Our Present Does Not Decide Either to Begin or to End

question:

How do you live with the fact that you are a living legend?

mahmoud darwish:

I am neither happy nor upset about it, but instead astonished. However, I am not responsible for the statues erected of poets. It seems that this tradition of our literary history is still very strong.

I do not aspire, of course, to be either a symbol or a legend. But I have no control over things, no means of modifying the perception that people have. And I recognize that my personal voice also carries collective dimensions, no matter what I do to give it a vital space. And even when I succeed in withdrawing into my own universe, people reserve to themselves the right to detect a public message in the autobiographical part of my work. This situation is embarrassing for me, because it could keep me from the possibility of exploring my interior world as I desire.

I used to complain about this in the past. I thought that the way my poetry was read was responsible. I constantly asked for an innocent reading of my poems. But it seems that this demand is illusory. Is there an innocent reading of any text? Certainly not. In reality, I was asking only for a less political reading of my poems.

All of this is to tell you that I failed and that I find myself burdened with a very tiring image, and heavy responsibilities—not only in what concerns my own work, but also with all that pertains to my personal conduct and my opinions.

I see myself overburdened by symbolic signs that I can neither accept nor refuse as such. Hence, I must be up to the role and the responsibility that was entrusted to me. I do not have the right to deceive.

q:

However, at certain moments of your life, you were almost going to integrate the myth. But each time, you have escaped it. As, for example, when you decided to leave Palestine in 1970; when you had to leave Beirut in 1982; when you resigned from the Executive Committee of the PLO; when you chose to live in Paris. It is as if you hesitated to cross the threshold. Have you benefitted from this fact of being permanently in the limelight on personal and literary levels?

md:

It's true that I have tried, several times, to break the myth. For to dwell in a myth is to dwell in a prison, to forbid oneself any spontaneous blossoming, any intellectual enrichment. Take, for example, my exit from Palestine in 1970, and my insistence upon always maintaining a distance after that between my practice of poetry and the national question in the broadest sense. I have been fully conscious that I was putting into question my myth and that I was doing that because I was not comfortable. And I thought, at a certain moment, that I had succeeded in untying myself, assuring that no one would demand answers from me anymore to questions pertaining to public order.

For more than thirty years, I haven't lived in Palestine, but far from altering the myth, my distance, in fact, has nourished it. The reason for that is that people here remain convinced that I have not abandoned them and that, even if I have been away, my voice has remained theirs in all places. They began then to follow my voice from one country to the other, as if my wandering was spreading their voice over the earth. Thus, they have pardoned me "the mistake" that was my departure, and I even wonder if they ever perceived it as such. The welcome that has been accorded me upon my return shows that people never believed in the "prophecies" of the great priests of the literary press who had announced my death when I left. The critics—even before I...