Something strange, almost non-literary, happens to Darwish's poems. They emerge from the poetic writing to become a painful and even infuriating reality
"Matsav Matsor" ("State of Siege") by Mahmoud Darwish, translated into Hebrew from Arabic by Muhammad Hamza Ghaneim, Andalus Publishing, 95 pages, NIS 47
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"Had Israeli intelligence read the Egyptian poetry after the defeat of the Six-Day War, it would have known that October, 1973, was inevitable. Every good intelligence officer must read poetry." So said Dr. Hussein Fawzi, a leading Egyptian intellectual, during a meeting at his house in Cairo in December, 1977.
I recalled Dr. Fawzi's remark as I was reading the book by Mahmoud Darwish, "State of Siege." I regret that I cannot read Arabic, because as Robert Frost said, "poetry is what is lost in translation." I have also read Darwish's poems in English and French, but they seemed quite remote to me. Hebrew brings them closer. They are from here, from this land, from the house next door.
My encounters with Darwish's poems, since the 1960s have always been prompted by an anxious curiosity. I often entered a state of readiness to absorb a blow, as they say in the army, when I approached the "blood junction" of the political context. This time I wanted to know what he is writing now, as a scarred gladiator and "national poet," about the prolonged and toxic conflict between our peoples; I wanted to know what was happening in his heart about the recognition of the different in the similar.
"State of Siege" fascinated me. In it, the miniature holds much. The poems are short and untitled. Essence. This is not a long narrative poem with a unifying plot that holds its parts together. The poems are read individually, each on its own. Sometimes they identify with their neighbors in the book and sometimes they are in opposition to them. Sometimes two parts of a single poem are in conflict with each other in the tension of contradiction, like the poem on page 16: "You who are standing on the threshold, enter / Drink Arab coffee with us / [Perhaps you will feel that you are human beings like us]. / You who stand on the thresholds of houses / Get out of our mornings / So we can be sure that we too / Are human beings."
He invites those who are standing on the threshold to enter - "Drink Arab coffee," integrate into the expanse, do not be an alien element. And then, in the same address to the "you" (plural), that is - to us - he says in the imperative "Get out of our mornings." It seems that our presence harms their humanity, not only their honor. Darwish is an artist of these contradictions.
In their cumulative progress, these poems create a testimony of great significance, which is essential for the understanding of the Palestinian situation that is, as the title suggests, in a "state of siege." Something strange, almost non-literary, happens to the poems. They emerge from the poetic writing to become a painful and even infuriating reality. The reference is to the closure that was imposed on Ramallah in Operation Defensive Shield after the slaughter at the Park Hotel in Netanya during the Passover seder last year.
But the siege in this book is more than that. It is a permanent state. It is a state of being. Many see Darwish as the poet of the besieged and the robbed, at least since the Nakba. A look at his previous works, like "The Immortality of the Prickly Pear" and "Identity Card," which every Palestinian can quote, will testify to this. Along with the esteem he enjoys as a poet, Darwish is a representative.
In this book Darwish often turns things topsy-turvy. He makes use of the unforgettable text of Shylock, the Jewish merchant of Venice, as an expression to define the situation of his people. In the poem addressed "To a so-called Orientalist," he writes: "Let us suppose that you are right - / Let us suppose that I am stupid / And I don't play golf / And I don't understand technology / And I am incapable of flying a plane - / Is it because of this that you have taken my life and made it your life? / If you were the other, and I were the other / We might have been friends and recognized together the need for stupidity - / Hath not a stupid man, like Shylock, a heart, and bread, / And eyes that have filled with tears?"
This reminds me of the scene in the Israeli film "Avanti Popolo," in which the Egyptian prisoner goes down on his knees in the middle of the sands of Sinai and, as a student of the theater school in Cairo, recites the famous Shakespearean monologue. This is the essence of the irony of the underdog. As he ridicules the stereotype of the Arab in the eyes of the "so-called Orientalist," a Westerner, he carries out, along the lines of "How lucky I'm an orphan," a conscious ironic devaluation of Arab society and its culture. Nevertheless, the part about Shylock is touching.
Reckoning of conscience
From childhood, as a native of this land I grew up in the experience of "the besieged and the just." The Hebrew Israeli experience in the Land of Israel was "a reality of thorns," as Joseph Haim Brenner put it, and an experience of siege. We are perceived as a foreign body in the Arab world, which is hostile, unreconciled, unforgiving and seeking vengeance. Throughout the generations our Jewish ancestors knew the loneliness of the besieged, the other, the shunned, shut into the ghetto. It is not easy for us to be revealed as besieging others. But it would be excessive self-righteousness, in the name of undeniable necessity, to dispute the fact that we have been ruling for some time now over another people, a rule that frequently also leads to destruction, humiliation and harassment, and we have still found an answer to the continuing terror and the final weapon of the shaheed (martyr) in our streets and in our homes. Indeed, the two peoples have learned to hurt each other.
