In the Presence of Absence:
Mahmoud Darwish’s Testament
Tetz
Rooke
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is well
known for his intertextual playfulness and inventiveness, and indeed, in one of
his last books, Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb (In the
Presence of Absence, 2006) he alludes to classical Arabic poetry, the Qurʾān,
to and his own previous oeuvre. Drawing on a celebrated qaṣīda
by the Umayyad poet Mālik Ibn al-Rayb as his model, Darwish composed this
work as a funeral speech for himself. Essentially, it is an oration in prose,
but snatches of poetry also appear in a stylistic pattern where rhetorical
figures abound. Speaking from the barzakh between life and death, the
poet reflects on his wordly existence from cradle to grave. Published less than
two years before Darwish’s death in August 2008, the text has the double
character of prediction and testament. The
thesis of this article is that the death of the author adds meaning to
it not by his absence, but paradoxically, by his increased presence as an
unavoidable point of reference and source of identification for the reader.
In the spring
of 2006, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish received a delegation from the
Swedish Writers’ Union in Ramallah on the West Bank. His first words to his writer colleagues from the north were: ‘Welcome,
I have just finished writing my own funeral speech’.[1] At the time this seemed to be an odd greeting
and the guests were not quite sure what to make of it. But later that same year
Darwish published a book with the title Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb (In the Presence of Absence) composed as an elegy in prose
by the poet over himself.[2] And with his sudden death in the aftermath of
open heart surgery in
In an instant, the informed reader’s way of reading Mahmoud Darwish’s funeral oration,
Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb, abruptly changed. From a sombre
fiction, the book became a terrible truth; from an open ended story about ageing,
it froze into the poet’s last will and testament. A similar transformation (or
addition) of meaning also took place in other texts from his later production which
have disappearance and death as major themes; the passing away of the author
changed the impact of these writings on the reader. Darwish’s two final works Ḥayrat
al-ʿāʾid (The Confusion of the Returnee, 2007) and Athar
al-farāsha (The Trace of the Butterfly, 2008) now read differently
than before when he was still alive.
This uniting of
the person Mahmoud Darwish with his work, of course goes against the notion of
the independence of the literary text from its author, a notion most famously
developed by Roland Barthes. According to Barthes, ‘literature is that neuter,
that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where
all identity is lost, beginning with the
very identity of the body that writes’.[3] Thus, to maintain the importance of the authorial
subject and stress the identity of the person writing might seem hopelessly
naive. But the biographical reading, to seek the explanation of the work in the
man or woman who produced it, is sometimes the most natural. And in the case of
autobiographical writing it, is often the whole point.
In
autobiography, the word and the world are intrinsically united; in a book about the author’s life the reader’s
knowledge of what really happened to him or her, certainly influences
the interpretation. To deny the importance of the biographical dimension of
Darwish’s writing on the theme of his own death would therefore be as rash as
ignoring the political events of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict when reading
his resistance poetry. The referential is essential. Indeed, the death of the
author posits new meanings to the text, but in this case not by way of his
total absence, as Barthes argued,[4] but through his increased presence as an
unavoidable point of reference and source
of identification for the reader. The Presence of Absence
is not only the title of a book, but also, implicitly, an instruction of how to
read it.
By 1984,
Mahmoud Darwish had already suffered his first heart attack. According to the
doctors he was clinically dead for one-and-a-half minutes before he was brought
back to life with the help of electric shocks.[5] The memory of this near-death experience, or
‘life accident’ as the author himself mockingly calls it, in a hospital in
Vienna, is the starting point for one of many discussions in Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb about the nature of death. Actually, death is nothing to be
afraid of. It is a beautiful and painless sleep, a sense of brightness and
whiteness, a blissful state beyond time and free of emotion; neither a high nor
a low, neither a thing nor a no-thing:[6]
أدركتَ
أن الموت لا
يوجع الموتى،
بل يوجع الأحياء
You
understood that death doesn’t hurt the dead, it only hurts the living.
