In the month of March we come to the obsession of memories and
the plants grow upon us ascending toward all beginnings. This is the
growing of reminiscence. I call reminiscence my ascent to the
Zanzalakhttree. Thirty years ago, I saw by the sea a girl and I said:
I am the waves. She receded in recollection. I saw two martyrs listen-
ing to the sea: ‘Acca comes with the waves. ‘Acca departs with the
waves. They receded in remembrance. Khadija leaned toward the dew
and I burned. Khadija! Do not close the door! Nations will enter this
book and the sun of Jericho will set without ritual.
O country of prophets: Come to your fruition!
O country of planters: Come to your fruition!
O country of martyrs: Come to your fruition!
O country of refugees: Come to your fruition!
For all the pathways in the mountains are extensions of this song. All
the songs in you are extensions of an olive tree that swaddled me.^69“Yawm al-ar,” (The Day of the Land 1976) gathers its register from songs,
speeches, reminiscences, recapitulations, land images, and incantations. The
human and the inanimate exchange places easily, and the massacred five girls
are the mirror and the land. The land exchanges place with words, and words
get their potency as an embodied land. The poet’s register derives its power-
ful eloquence from urgency, loss, and a will to survive. Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s
use of juxtaposed sites, stylistic devices like repetition, naming, expectations,
and metaphors as “Five girls conceal a wheat field under their braids,” along
with the story of real girls, who were murdered on that day, sets this
piece apart as a unique poetic experimentation. The poem perpetuates its
total effect through memory and recollection, for the murdered recede into
memory as martyrs, but they are also more so for their association with waves.
The speaker responds like waves to incantations that carry the image and
the voice of the girls. All transfigure into a poetic carnival that defies death
and extinction. This mode of writing, whereby the metaphorical and the
metonymic coalesce, would receive further validation in due time, and writ-
ings of critics and poets would soon recognize the need for this writing to
accommodate, in long poems, a complexity that may be hard to express other-
wise. This combination has roots in tradition, but it gains in momentum and
power in this instance as the poet conjoins actual scenes and vicissitudes with
metaphoric accentuations.^70 This particular use of mixed genres is no less
effectively engaged in multivoicing than poetic dramatizations that allow
enough space for poets to involve a large number of characters and from dif-
ferent discursive sites to compete for ascendancy. Poetry is no longer the
monopoly of the privileged or even the well-educated, for the street itself
operates with its own languages to influence, and even decide, the course
of events.
POETIC DIALOGIZATION