3 Identity versus cultural erosion:Alienation at home and treatment of
natives as strangers in their homeland shows more in poetry that takes as
subject not only repression, but also foreign occupation. The French experience
in Algeria and Morocco provokes a poetics of disenchantment, opposition,
resistance, and native solidarity. The alienating force of occupation works
culturally on the dynamics of discourse and provokes a counter emphasis on
every minute sign of identity and identification, along with the register of
anticolonial struggle. While the emerging text is one of postcolonial vigor,
its poetics of alienation navigates between an indigenous culture and the
present predicament. The following is by the Algerian Assia Djebar:
I have no home
I wander through the oasis, fires illuminating the night
O my dead tree my vanished shadow
Do you remember the palm trees
The camel and her milk.^78The poem nationalizes the struggle while locating it in rustic terms of strong
indigenous and traditional connotations where there is no boundary between
the speaker and the fighter. The occupiers make the land their own, exiling
the natives morally, whereas the poem enhances the presence of rustic images
to belie their use of force to undermine and annihilate national solidarity.
In an ironic twist, the speaker’s complaint of dislocation invokes larger
nationhood that intensifies in response.
4 Exile internalized:Exile becomes a state of mind, a mood, whenever, as
in the case of the Palestinians, the exiling power deploys its might not only
to confiscate, repress, and colonize lands but also to uproot national cultures,
resources, feelings, and lifestyles. The emerging counter discourse varies in
registers and topoi. In a poem by Darwlsh, already discussed, soul, place,
thought, wine, poetry, and longing are exilic sites, so much so that the poet
exchanges places with the partner, the homeland, and the song. “What shall
we do without exile?” asks the poet in another poem, for all that is left of the
two in the poem belongs to each other, along “with long nights of gazing at
the water.”^79 Although this remaining sense grows into a poem inscribed
with an inventory of defiance and resistance, its markers are those of love.
Darwlsh’s poems of exile reinstate moods and agonies in a textual terrain that
uncovers the sham of coercive ideology.
On another front, relocation may not end the exile’s agonies, but intensify
them whenever the poet is reminded of the perpetual infliction of suffering on
one’s people. In her poem “In San Diego” the Iraqi woman poet Laml‘ah ‘Abbms
’I‘mmrah (b. 1927) says as much of her experience as exile in the United States:
The beauty of San Diego
reminds me of LebanonENVISIONING EXILE