The
author-narrator sums up when he describes the event and remembers the intense
pain of waking up to life again.[7] The voice that speaks in this way and utters
these words, is a textual ‘I’ whom the reader identifies as the author early on.[8] But the ‘you’ that he directs towards himself
with his speech, is also he himself. He is both the watching spectator and the
watched protagonist in a seeming paradox that functions as the central
narrative ploy of the work.
The first scene
of the book is a funeral. It is seen and described through the eyes of a
narrator who is making a farewell speech to a silent corpse laid out before him,
‘shrouded in words’.[9] But the shrouded body is also he; he is both the mourning and the mourned at
the same time, the addressee and the addressed.[10] Both the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of the text appear as
different sides of one and the same person in a game of double identities: ‘We
were born together under the China tree, neither as twins nor as neighbours,
but one in two, or two in one’.[11] The narrator’s sleeping, silent self is on his
way to ‘a second life’, promised to him by language, ‘in a reader that perhaps
will survive a meteorite collision with the earth’ while his lamenting, talking self has an appointment with death, ‘an appointment
that I have longed for more than once’.[12] In this passage it is not far-fetched to
interpret the corpse on the bier as the symbol of Mahmoud Darwish the poet, the
public persona and the national icon. The narrator-self on the other hand seems
to stand for Mahmoud Darwish the human being, the private person and the lonely
man behind the mask. The split between the public and the private self and the
struggle between them is a problem that is explored on several occasions in the
text.
The funeral
scene, too, comes back, or is evoked, in the narrative many times and functions
as a typical framing device. The last chapter of the text begins with exactly
the same words as the first in order to close the circle:
سطراً
سطراً،
اُنثرك أمامي
بكفاءةٍ لم
اُوتَها إلا
في المطالع
‘Line by
line I scatter you before me with an ability that I am not given except in
preludes’.
As a frame
story, it has many other stories embedded within it. Most of these tell
dramatic episodes, such as that of the author’s heart-failure, or they hinge on
decisive moments in his life, like the flight from the home village in 1948;
the expulsion of the PLO from
The
metaphorical setting of the funeral scene is highly symbolic: the transitory space between life and death that the
Qurʾān refers to as barzakh, interpreted
in Islamic eschatology as the boundary between the world of human beings and that
of the spirits, the in-between where
the soul rests in waiting for the Day of Judgment.[14] A more concrete interpretation of the barzakh is
the grave which lies between this life and the next. The term appears several
times in the narrative in both these senses.[15] But Mahmoud Darwish is famous for his frequent
use of symbols, legends and myths from all Middle Eastern religions.[16] To classify his text as ‘religious’ because of
the Islamic way he imagines his death would therefore be an over-interpretation
of it. During one period of his life he was even a convinced Communist.[17] In his œuvre, the repeated deployment
of Quranic allusion is more a sign of cultural belonging than of religious
belief.
Yet, when
recalling his first discovery of the mystery and power of the written word as a
young boy in school, and his fascination with the magic of Arabic letters,
especially the letter nūn, the author also mentions his strong
belief in, and love of, God. It was fired by the Quranic sūra,
al-Raḥmān.[18] The lasting importance of this Islamic imprint
on him only becomes clear to the reader at the end of the book, which has a verse from
فبأي
آلاء ربكما
تُكَذّبان /
وغائبان أنا و
أنت، وحاضران
أنا وأنت،
وغائبان /
فبأي آلاء ربكما
تُكَذّبان.
‘Then which of the blessings of your Lord will you both deny / absent as
we are, you and me, and present as we are, you and me, and absent / then which
of the blessings of your Lord will you both deny’.[21]
Another
pertinent trans-textual relationship in Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb is
signalled by the quotation that stands as the book’s motto. It is a quote from
a famous elegy by the Umayyad poet, Mālik Ibn al-Rayb (d. 56/676). Ibn al-Rayb’s
poem can be seen as the hypotext, the model for the hypertext, which is
Darwish’s modification of it. According to tradition, Mālik ibn al-Rayb
recited his celebrated poem on his deathbed.[22] It was a
dirge composed by the poet to himself that describes his own funeral.
