the word in a cultural context; and (4) a poetic of absence to speak of exile
and the human condition. Identity grows first as an affirmation against
occupation and challenge, as his early poems demonstrate. In early poems
like “Al->uzn wa al-gha,ab” (“The Sadness and the Anger”) and “Biymqat
huwiyyah” (“The Identity Card”) (1964) language is imbibed with a national
spirit to rhetorically enforce an ultimate rebirth against heavy odds, “We have
been carrying sadness for years, but no dawn ever shows / And sadness is a fire
that its flame can be put out in delays / yet the wind can inflame it more /
and you have the wind, why do you have to bind it? And you have no other
weapon.../ other than meeting the wind and the fire.../ in a confiscated
homeland.”^80 The outcome of the 1948 debacle turns into a site of destruc-
tion where inhumanity reigns under deceitful slogans that target people,
Jews as well as Arab Palestinians. Subsequent regressions intensify a sense of
loss that builds on actual details of identity erosion. In his poem “On a
Canaanite Stone at the Dead Sea” the poet speaks in his own voice where there
is confession, and revolt at what is taking place. There is also bitter recogni-
tion of the speaker’s little acquaintance with his national landscape and life,
“I’ve been a stranger to the desert palm / from the moment I was born / into
this crowded mass,”^81 for identity as culture and land was taken for granted
before the shock at its destruction and the systematic erosion of the landscape.
The poem asks the stranger-occupier to act like colonialists and steal what-
ever from this land, but “let me plant my wheat in Canaan’s sacred soil” and
“Leave Jericho under her palm tree” and “don’t steal my dream, don’t steal /
the milk of my woman’s breast / or the ant food dropped in the cracks in the
marble!”^82 Land and landscape assume greater significance as objects of mem-
ory and recollection. In a moment of shock and recognition the speaker takes
cognizance of an ongoing inhuman confiscation and attrition, as both land
and people undergo this erosion. In this global context, affirmative rhetoric
gives way to a dialogic poetics that allows a number of voices and, hence,
comparisons as in “Speech of the Red Indian.”^83 The tragedies of the Native
American and the Palestinian reflect on each other, as they both undergo sys-
tematic erosion. “Time is a river/ blurred by the tears we gaze through,” says
the poet’s persona.^84 A history of “tidings of innocence and daisies” becomes
the target of steel and arrogance where there is no place for primal affection,
“Weren’t you born of a woman? Didn’t you suckle the milk of longing / from
your mother as we did,” asks the American Indian.^85 On the other hand, the
stranger speaks in terms of the colonizer, as the giver of civilization, electric-
ity, and the carrier of the White Man’s burden. The dialogic principle releases
poetry from lyrical monophony and enables it to retrieve complexity without
detracting from its poetic flow. The engagement of the poetic with politics of
native tradition and colonial onslaughts defines poetry as part of this tradi-
tion, for, as usual with the poet, any departure from the song as a traditional
poetic signifier means not only dryness and loss on a national level, but also
cruelty and bigotry on a wider cultural one. No wonder the native speaker in
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION