mahmoud darwish memory for forgetfulness

Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. These characters represent, as the article demonstrates, the authors’ attempts at working out the implications of the idea that, as a result of the historical events of the Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba, the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its adversarial counterpart.

In the respective fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, both Abulhawa and Kashua construe characters whose existence blur the borderlines between various versions of today’s Palestinian Arab and mainstream projections of its Israeli-Jewish counterpart. Both Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular present Arab characters who, under unusual circumstances, impersonate or literally acquire the identity of the Israeli-Jewish other.

This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Furthermore, Darwish’s poetry frees his audience from the boundaries of subjective experience, allowing them to access “visions of universal truths in the depths of the mind.” Although Mahmoud Darwish “did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness,” his poetry and prose deal primarily with humanity, “highlighting universal human values through the mirror of the Palestinian experience.” Not only those of land and occupation, and the confines of oppression, but also those of country and nationalism. It was a magical night in Ramallah, the magician’s night in Ramallah, the magician, Mahmoud Darwish, whose spell was cast the way it has been through ages…” In his tireless quest for freedom, Mahmoud Darwish successfully transcends all kinds of borders.

We did not know a word of Arabic, but we heard his voice reach out and sink deep down to pluck the strings of the Palestinian soul. The renowned Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka eloquently describes this effect: “Then came silence. To read Mahmoud Darwish is an unforgettable and transformative experience, one of beauty and simultaneously of profound pain for it makes the reader vividly aware of the injustice and staggering cruelty that Palestinians have endured for almost seventy years at the hands of Israel, a genocide the entire world is accountable for.

Mahmoud darwish memory for forgetfulness