The verse quoted in Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb runs:[23]
يقولون:
لا تبعد، وهم
يدفنونني /
وأين مكان البُعْد
إلا مكانيا؟
‘They say
“do not go away”, yet they bury me / but where is the place of separation if
not my place (the grave)’?
The fact that
this verse contains the favourite expression of the classical Arabic poets who
composed dirges: lā tabʿad, i.e. ‘do not go away’, makes it a
very strong literary signal.[24] In addition to the direct reference, there is
possibly also an allusion to the classical qaṣīda in the
rhetoric structure and design itself. According to Jaroslav Stetkevych, the
Arabic ode shared some features of the oratorical genres of khuṭba
and risāla. The classical poem was oral and ceremonial in its
essence. It had a message and was meant to influence. In practice, the poet was
also a kind of orator.[25] So when the first person narrator in Darwish’s
text uses the word ‘speech’ (khuṭba) to describe his own narration,
this too alludes to the classical bards and their custom.[26]
By using the
textual model of an honoured qaṣīda, the modern poet affirms
his belonging and allegiance to the Arabic literary tradition and, in a sense, he
shows its modernity. But he also demonstrates his independence from it by
writing his own version of Ibn al-Rayb’s funeral song in prose, or better, in a
combination of poetry and prose. The subtitle of the book is ‘text’ (naṣṣ), a generic sign that indicates a free relationship
to ‘the tyranny of genre’ and a subversion of the strict boundary
between prose and poetry. In his elegy, the modern poet weaves together
narrative and verse into one single ‘text’ that softly swings between the
down-to-earth and the lyrical. To him this movement is also a kind of poetics:
‘Prose is the neighbour of poetry and the poet’s pleasure ride / The poet is
the one who cannot decide between prose and poetry’.[27]
But this combination is nothing new. Even if Mahmoud
Darwish is best known as a poet, he has written several works of prose before,
the most acclaimed being his one-day diary from Beirut under Israeli siege on 6
August 1982, Dhākira li-l-nisyān (Memory For Forgetfulness,
1984).[28] Interestingly, this book is also a kind of
meditation over the grave and has been described as a work ‘saturated with
death’ where ‘the author seems to be living
out his own imminent death’.[29] Another correspondence
between it and Fī
ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb is
in the author’s use of paradox as a rhetoric device in the title.[30] Generally speaking, the paradox is one of Darwish’s
favourite methods to achieve a poetic effect and Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb is
no exception to this. Here, the paradox occurs on all levels, from the word to
the sentence to the story. As a rhetorical figure, the paradox is sometimes
based on a switch of terms into a reversed proposition, then called ʿaks
or tabdīl in Arabic, or on a complete antithesis, called muṭābaqa
or ṭibāq.[31] Darwish knows his craft and loves badīʿ
just as much as his classical predecessors did. Here are a few illustrative examples:
لم تنتصر
قبيلة بلا
شاعر، ولم
تنتصر شاعر
إلا مهزوماً
في الحبّ
‘No tribe was ever victorious without a poet, and no poet was
ever victorious unless he was defeated in love’. (The romantic idea of the author
as child).[32]
الحنين
أنينُ الحق
العاجز عن
الإتيان
بالبرهان على
قوة الحق أمام
حق القوة
المتمادية
‘Nostalgia is the complaint of truth over its inability to produce proof
of the power of truth in front of the truth of persistent power…’ (Said on the
helpless longing of Palestinian refugees for their old houses buried beneath
the settlements).[33]
إن ثلاثة
عقود من غياب
الذات عن
مكانها تجعل المكان
ذاتاً يتيمة
‘Three decades of the self’s absence from its place make the place into
an orphan self’. (Reflection by the poet during his first visit to Galilee
after exile).[34]
His
paradoxes are often built on metaphorical contrasts and surprising semantic
turns. Thus,
young love can be described as a state of death more sweet and alive than any
other (akthar ʾaṭwār al-mawt ʿadhūbatan wa-ḥayā)
and old love as an absence with an intense presence (ghiyāb
kathīf al-ḥuḍūr).[35] Another salient stylistic feature of the text
is rhyme and alliteration:[36]
المنفى،
وهو سوء تفاهم
بين الوجود
والحدود
‘Exile, which is a misunderstanding between existence and the borders’.
