Mahmoud Darwish - in memory of Edward Said
New York/November/Fifth avenue
The sun, a disc of flying metal
I asked my distant self in the shadows
“Is this Babylon or Sodom?”
***
Over there, at the doorsteps of
A sky-high electric chasm
I met Edward some thirty years ago
When both of us yelled
“Should your past be an experience
make your tomorrow
a meaning- a vision!
Let’s head to our tomorrow
Confident in the sincerity of imagination
And the miracle of the grass!”
***
I can’t recall going to the cinema at night
Yet I heard the ancient Indians call upon me
“Do not trust the horse – or modernity!”
***
No, no victim asks the executioner
“Am I in your place?
Had my sword been mightier than my rose
Would you have wondered if I’d do as you?”
***
That question intrigues a novelist
In a glass-walled office
Overlooking the garden’s lilies
Where the hypothesis is white
Like the novelist’s conscience
When he settles the score with
Human inclinations
“Tomorrow will not be found in yesterday,
so let’s move forward!”
***
…Perhaps progress is regression,
towards barbarism…
***
New York/ Edward slowly wakes up
Plays a tune by Mozart
Runs in the university’s tennis courts
Thinks of the birds’ migration
Across the borders and barricades
Reads the New York Times
Writes his nervous commentary,
Then curses an orientalist who guides a general
Towards the weakness
in the heart of an oriental woman.
Showers and chooses his suit with the elegance of a rooster
Drinks his coffee with cream and shouts at sunrise
“Come and stop loitering!”
***
On top of the wind he walks
And within the wind he knows his identity
There is no ceiling for the wind
No home for the wind
The wind is a compass whose pole
Is the foreigner’s North
***
He says: “I belong there
I belong here – I am not there
I am not here
I have two names that meet and embrace
Two languages – I forgot
which was the language of my dreams
English for writing, its vocabulary tame
But another that comes
from the dialogue of the heavens and Jerusalem
its tone of silver
Yet it does not easily yield
to my imagination!
***
“And what of identity?”
“Nothing but self-defense
Identity is the child of birth
Yet, in the end, is the creativity
Of our own self
There is no inheritance of a past
I am the manifold
Within, is my ever renewing without
But I still belong to the victim’s question
Had I not been from there,
I would have trained my heart to raise,
-over there
The deer of metaphor
So carry your homeland
Wherever you may go-
And be a narcissist if you must!”
***
Exile, is your outside world
Exile is your inner world
“who are you in between?”
“I never define myself
Lest I lose myself
I am who I am and my other self
a duality within the harmony of words and symbols
Had I been a poet I would have said:”
I am two in one
like wings of a swallow
should spring prove late in coming
suffice it that I was its messenger!
He loves a country and leaves it behind
Is the impossible so far away?
He loves migrating towards anything
In free travel among cultures
Those who investigate the essence of humanity
Might find enough seats for everybody
Here, the margin moves forward
Here, the center regresses back
Neither is the East totally an East
Nor is the West totally a West
Identity is always open for variation
Not a citadel or a trench
***
Metaphor slept on a bank of the river
Not for pollution
It would have embraced the second bank
“Have you written the novel?”
“I tried… through it I tried to reclaim,
my image in the mirrors of distant women
who delved into their fortified nights
and said: “We have a world free from text,
No man shall put into words
the woman/the mystery/the dream
No woman shall put into words
The man/the symbol/the star
No two love stories are the same
No two nights are alike
So let’s recount the merits of men and Laugh!”
“Then what?”
“I laughed at my absurdity
and threw the novel in the trash!”
***
/The thinker restrains the story teller in the novelist
The philosopher explains the flower of the singer/
***
He loves a land and leaves it behind
“I am what I am and what shall be
I shall create my own self
And choose my exile
My exile is the backdrop of
A scene from an epic
I defend the poets’ need
For both their tomorrow and their memories
I defend the trees
That birds don
Both as homeland and as exile!
I defend a moon that is still viable
In a poem of love!
I defend an idea that was broken
By the frailty of its creators
I defend a country that was kidnapped
By mythology!”
***
“Can you ever go back to anything?”
Whatever lies ahead drags what lies behind
Not enough time is left on my clock
To engrave letters in the sands.
Yet I may still visit yesterday
As strangers often do,
When they listen in the evenings
To a rustic poet:
[A young girl by the spring
Fills her jar with the cloud’s milk
Laughs and cries when a bee
Stings her heart amidst the estrangement
Is love the pain of the water
Or is it a malady in the mist?
etc… etc… till the end of the song]
***
Then, you may still feel the pain of nostalgia?
A nostalgia for tomorrow
More distant, more elevated and more distant still
My dreams guide my footsteps
My vision lays my dream on my lap as a pet
My dream is reality and imagination,
The child of my will:
We may yet avert
The inevitability of the abyss
“And the longing for the past?”