Darwish's book does not try to share the blame. The entire burden of the yoke is on our necks. In this he is completely different from well-known Israeli poets who express guilt and remorse in their poems. But perhaps the Hebrew reader will take comfort in the ambivalence that characterizes many of the poems in this book and find in them some sort of desperate attempt at dialogue, at possible reconciliation: "Peace unto those who discern like me / in the intoxication of the glow, the glow of the butterfly / in the darkness of the tunnel ..."; "Peace, to see the magnet of the fox's eyes / arousing a hesitant woman's lust ... / Peace, the woe that holds up the treetops / an Andalusian song in the heart of a wandering guitar."
This is a book that includes a number of poems that are difficult for me to figure out. Perhaps I lack the code. It is hard to say of such poems that they are supposed to be "beautiful" and pleasing. But they are also addressed to us, forcing a reckoning of conscience. Dr. Hussein Fawzi was right. Poetry shapes reality.
Quite a few times during the course of my reading I also encountered poems that are placard-like and infuriating, like the four-line poem in which Darwish addresses the murderers - that is, us: "[To a murderer:] Had you looked at the victim's face, / And pondered, you would have seen your mother's face in the gas / Chamber, would have freed yourself of the wisdom or the rifle / And changed your mind: This is not how identity will be returned."
The murderer is of course an Israeli soldier and the victim is a Palestinian. The murderer's mother was killed in the gas chamber and therefore her son must free himself of the violence and murderousness, of "the wisdom of the rifle," and come back with a different identity. You want to say: Drop the gas chamber, Darwish; take care and don't drag it into the terrible account between us, too.
Perhaps this is not appropriate to a literary discussion, but I could not help thinking about the two old women, 86-year-old Lola Levkowitz and 88-year-old Sarah Levy, survivors of "the gas chamber," who were also murdered by the suicide bomber at the Park Hotel in Netanya. They had not murdered anyone in the name of "the wisdom of the rifle," but perished in that noisy death during the Passover seder meal. From then on they accompany this text by Mahmoud Darwish.
Furtheron he writes, "To another murderer" and says to him: "Had you allowed the passage / of 30 days, a different scenario would have been possible" - the occupation would have ended, the newborn baby would have grown up as a healthy child who does not remember the time of the siege, as a boy who learns in the same school as one of the murderer's daughters. And they will, perhaps, fall into the net of love "and perhaps have a daughter, [Jewish by birth]." In the other possible ending to the poem Darwish says: "But what did you do? Your daughter became a widow / and your granddaughter an orphan - How did you hit three doves with one shot?"
And I recalled lines from Rabbi Binyamin's "Arabian Vision" in the journal Hameorer, 1906: "You shall give him of your sons and take of his sons unto you. / And the blood of his heroes will mingle with yours and you shall wax and grow. / And each will find his own kind and become one kind." For, "We are people who are brothers, few families of Israel and all the nations of the land." The mingling of Israel and Arabia in a stunning vision." Things turned out otherwise.
On shaheeds
In Darwish's book there is a whole group of poems that deals with the shaheeds. In one of them, a shaheed explains to him: "... I wasn't seeking, beyond the horizon, / The virgin of eternity, for I loved my life / On earth, between the pine and the fig, / But the way to my life was blocked, / And I looked for it in the only thing I had - / Blood in the body of the lapis lazuli."
In truth, I found it difficult to understand entirely the significance of this stone and its qualities. Lapis lazuli also appears in another poem: "... I shall be born free, an orphan, / From the lapis lazuli I shall choose the letters of my name."
Prof. Moshe Sharon, a leading scholar of Islamic culture, to whom I turned, told me that the lapis lazuli, the name of which in Arabic is of Persian origin, appears in the popular tradition in the ancient world as well as having the power to ward off the evil eye, was a substance that was considered sacred because of its blue color and also served as an amulet. This blue can be found in the "blue eye" and the hamsa (five-fingered hand) that protects us. Thus, as the poem says, names can be extracted from it. In Sharon's opinion, the phrase "Blood in the lapis lazuli" creates an element of sanctity. He adds that Darwish, as the son of a peasant family in the Galilee, was familiar with the blue color since his childhood, the color of the sky that is painted around windows in Arab villages.
In an adjacent poem, Darwish writes: "The shaheed teaches me: There is no beauty apart from my liberty." And this is a line that will concern many readers of the book in Hebrew. This is because although it is a line in a poem, it deviates from it to suicide, which kills with forethought, and through which the liberty of the individual who chooses both the deathly deed and its victims is attained. There is something chilling about the words that the poet puts in the shaheed's mouth.
I think Israelis who have not stopped fighting the Palestinians' fight, have held out a hand and have sought friendship, will ask questions that have no answer in quite a number of the poems in this book. He who addresses us in the name of his besieged and humiliated nation, wounded by gunfire, but cannot look directly at the crushed bodies of Israelis in hotels, shopping malls, buses and cafes. But something very human happens further on when the Palestinian father, who is looking at a picture of his son the shaheed, says: "How did we switch roles, my son, / And you led me behind you?" No, not the proud mourners' pavilions.