إمرأة،
حسية مرئية،
ملموسة
محسوسة
Or: ‘a woman, who is sensual and visual, touchable and perceptible’.
الصباحُ
نظيفٌ ربيعيّ
مشمشيّ مشمسٌ
سَلِسُ التدفَّق
Or: ‘the morning is clean, like spring, like apricot, sunny and smooth
in its outbreak’.
A
third rhetoric tool, lastly, is repetition: of words and phrases, syntactic
structures, images and scenes. This stylistic feature frequently includes
different kinds of parallelisms, analogy and the use of synonyms instead of
antonyms. Perhaps the best example of Darwish’s conscious use of this device for
aesthetic purposes is found in the last chapter of Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb. It consists of fifty gnomic sayings varying in length from
one line to five. Each saying is separated from the next by a stroke (/)
followed by a blank space. The last word of each paragraph is picked up and
repeated by the next where it becomes the first word and subject of a new aphorism,
like in a verbal relay where the movement forward never stops. Here is an
example:
ألحكاية
أنك هندي
أحمر/
أحمرالريش،
لا أحمر الدم،
أنك كابوس
الساهر/
الساهر على
كشّ الغياب،
وعلى تدليك
الأبد /
‘ ... / the story is that you are a Red Indian / red-feathered, not
red-blooded, that you are the nightmare of the sleepless / the sleepless from
the recoil of absence, and from the rub of eternity’.
Not all sayings have the force of a proverb or a maxim.
Sometimes they read more like poetic images not unlike the many ‘one-liners’
that are sprinkled through the text as a whole. Still, when gathered together,
as if they were outside of narrative, in a chapter of their own, they give a
joint impression of solemnity and weight. Some feel almost ‘testamental’ in
their terse and concentrated form. This impression in further strengthened by
the inclusion of a verse from the Qurʾān as the last link in the
chain (see above). In relation to the
normal structure of a contemporary autobiography this chapter may seem
strange, but connected to the underlying qaṣīda-model it
makes more sense: It is a typical closure of the Arabic ode to end with an
excursus, such as a string of epigrammatic maxims.[37]
Besides, wise
sayings (ḥikam) are an established art in Arabic literature where they
are recognised as a genre of their own.[38] As a rhetorical exercise, gnomai also
featured in ancient
In summary
then, Darwish fully knows and freely uses the heritage from many traditions in his creative writing, both in terms of
intertextuality and literary technique. But he is not a traditionalist
poet, nor a manufacturer of political slogans: ‘All beautiful poetry is...
resistance. / The living heritage is what is written today ... and tomorrow’ he
says in his last book to those who would have it to be otherwise.[45]
What poetry is
and is not, what it can do and cannot, what the poet’s mission is and is not,
are issues that are inseparable from Mahmoud Darwish’s life trajectory as it is
narrated in his auto-elegy. Poetry plays a part in his everyday life in its
most intimate and trivial details. To him, getting up in the morning, shaving
and getting dressed are part of the routines of writing, ‘the hobby that became
a profession, and the profession that has remained a hobby’.[46] The author presents an image of creative
writing as being not just a matter of inspiration, but also of discipline and
hard work. There are other famous Arab poets as well, who have written
autobiographies built around this theme of ‘literature and myself’.[47] However, to Darwish, it is not a theme
developed for its own sake, but rather it serves to allow deeper probing into
the riddles of identity. Who am I/you except the poet? That is the real
question. What is the purpose of my/your life on earth? What does it mean to be
a human being? In this way Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb is
a more existentially worried work than most of its kind.
