-
Postscript
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
169 Postscript Mahmoud Darwish is the last of the twentieth century’s world-famous poets, beginning with Tagore and moving on to Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Nizar Qabbani—poets who drew both popular acclaim and critical attention across national and linguistic borders. The secret of these poets’ popularity is both political and musical. Neruda was known for his activism and his championing of the common man. Though he suffered exile and abuse for his political beliefs, Neruda’s politics were not what made Neruda a poet. When audiences heard him, they wanted to hear and chant along with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada or Canto general, not any of his manifesto poems. Neruda, it should be noted, was a masterful formalist, and his populism went hand in hand with his desire to experiment with new poetic modes and techniques. Similarly, Tagore represents a separate era in Bengali verse—indeed, in all of India’s literatures. Despite being born into an affluent family, he had a strong capacity for humility and empathy that drew various and numerous audiences to him. Writing often from a youthful perspective, Tagore created a level playing field of human emotional expression that made class and caste distinctions dissolve. Tagore innovated 170 • Mahmoud Darwish and preserved the language of his people; he wrote from within the Bengali tradition and added to it. Faiz Ahmad Faiz of Pakistan and Nizar Qabbani of Syria were unrequited lovers of other human beings and unrequited seekers of the freedom that eluded them. Echoing and expounding upon the defeats their readers faced on both fronts, the poetry of Faiz and Qabbani attracted rich and poor lovers of Urdu and Arabic poetry, capturing their emotions and channeling them in masterful rhythmic command. They pushed progressive agendas in rhythms that suited the body politic, with emphasis on body. Like them, Darwish, who died in 2008, was a critically acclaimed, traditionally trained, innovative poet who managed to win admirers among those who wanted to preserve traditional poetics and those who called for opening up Arabic verse. He managed to be modern and relevant. The Arab world is full of poets, and very few of them can claim both attributes. Perhaps harshly but incisively, the Syrian poet Adonis critiqued Darwish for seeking a point of cultural consensus to direct his poetry at. Indeed, Darwish’s popularity remains rooted in his early poetry, where his lyrical articulations of Palestinian anger and the desire for emancipation from Israeli oppression met no resistance and struck exactly the right chords among his people and Arabs the world over. Darwish’s listeners still recall the freshness of his voice as a discovery of their deep-seated national identity, the poetry giving them a sense of an existential place in the world. There is no doubt that the enthusiastic and welcoming response Darwish regularly received had impacted him and his sense of what a poet is, or who he was as a poet. The [3.235.120.15] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:54 GMT) Postscript • 171 audience’s embrace may have limited the range of his tone and positioned him essentially as someone working “from inside the system” of his community’s cultural and political machinations. For most of his career, Darwish was affiliated with the Palestinian establishment’s institutions, whether formally or informally. Even when assessing his later poems, one cannot say that Darwish directly challenged his culture or was willing to see himself as speaking outside the fold of the We—both Palestinian and Arab. His allusions to religion and Arab patriarchy do not forcefully question the authority of these daunting cultural forces. Less critical of Palestinian and Arab cultural elements than his prose, Darwish’s poetry remains largely an articulation of solidarity. On the other hand, Adonis—Darwish’s main contender for prominence among modern Arab poets—saw the poet as both a lifter of the people and a provocateur. In this regard, Adonis feels Darwish fell short since his poetry was a poetry “not of individual confrontational quest, but a poetry of consensus that reflected a collective stance and point of view” (Adonis 2010, 14). According to Adonis, a poet’s desire to regenerate a people politically had to be equaled aesthetically (14). The question remains, however: Can one, in fact, provoke aesthetic regeneration subtly and subversively? And do certain circumstances demand such subtlety? Darwish would definitely argue that his circumstances as a Palestinian dictated such an...