But in the book there is also a poem that is supposed to be interpreted otherwise in its bitter irony, that deals with the family tree of the shaheeds, to the point of a suffocating accumulation of "That's enough!": "The female shaheed the daughter of the shaheed / And the sister of the shaheed and the sister of the female shaheed the sister-in-law / Of the mother of the shaheed the granddaughter of a shaheed grandfather / and the neighbor woman of the shaheed's uncle [and so on and so forth] - / And noting happened in the enlightened world / For the age of the barbarians has ended / And an anonymous victim is a matter of routine / And the victim, like the truth / is a relative matter / [And so on and so forth]."
In another place he writes: "... Were it not for the sins the Scriptures / would be skinnier. Were it not for the deceptions / the prophets' footprints in the sands would be clearer / The way to God shorter - /... Were the history of this place less cacophonous / Our songs of praise to the acacia would be more numerous." You respond to these lines.
And this book goes on. There is restraint in it, a refraining from loud tones and the abundant use of adjectives. Often you meet in these poems a gaze that defines situations, people and essences well. Siege and the waiting for something else: "An act of prisoners / An act of unemployed people, / We will cultivate hope." Indeed, things you see from there you can't see from here.
National experience
Darwish is a genuine poet. He is also a "national poet." We do not have and we cannot have a "national poet" at this time. This is a bitter, ironic and sarcastic Israeli society, torn by disagreements. This is a society that has in it very different poets who dispute with one another about the justice of the way in this deathly tired land, and also about Darwish's poetry and the national experience he represents. In this book, Darwish makes no distinction between them.
Further along, he says: "Here there is a general of excavations who is looking for an old state / Beneath the ruins of the future Troy." Here Darwish is at his best, fastidious and biting. And if I have understood him correctly, this refers to Moshe Dayan, who was crazy about archaeology, and who - while seeking an ancient, local culture - belongs to the ruin of what will happen to his city in the future. I recalled another poem of his, "The Eternity of the Prickly Pear," in which the father reminds his son of the conquerors of the land - the soldiers of Joshua Ben-Nun, Crusaders, Turks, the French, the English, who were here and disappeared; the father concludes: "Remember, my son, Crusader fortresses / that were gnawed by the weeds of Nissan after / the soldiers left."
But we are not Crusaders. We are indigenous. A people in its land. A people in part of its land, a people that is willing for the most part to share it with the neighboring people. We do not need to keep proving our determination to be here and our devotion.
Fifteen years ago I read something that the poet wrote: "You who pass through the sea of transient words / Take your names and leave. Steal what you want / of the blue of the sea and the sands of memory ... but you will never know how a stone from our land builds the roof of the sky." And then: "From you the steel and the fire and from us our flesh. From you another tank and from us a stone / from you another gas bomb and from us the rain / Take your portion from our blood and just leave / ... because we have in this land what you do not have, a motherland."
The continuation does not make things easy for the Hebrew reader: "Go wherever you will. But not among us, by no means! The time has come for you to leave / For you to die wherever you will, but not among us / Leave everything, leave our wounds, our lands / Leave the dry land, the sea, everything ..." (This poem was published in a Hebrew translation by Sheffi Gabbai in the daily Ma'ariv in March, 1988.)
I hope Darwish regrets this "leave," which aroused anger and amazement among many on the Israeli left who found it difficult to defend it despite its habits of justification. There were, of course, others who koshered what was written and explained to us that this was only about leaving "the territories."
The tone in this book is very different. I found quite a number of poems, that have in them a wisdom of formulation, nuances and a fastidious ability to define. If I am not mistaken, the book also has in it a tiredness with blood and hatred, and even a wounded recommendation for a different future. Those who want to will say that the final chapter in the book deals entirely with peace and defines its essence. It opens with words reminiscent of Natan Zach: "Quiet please." And then in the adjacent poem:
Truce, please, for examining the instructions.
Can airplanes be beaten into plowshares?
We said to them: Truce please, to examine the intentions,
Whether possibly a dollop of conciliation has stolen into the soul.
And then, with poetic tools, we shall compete and decide
Who loves things more.
Answer us: Didn't you know that inner reconciliation
Can open the gates of our citadel
To the musical scales of Hijaz and Nahawand?
We said: And then what? And if so?
Do not fear the reconciliation that steals into the soul. I do not know whether he is talking here about the inner reconciliation among themselves, or between them and us. Often Darwish is an artist of the ironic, ambiguous fog. Often he is to be found on the cusp between contradictory possibilities. But in this poem there is a kind of awakening that characterizes the closing pomes of the book. I choose a number of isolated lines: "Peace, doves of two strangers who share / The last cooing at the edge of the abyss"; "Peace, longings - separately - of two enemies / For the yawn on the platform of boredom ... Peace, the breaking of swords in the face of the beauty / In nature, where the dew can overwhelm the iron easily"; "Peace, a domestic, heartening day / And light of step, that is the enemy of no one"; "Peace, to go to work in the garden: Where shall we plant the tender sapling?"
Things that are beyond the hudna. Perhaps with suffering that is too hard to bear, nevertheless the other time is hatching.
Haim Gouri's book "Late Poems" was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad.ad
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