But
poetry of course can be existential too. When existence is unjust, when
existence is incomprehensible, when existence is tough, then poetry is a way to
set the balance right: ‘Isn’t poetry an attempt of sorts to correct a mistake?’
the author-narrator asks his double.[48] And further on in the monologue he states:[49]
الخيال
قرينُ الكائن
السريُ
ومُعينُهُ
على تصحيح
أخطاء طباعية
في كتاب الكون
‘Fantasy
is the secret companion of the being and his help to correct the misprints in
the book of existence’.
In this sense,
poetry is a way to protest and take revenge. As a young man, the poet felt that
poetry had some sort of power to rectify the disaster that had befell his
family and people. And subsequently this feeling gave rise to his political
poetry in order to reclaim the lost land.[50] Poetry, Darwish writes, is an act of freedom
and makes the invisible visible.[51] In this context, the title of the book, In
the Presence of Absence, may also be interpreted as a reference to the
spiritual presence of the Palestinians, manifested in their words and songs,
even in those places in Israel in which they are physically absent after 1948.
The role of
poetry is to keep memory alive, the author explains, first and foremost from
the threats of extinction by the enemy, but sometimes also from the threats of
denial from within the own ranks. Watching the historical handshake on
television, he describes his negative reaction to the peace agreement between
the PLO and
What
can the poet do against the bulldozers of History except to protect the trees
by the old roads and the springs, both the visible ones and the invisible? And
to protect language from the feebleness of retreat from its metaphoric particularity,
from the emptying of it from the voices of the victims who demand their share
of tomorrow’s memory, on this earth where the struggle stands and concerns far
more than the power of weapons: the power of words.[52]
In
ancient
As previously
mentioned the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s last published book is Athar
al-farāsha (The Trace of the Butterfly). The phrase is taken from a
short, simple poem in this undated diary. The poem begins and ends with the
same verse:[58]
أثرُ
الفراشة لا
يُرى أثرُالفراشة
لا يَزولُ
‘The trace
of the butterfly cannot be seen / the trace of the butterfly never disappears’.
What,
then, is the final message of Mahmoud Darwish’s funeral speech, Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb? The author-narrator eventually asks the same question to his
shrouded corpse and finds that ‘indeed, you do not leave any testament except
the ban on exaggerating interpretation’.[59] The reader concludes that is the will of the
poet that his text remains open, as open as
he liked life itself to be, as open as identity. In the poetry
collection immediately preceding Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb there
is a poem where the poetical self addresses absence in a predictive verse:
‘Tell absence: I have missed you / Now I have come, to make you complete!’[60] In the same collection, Ka-zahr al-lawz aw
abʿad (Like Almond
Flowers or Further, 1995) one also finds a
long farewell poem by Darwish to his friend Edward Said. It is part of a
suite called ‘Exile’ and has ‘antithesis’ (ṭibāq)
as its telling subtitle. The contradictions of the great intellectual were in
fact also those of the great writer, and the words of this poem could very well
stand as an epitaph of both:
And in the free travel between cultures
Researchers looking for the essence of man perhaps will find
Room enough for everybody.
Here is a margin advancing, or a centre retreating.
The East is not exactly the East
Nor the West exactly the West
Because identity is open to multiplicity
Not a fortress or trenches.[61]
ففي
السفر الحر
بين الثقافات
قد يجد
الباحثون عن
الجوهر
البشريّ
مقاعدَ
كافيةً
للجميع.
