soul and what you make . It is also a fragmented diaristic rumination of the psychology of siege — the siege of bodies and consciousness alike.