“A sentiment that doesn’t suit the thinker
save to understand the yearning of the foreigner
To the tools of his absence
As for me, my nostalgia is a struggle for a present
That desperately clings to the future!”
***
“Did you not slip into yesterday,
when you visited the house,
your home in the Talibiyya neigbourhood?”
“I prepared myself to lie under my mother’s bed,
as a child would do when fearful from his father.
I tried to recall the birth of myself,
to follow the path of milk,
on the rooftop of my ancient home
I run my fingers through the skin of absence
and the summertime in the garden’s jasmine,
But reality’s monsters drove me away
From this longing which lurked behind
Like a thief in the shadows!
“Were you scared? What caused your fear?”
“I can’t meet defeat face to face.
I sat at the doorsteps as a beggar
Should I ask the permission from those
Who sleep over my very own bed?
To pay a five-minute visit to my soul?
Should I curtsy to those who inhabit
my childhood dreams?
Will they ask who’s this stranger visiting?
Can I speak about War and Peace
between the victims and the victims
of the victims-
Without an intercepting sentence?
Will they tell me that there’s no room
for two dreams, in a single bed?
***
Neither he, nor I
But a reader wondering
What poetry might say amidst catastrophe
Blood
and Blood
and Blood
in your Homeland
In my name, in your name,
In the almond flower, in a banana’s peel
In an enfant’s milk
In light and in shadow
In the grain of wheat, in the salt jar/
Skilled snipers who always hit their target
Blood
And Blood
And Blood
This land is too small
for the blood of its children
Who stand as offering at the doorsteps of resurrection
Is this land truly blessed or is it anointed
With Blood
And Blood
And Blood
Neither sand nor prayer can dry this blood
Justice in the pages of the holy book
Isn’t enough for the martyrs
To enjoy the liberty of walking atop the clouds.
Blood in the day,
Blood in the dark
Blood in the words
He says: The poem may play host to defeat,
A ray of light glittering in the heart of a Guitar
A messiah on a horse wounded
by the beauty of metaphor.
The beautiful is nothing but the presence
Of reality in the form!
***
In a world devoid of its skies
Earth becomes a chasm,
And the poem, a gift of solace
A trait of the wind, northern or southern
Do not describe what the Camera sees
Of your wounds
Shout, that you may hear your self
Shout, to know that you’re still alive
…and Alive
That life on this earth is a possibility.
Create the hope for your words,
Invent a direction, or a mirage
That prolongs the hope,
And sing, for beauty is liberty
Say: Life that is only defined
as the opposite of death …
Is not a life
***
He says: We shall live, even if life
abandons us to our own fate
Let’s be the masters of words
That shall make immortals of their readers,
As your friend Ritsos used to say
***
He said: Should I die before you,
I leave the the impossible for your care
I asked: Is the impossible far?
“One generation away.”
“And should I die before you?”
“I shall console the mounts of Galilee,
and I will write: Beauty is naught
but attaining that which is suitable.
Now, don’t forget,
Take care of the impossible!”
***
When I visited him in the new Sodom
In 2002, He was resisting,
Both the war of Sodom on Babylon,
And the cancer in his body
He was the last hero of the epics
Defending the right of Troy
To have a share in the story!
***
An eagle bidding his summit farewell,
High up, high up,
Living atop mount Olympus
, atop the summits
May prove tedious
Farewell,
Farewell, poems of pain!
Liberty of a People - Fadwa Touqan
My Liberty!
My Liberty!
My Liberty!
A cry I repeat
With anger’s very mouth
Under the bullets
Within the circle of fire
Inspite of my shackles
I run behind her
Inspite of the darkness
I follow her steps
And I remain
Carried on the tide of anger
Fighting, crying, “My Liberty!”
My Liberty!
My Liberty!
The sacred river
And the bridges
Echo my words
My Liberty!
And the two banks
Echo my words
My Liberty!
The pathways of the angry wind
Thunder, rain and hurricanes
In my homeland
Echo my words
My Liberty!
My Liberty! My Liberty! My Liberty!
Resisting, I shall engrave her name
In the earth
In the walls
In the doors
On the balconies
On the altar of the Virgin Mary
In the Mosques
In the farm roads
On every hill top and every slope
Every corner and every street
Every prison every torture chamber
On the wood of the gallows
Against all the chains
Against the destruction of the homes
Against the flames and fires
I shall engrave her name
Until I see it spread
in my homeland
Growing,
Growing
And Growing
Until it covers every inch of the land
Until the red freedom opens every door
The night escapes,
The light knocks down
The foundation of the fog
My Liberty!
My Liberty!
The sacred river
And the bridges
Echo my words
My Liberty!
And the two banks
Echo my words
My Liberty!
The pathways of the angry wind
Thunder, rain and hurricanes
In my homeland
Echo my words
My Liberty!
My Liberty! My Liberty! My Liberty!