هنا هامش
يتقدّمُ. أو
مركز يتراجع
لا
الشرقُ شرقٌ
تماتاً
ولا
الغربُ غربٌ
تماماً
لأنّ
الهويّةَ
مفتوحةٌ
للتعدّد
لا قلعةً
أو خنادقَ
[1] Personal communication with one of the members
of the delegation, the poet Jenny Tunedal. The other members were Håkan
Bravinger, Aimée Delblanc and Ingela Bendt.
[2] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2006.
[3] Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen
no. 5+6 (1967). In 1967, Aspen
5+
[4] ‘The absence of the Author [...] is not only a
historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text
(or––what is the same thing––the text is henceforth written and read so that in
it, on every level, the Author absents himself)’. Translation by Richard
Howard. Ibid.
[5] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
112–13. Tahar Ben Jelloun, ‘Mahmoud Darwish’, column published on Tahar Ben
Jelloun’s official website, 10 Aug 2008. http:// www.taharbenjellun.org/chroniques
(nr. 92). Retrieved 12 Sept 2008.
[6] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
111–13.
[7] Ibid., 113. All translations are mine
except where otherwise noted.
[8] This identification is the result of an
implicit contract between the author and the reader, an ‘autobiographical pact’
that governs the reading (P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, 1975).
Essentially, this ‘pact’ rests on an established correspondence between the
details of the story and known historical and biographical facts. The
appearance of real persons in the narrative also contributes: in this case, the
Arab writers Elias Khoury and Emile Habibi are two such real persons that show up
in the text (115, 155). The first person narrator remains anonymous throughout,
but assumes the authorship for a literary production that we know has been
written and published by Mahmoud Darwish, and thus the identity between them is
fully confirmed. Cf. note 43 below.
[9] Ibid., 11.
[10] Ibid., 15.
[11] Ibid., 18.
[12] Ibid., 10.
[13] The book is divided into twenty chapters that
has the following content (brutally summarized): Chapter 1: The burial scene /
Chapter 2: birth and early childhood; childhood as paradise and adventure /
Chapter 3: learning to read and write; the magic of letters, the first meeting
with poetry / Chapter 4: the horror of exodus, the flight from the home village
to Lebanon; childhood turns hell / Chapter 5: smuggled back into Galilee, semi-illegal
life in Israel / Chapter 6: childhood memories of Gypsy women, on the symbol of
the Gypsy; dangerous moments and chance rescues; on waiting in airports and the
sense of rootlessness / Chapter 7: prison experiences; on the meaning of
freedom / Chapter 8: the Israel-Palestine conflict as a struggle between myths
and legends; the Palestinians as the new Trojans / Chapter 9: in exile, Cairo
and Beirut; the traumatic expulsion from Beirut / Chapter 10: on autumn, autumn
in Paris and autumn in life; on the meaning of exile / Chapter 11: daily
routines, writing practices and poetics / Chapter 12: a praise to sleep and
dreams / Chapter 13: the first and the second infarct, the nightmare of
hospital / Chapter 14: on the meaning of homesickness and nostalgia / Chapter
15: on the meaning of love / Chapter 16: leaving Tunis and returning to
Palestine; the first visit to Gaza / Chapter 17: the first visit to Jericho;
the first visit to Galilee; the funeral of Emile Habibi / Chapter 18: searching
for the remains of al-Birwa, the destroyed home village; the reunion with the
mother and a visit to the father’s grave / Chapter 19: the funeral scene /
Chapter 20: aphorisms.
[14] Qurʾān, 32:100, 55:20 and 25:53. B. Carra de Vaux, ‘barzakh’ in EI2, I: 107.
[15] Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb, e.g. 12, 20, 31 and 113.
[16] See e.g. Anette Månsson, Passage to a New Wor(l)d.
Exile and Restoration in Mahmoud Darwish’s Writings 1960–1995, Ph.D. thesis,
Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2003. Esp. 108–11.
[17] Darwish joined the Communist party in 1961. Ibid.,
15.
