In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is a synecdoche for the wounded: the part stands for the whole.
The poem is addressed to a woman, the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, who had written a bittersweet poem in the aftermath of the resounding defeat of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel. Ironically, the victory of Israel—and its occupation of Arab lands including the West Bank—made it possible for Palestinians to write, albeit under Israeli subjugation.
The English translation by Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton renders only 11 of the stanzas into English, but they preserve the tone of the original.
Despite the defeat of the regular Arab armies, and possibly because of the defeat and the occupation of the Palestinian lands invaded by Israel, a resistance movement came into being in the aftermath of that war during the late 1960s. Palestinian fighters were willing to sacrifice their lives for their homeland, and they engaged in combat. The French writer Jean Genet visited Palestinian camps about that time and wrote Le captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love), portraying the guerrilla warfare the Palestinians were waging to gain their national rights.
The poem is an apostrophe, a poetic address to an absent Fadwa Tuqan, whom the poet refers to as “sister.” The poem promises steadfastness while admitting of the Palestinian tragedy. It uses motifs of sacrifice and redemption, of martyrdom and resurrection, echoing the best-known Palestinian who died on the cross to save the world—Jesus Christ—without naming him.
In stanza 1 the poet assures his addressee that there is no need to remember Palestine, as Palestine has become one with the Palestinians:
“Mount Carmel is in us / and our eyelashes the grass of Galilee.”
Here, Darwish responds to Tuqan’s poem in which she evoked the memory of beloved ones in the manner associated with classical Arabic poetry. The poet assures his interlocutor—who had addressed her poem Lan abki (I Shall Not Cry) to Palestinian poets of resistance—that captivity under occupation has not broken them:
“Before June we were not fledgling doves / so our love did not wither in bondage.”
On the contrary, the poet asserts, it is precisely this captivity that brought about reversals and transformations. Martyrdom was turned into a feast and songs have become weapons:
“And we came to know what makes the voice of the nightingale / a dagger shining in the face of the invaders. / We came to know what makes the silence of the graveyard / a festival . . . orchids of life.”
Stanza 14 is one of the most cited verse lines of Darwish. It takes a stand against leaving one’s country and treating it like a commodity that one can take with him or her. Darwish asserts the love bonds with the homeland:
Ah my intractable wound!
My country is not a suitcase
I am not a traveler
I am the lover and the land is the beloved.
The poet ends his poem by contrasting what the occupying forces strive for and what the Palestinian poet does. The enemy fabricates false archaeological claims to exclude the Palestinians from their historical land. The Palestinian poet, however, counters these claims by planting trees and singing of his love to his country. While history is falsified by myths of exclusivity, the Palestinians express their devotion to their homeland in cultivating it and singing for it.
Bibliography
Abou-Bakr, Randa. “The Dialectics of Emergence and Withdrawal: Pre-Exile Phase.” The Conflict of Voices in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus and Mahmoud Darwish. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag, 2004, 21–54.
Darwish, Mahmoud. “Yawmiyyat jurh falastini.” Diwan Mahmoud Darwish. Vol. 1. Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1979, 524–562.
———. “Diary of a Palestinian Wound.” In Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Salma K. Jayyusi, 200–202. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Tuqan, Fadwa. “Lan abki.” Al-Layl wa’l-fursan. Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1969, 48–56.
Categories: Arabic Literature, British Literature, Literature, Palestinian Literature, War Literature
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