I understand Mahmoud Darwish to be the Palestinian national poet. Maybe that’s why—being unable to read his work from within an Arab-language tradition that is closed to me—he reminds me most of all of the American national poet. And Darwish never reminds me more of Walt Whitman than in this passage from his late prose work In the Presence of Absence, which appeared in Arabic in 2006, two years before his death:
If they ask you about the power of poetry, say: Grass is not as fragile as we might perceive. It never breaks, since it hides its modest shadow in the earth’s secret. Grass growing on rocks has the inimitability of words revealed from the unknown, without clamor or bells. Grass is a spontaneous prophecy without a prophet, except its drought-resistant color. Grass is the traveler surviving the ugliness of the scene and an army besieging the road to the possible. Grass is the fluent poetry of intuition; easy, yet inaccessible, and inaccessible, yet easy. It is language coming closer to meaning, and meaning bound to the hospitality of hope.
I don’t mind telling you how tempted I am to conclude this entry right there, because what else need or can be added to this passage, which in itself communicates a comprehensive poetics, as resolute as it is modest, and one that certainly would have secured the assent of the earlier poet who, asked about grass, cast about for answers that included: “the flag of my disposition” or “the handkerchief of the Lord…Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?” or “a uniform hieroglyphic” signifying equality. But I feel I owe you another word to give at least a hint as to why this national poet, if that’s really what he is, must also be, by virtue of being the particular poet he is, a poet of all nations and none. It’s because the nationhood signified by this poetry (and yes, this book in prose is a book of poetry—I refer you back to the difference between the prepositions “in” and “of” that I pointed out last week) is an impossible one, unlike the one he fought for as a member of the PLO, since it is the nationhood of the lonely, the exiled, the weak, the self-divided. Especially the self-divided. “You think: Were I in my shoes, I would have written in praise of my freedom at the airport….As if the airport were a homeland for those without one.” That’s another definition of poetry, a bitter one. At first, reading this book, I tried to understand, who was this “you” who, from the very first lines, was being addressed? Is Darwish speaking to poetry itself, to words—or to silence? To himself, or a Baudelairean semblable? To a beloved, or to a people? To his death? To his life? The more I read the less I could say—“you” had become one of those words both easy and inaccessible. What matters, more than to identify the interlocutor, is to recognize that the text is always dialogical in essence. It’s one in which “You are you, and more,” but also in which, “You are you, and less,” and therefore “You are you and not you at the same time.” Toward the end, a nightmare vision of inner displacement:
A host of shadows was present in your shadow. You do not know who walks inside you. Within you lies a crossroads marked by the tracks of invaders who descend like paratroopers trained in using your plows. In your name there are errors caused by a great inferno on the map. Roman ruins are built upon your home. As for you, your only image is that of a ghost.
The better to haunt you with.
❂
Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon, is published by Archipelago Books, Brooklyn, 2011.
❂
BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.