[18] Sūra 55, ‘The All-Merciful’. Fī
ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb, 27. This memory from childhood is a
source of inspiration that Darwish has used before, notably in the poem ‘Like
the letter nūn in sūrat al-Raḥmān’ from the
collection Li-mādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan
(Why Did You Leave The Horse Alone, 1995), Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2nd ed., 73–5.
[19] Qurʾān, 55:13, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25,
28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67,
69, 71, 73, 75, 77. It should be remembered that sūrat al-Raḥmān
contains a very poetic and at the same time concrete description of the wonders
of Earth, the horrors of Hell and pleasures of Paradise. These expressive
images of the timely and the evanescent are of course instantly evoked by the
verse in the implied Arab reader.
[20] English translation from The Noble Qurʾān
in the English Language, M. T. Al-Hilālī and M. M. Khān,
Riyadh: Dar-us-Salam, 1995. Note that in my translation I have left out the
interpolation ‘(jinns and men)’ that we find after the words ‘you both’ in this
Muslim interpretation of the verse. Cf. Arberry’s translation: ‘O which of your
Lord’s bounties will you and you deny?’ The Koran Interpreted, Arthur J.
Arberry, London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
[21] Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb, 180–1. The Arabic rhetorical
figure of taḍmīn is the incorporation of an existing line of
poetry, or part thereof, into one’s own poetry. See also note 31 below.
[22] Kitāb al-Aghānī, XXII,
Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1986. Mālik Ibn al-Rayb is
introduced as a ‘poet, killer, and thief’ in the article about him in al-Aghānī
(288–304). He is said to have lived an adventurous and violent life as an
outlaw before joining the troops of the Muslim governor of Khurasan, Saʿīd
ibn ʿUthmān. It was on his way back from a campaign together with him
that Mālik died.
[23] Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb, 7. The translation is by S. M. Stern
and C. R. Barber from Ignaz Goldziher’s German translation of the Arabic
original: ‘Sie sagen: Entferne dich nicht und dabei begraben sie mich; aber wo
ist denn der Ort des Scheidens, wenn es nicht mein Ort (Grab) ist?’ Ignaz Goldziher, ‘On the veneration
of the dead in paganism and Islam’, Muslim Studies 5/1 (2006), ed. S. M.
Stern, 209–38 (232, n. 1). (Originally published in German 1889–90).
[24] Ibid., 231-2. According to Goldziher the verse
is the concluding line of the poem. But in most versions of Ibn al-Rayb’s
funeral song it comes somewhere in the middle. According to a report in al-Aghānī
(ibid., 303) the original poem was only 13 lines long, but it is not made clear
which ones they are. A longer version of more than fifty verses is found in several
4th/10th century sources that form the basis for the
modern editions of text. For the full poem, including an Italian translation, and
a presentation of its author, see S. A. al-Tilbānī, ‘Il poeta
umayyade Mālik ibn ar-Rayb’ Annali (Istituto Universitario
orientale di Napoli) 18 (1968), 289–318. I would like to thank Professor G. J.
van Gelder for drawing my attention to this article.
[25] Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd.
The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993, 6–16.
[26] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
113, 166.
[27] النثر
جارُ الشعر
ونُزْهةُ
الشاعر /
الشاعرُ هو
الحائر بين
النثر والشعر Ibid., 177.
[28] The diary is a form of writing that Darwish
practiced in several works. The first was Yawmiyyāt al-ḥuzn al-ʿādī
(1973) and the last Athar al-farāsha (2008), which also became his
last published book. But the term ‘diary’ here should be understood in a wide
sense meaning ‘essay’ too. For a close reading of Yawmiyyāt al-ḥuzn
al-ʿādī and Dhākira lil-nisyān,
see ‘The Poet and his Mission, Text and Space in the Prose Works of Maḥmūd
Darwīsh’, in S. Guth and P. Furrer (eds) Conscious Voices,
Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999, 255–75.
