the poem asks the invader: “But don’t you ever / memorize a few lines of
poetry, perhaps, / to restrain yourself from massacre?”^86 Between this under-
standing of the poetic as primal innocence and love and the valorization of the
poetic word there is certainly ground for more discussion, but the poet is
unconcerned with the old racist theories of proneness to one expression or
another. The word has a power, and its effectiveness materializes in durability
and popular memory. Recollection of this poetry does not entail heterogene-
ity in response, for as the poet’s voice in “Psalm Ten” says, the word becomes
part of a collective memory in times of distress, “Interminable agony / has
brought me back to a street of my childhood / Taken me into houses, hearts,
and stalks of wheat,” only to be turned “... into a controversy / Bestowed
upon me an identity / and a legacy of chain.”^87 Poetry becomes a resort for
sufferers and, paradoxically, for leaders. Yet, this creation that belies passive
succession entails an interaction and a role in identity formation. The poem
becomes a process rather than an end, and even martyrdom evolves as a
dynamic challenge to occupation and invasion of lands and identities. In this
as in the “Speech of the Red Indian,” Ma.mnd Darwlsh draws a comparison
between what is taking place against the Palestinians and the Native
Americans. In both cases, there is indigenous culture that re-inscribes identity
as a detailed landscape and life against the deliberate physical erosion of home
and culture.
These poems lead to a poetic of absence, not only in terms of exile and
dislocation whereby memory re-inscribes the text with landscape markers,
past experience, and poignant intimations as in most Beirut poems and the
ones on the way to Tunisia (1982), but also as a subtext of richness. Anat, the
Palestinian moon goddess, the Canaanite queen of heaven and earth, becomes
in his poetry the archetypal Palestine with her will to rebirth. A symbol for
motherhood and matrimony, she is his catalyst against the onslaught of an
aggressive masculine and racist colonial discourse. In the “Phases of Anat,”^88
her stay in the underworld leaves all in a void. The questioning note that asks
for her coming to put an end to emptiness does not duplicate the urge of
cyclical death and rebirth of the Tammnzlmovement, as the context is in
keeping with the poet’s consistent equation between the mother and Palestine.
The idea does not negate ancestry or specific landscape mapping,^89 but
signifies an underlying theme that imposes a vision on his latest poetry.
Motherhood and nationality coalesce into a song that becomes the epitomic
poetics for Ma.mnd Darwlsh. The present betrays enormous disparity between
Palestine and discourses of aggression, and between motherly love and invad-
ing white masculinity. The poetic of the song, the gypsy celebration of life
and love, becomes his only language to enjoy life and to speak of agony.
Emotive disintegration under the impact of exile and departure from the
fountains of inspiration render poetry divided between two languages: an
artificial one that is dry and repetitive and a popular one of songs. “Exile has
established two separate languages for us: / Slang for doves to understand and
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION