On Mural

This is a really beautiful collection of two of Darwish’s longer poems, “Mural” and “The Dice Player.” “Mural” is very much about using poetry, literature, the written word, to escape the confines of everyday life — especially resonant for Darwish as a Palestinian, a national identity that faces a permanent sense of exile, whether internal (as for ‘48 Palestinians), external (as for the diaspora), or somewhere in between (as in Gaza and the West Bank). He is grappling with what home means, and he writes:

My nurse says: you were shivering violently and screaming: I don’t want to return to anyone I don’t want to return to any land After this long absence I want only to return to my language deep in the cooing of a dove My nurse says you kept shrieking and asking me: Is death what you’re doing with me right now? Or is this how language dies?

Since moving to Tunisia, I’ve reflected a great deal on how my own sense of home comes from the use of language — both the linguistic system and the way language is used — and Darwish’s poem feels like a vindication of that. Something else strikes me, as a non-Arab: the commonalities, and the limits, of our shared reference points. So many of Darwish’s are profoundly Christian; he reaches often for Christ and for Solomon, which is worth sitting with, since he’s from the region around Galilee, the same place Christ called home. He also reaches for Homer and Gilgamesh, both of the “Western tradition” — and I’d go so far as to place most Arab cultural and literary output in that tradition too. But there are limits: Leila and Majnun matter to the poem, and I didn’t learn their story until I’d lived a while in North Africa. The poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah fell in love with Leila, they were kept apart, and he went mad with love, producing poem after poem; the story was later reified by Nizami Ganjavi and became as important to the Persianate tradition as to the Arab one — and the Persianate tradition seems to share much less with the Western.

I loved “Mural.” Darwish’s love of literature as an escape, a source of freedom, the bedrock of all meaning, resonates with me heavily. The second poem, “The Dice Player,” doesn’t hit quite as hard, but it does important work: Darwish suggests that we have little choice in who we are or who we become, that chance plays an enormous role, and that we would do well to accept ourselves fully regardless of not having chosen what we are. I wouldn’t quite call it existential, but it resonates with Nietzsche on eternal recurrence and the acceptance of all that is — an empowering piece that lets us look on ourselves charitably, even the parts we don’t much like. From this short book it’s obvious why Darwish is seen as such a major figure in contemporary Arabic poetry. Even in English translation, which has surely lost a great deal, there’s much beauty here, and an enormous amount to grapple with.