[29] Boutros Hallaq, ‘Autobiography and Polyphony’
in Writing the Self, Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, London:
Saqi Books, 1998, 193.
[30] The original title of Dhākira
lil-nisyān / Memory For Forgetfulness when the work was first
published in the magazine al-Karmal was The Time: Beirut / The Place:
August. But also in this title the paradox is used to produce a destabilizing,
jolting effect on the reader. On Dhākira lil-nisyān and its
background, see the introduction by Muhawi to his English translation, Memory
For Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982, Los Angeles/London: University of California
Press, 1995, esp. xii.
[31] As a rhetorical figure ‘paradox’ can be
defined as ‘an assertion seemingly opposed to common sense, but that may yet
have some truth in it’ while antithesis is ‘opposition, or contrast of
ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction’ (http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html#7)
[Accessed: 22 Dec 08]. On the Arabic
terms see W. P. Heinrichs, ‘rhetorical figures’ in Encyclopedia
of Arabic Literature, ed. J. S. Meisami and P. Starkey, vol. 2, London:
Routledge, 1998, 656–62.
[32] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
27.
[33] Ibid.,
125.
[34] Ibid., 154.
[35] Ibid., 126, 130.
[36] Ibid., 92, 132, 154.
[37] Stetkevych, op. cit., 6.
[39] Jidāriyyat Maḥmūd Darwīsh,
Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2nd ed. 2001, 85–91.
[40] ʿAbd al-Salām
al-Musāwī, ‘al-Mawt min manẓūr al-dhāt’, in ʿĀlam
al-fikr, 4 (2007): 99-135 (104). Jidāriyya is ‘completely devoted to
death’, according to al-Musāwī (103), who has counted these words and
others related to death in the text (e.g. ‘grave’ and ‘funeral’). The Arab
critic Abduh Wāzin similarly chose ‘The Taming of Death through Poetry’ as
the title for his analysis of Jidāriyya in the book Maḥmūd
Darwīsh. Al-Gharīb yaqaʿ ʿalā nafsihi, Beirut:
Riad El-Rayyes, 2004.
[41] al-Musāwī, op. cit. p. 100, quoting
an interview with Darwish published in Akhbār al-adab, no. 396, 11
Feb 2001.
[42] Cf. Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb, 112 and Jidāriyyat Maḥmūd
Darwīsh, 10.
[43] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
163 and Jidāriyyat Maḥmūd Darwīsh, 98–9.
[44] باطل
الأباطيل،
الكل باطل
Fī
ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
156 and Jidāriyyat Maḥmūd Darwīsh, 87, 88, 91.
[45] كلّ شعرِ
جميل...مقاومة /
التراث الحيّ
هو ما يُكتب
اليوم...وغداً Athar
al-farāsha, 225.
[46] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
98.
[47] Perhaps the most well known one is Nizār
Qabbāni’s Qiṣṣatī maʿa al-shiʿr (Beirut,
1973), but also Adonis has written a work in this genre: Hā anta ayyuhā
al-waqt. Sīra shiʿriyya thaqāfiyya (Beirut, 1993).
[48] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
100.
[49] Ibid., 163.
[50] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
162.
[51] Ibid., 64.
[52] Ibid., 142.
[53] Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the
Soul, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987, 82 and 123. According to Bremmer, the
association of the butterfly with the dead perhaps goes back to Minoan times,
but the evidence is debated.
[54] Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb,
20.
[55] Ibid., 39.
[56] Ibid., 157.
[57] Ibid., 156.
[58] Athar al-farāsha, 131–2.
[59] أجل، لا
وصيّة لك إلا
النهي عن الإفراط
في التأويل Fī ḥaḍrat
al-ghiyāb, 168.
[60] Ka-zahr al-lawz aw abʿad, Beirut:
Riad El-Rayyes, 1995, 19.
[61] Ibid., 185.