Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry partakes of different cultural and mythological traditions. We find in his poems allusions to seminal texts from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Persia, and India.
In this poem, the title is taken from an Indian classic on eroticism, The Kama Sutra, written about 2,000 years ago by Vatsyayana. The Kama Sutra is commonly known as a manual of physical pleasures with a description of the different positions of coitus. But Darwish’s poem, while it manifestly deals with an erotic encounter, turns what is physical into a delicate portrait of passion.
The sensuality is there, but also the aesthetics and poetics of lovemaking. The poem is unambiguously sensual and builds up to an orgasmic finale, yet it can be read as the consummation of any desire or longing. The beloved in the poem may be a desired woman, or a homeland to regain, or a dreamt-of Utopia.
The delicate poem uses repetition effectively. The locution “Wait for her” becomes a leitmotif. In the Arabic version, practically every other line of the poem is the imperative “Wait for her!” In the English rendition by Sinan Antoon, about half the 20-some lines open with “Wait for her . . .” This repetition gives the poem an incantatory character, as if it were a prayer in some ancient temple or a spell.
The erotic content of the poem works beautifully with the form, as if the repetitive phrase is a prayer to the beloved and is simultaneously a lover’s sexual thrusts into the body of the beloved. In the ghazal tradition of lyrics, erotic love and devotional mysticism intersect. The great Sufi poems use physical imagery to express divine longing. Thus the poem points to the flesh and the spirit, the erotic and the patriotic—all at the same time.
The poetic diction used by Darwish evokes imagery of Indian miniatures, the exquisite gardens of a Taj Mahal, and the epic passions encountered in South Asian myths and legends. The language is refined and courtly—waiting with “an azure cup,” “among perfumed roses.” Masculinity is implied in identifying patience as princely and knightly: “Wait for her with the patience of a horse trained for mountains, / Wait for her with the distinctive, aesthetic taste of a prince.”
Having created an erotic subtext, Darwish moves to underline the masculine-feminine encounter by identifying the incense as “womanly” and the sandalwood scent as “manly.” When the poet writes, “Wait for her and do not rush. / If she arrives late, wait for her. / If she arrives early, wait for her,” the wording suggests a manual of lovemaking with instructions to the male.
The poem is composed in the form of an apostrophe, where the poet addresses someone and tells him over and over to “wait.” However, this addressee is none other than the poetic persona, the speaker himself; thus the poem is an interior monologue in which the speaking person in the poem is addressing himself.
This reflexivity makes the imperative more moving, as if the speaker is telling himself not to rush and to discipline his passion so that he might achieve a sublime finale with his partner. The reader undergoes the same subtle and disciplined excitement until reaching the blissful ending.
This type of repetition in lyrics is called “anaphora”; it indicates an imitation of thought or action. Shakespeare used it in Richard II (4.1: 220–224) to indicate nostalgia with its obsessive recall of the past. Darwish uses it to create a slow movement as if in a musical composition: “Wait for her to sit in the garden . . . / Wait for her so that she may breathe the air . . . / Wait for her to lift the garment. . . .”
Tenderness overcomes the wild desire in offering her “water before wine,” not glancing at her breasts, “the twin partridges sleeping on her chest,” “touching her hand,” and speaking to her “as a flute would to a frightened violin string.” The final note comes at the end of the poem when the two achieve the blissful moment rendered as “the death you so desire.” Here, as in Renaissance literature, desired death is a metaphor for orgasm and sexual fulfillment.
Bibliography
Darwish, Mahmoud. “Dars min Kama Sutra.” Sarir al-Ghariba [The Stranger’s Bed]. Beirut: Dar Riyad al-Rayis, 2000, 125–128.
———. “Lesson from the Kama Sutra.” In Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, edited and translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché, with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein, 115–116. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Palestinian Literature
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