https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0815-738X
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ABSTRACT
In the years following the Bandung Conference of 1955, poetry that captured the “voice of the people” became a strategy of the project of Third-Worldism. Mahmoud Darwish (b. 1941, Birwah, d. 2008, Houston) was one of the poet-intellectuals who identified his poetry with this strategy, and with the importance of putting the Palestinian “voice” in conversation with other struggles. Though understood as a national poet of Palestine, reading his 1964 Awrāq al-Zaytūn (Olive Leaves) in the parallel context of Third-Worldism helps to understand the role of poetic genre in this era’s debates about popular language, and sheds light on the transnational commonalities of post-Bandung anticolonial poetry. Analysis focuses on two poetic genres that Darwish adopted in the early 1960s—genres designed to capture this voice of the people. Reading his work in this light gives insight into hitherto unexplored facets of modern Arabic metapoetry, and why the dramatization of speech became the primary mode through which the “voice” of the Palestinian people could be captured.
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Notes
1 Darwish, “Sawt al-Jazaʾir,” 22. All translations are mine unless otherwise.
2 See Nassar, “Looking Out.”
3 The discursive fields in which these concepts operated have historically overlapped, meaning that they were translated into one another even as they were positioned as ideological opposites. Thus, Khaled Mattawa’s view of Darwish as a multazim poet coexists with Yoav di Capua’s argument that iltizām “gradually slipped into the traitorous trap of self-referential commitment to commitment.” Similarly, it is how we can make sense of Maha Nassar’s insistence on the influence of Soviet socialist realism on Darwish’s poetics alongside interpretations of his poetry as modernist––if by modernism one means, as scholars like Salma Jayyussi do, “technically innovative.” Grounding the analysis of Darwish’s 60s poetry in the conventions of emergent genres allows us to arrive at an understanding of the work that is not overdetermined by these debates. See Mattawa, Mahmoud Darwish, chap. 1; Di-Capua, No Exit, 252; Nassar, “Looking Out”; Jayussi, “Modernist Poetry in Arabic.”
4 Jean Sénac, “The Sun Under the Weapons.”
5 For an account of the creation of a Soviet-aligned Third-World literary field, see Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, chap. 2.
6 There is no dearth of essays and articles that describe the diction of Darwish’s early poetry as “simple” without seeking to historicize it and it in conversation with global anti-colonial poetic currents. Most recently, Khaled Mattawa has claimed that the simplicity of Darwish’s early poetry can be attributed to his adherence to the dictates of adab al-iltizām: “Ambitious as it may be, poetry has to be written in ways that simple folks can still understand.” In my view, the postulation of this link requires further examination. Mattawa, Mahmoud Darwish, 31.
7 For an account of this discursive shift, see Versteegh, Arabic Language, chap. “The Creation of Modern Standard Arabic.” For a review of the role of state institutions created during the nahḍa and during the era of Pan-Arabism in idealizing fuṣḥā as a standard language, see Brustad, “Diglossia as Ideology.”
8 See Di-Capua, No Exit.
9 al-Jadīd 9 (1961), 52. Translation by Khaled Furani appears in Silencing the Sea, 41.
10 Nowak and Zimny, “Joseph Stalin’s Statements,” 68. According to Masha Kirasirova, Stalin’s articles about language were probably excerpted and collated by members of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS pre-1958; SSOD post-1958), or the Informburo, working together with academic institutions.
11 The theorist Néstor García Canclini understands proposals like this one as movements in the dialectic of folklorization that the formation of all national cultures implies. From then, we can argue that processes of cultural or linguistic standardization are met by a form of folklorization, which appears as a solution to the problem of what to do with elements that are deemed inadequate for the expression of modern identity: they are promoted as artifacts, as merely charming songs, and evacuated of all social and political utility.
12 As Kees Versteegh has studied, since the nineteenth century––which is to say, since the reintroduction of Arabic as the official language of Arab countries––there have been calls for the simplification of fuṣḥā. This episode should therefore be understood as the reactivation of an anxiety indelibly tied to the articulation of modern Arab identity. Versteegh, Arabic Language.
13 It is worth making a note about poetic meter as an added strategy of containment. Darwish was aided in his quest to sustain the illusion of a representational link between his verse and the “voice of the people” by the burgeoning shiʿr al-tafʿīla (free verse) movement. In the immediate aftermath of the nakba many Palestinian poets remained faithful to the classical prosodic practice and employed diction drawn primarily from the corpus of classic and neoclassical poets. However, despite his distance from the vernacular, already by the early 1960s Darwish was beginning to experiment with inconsistent rhyme patterns and a variable number of feet per line. The result was, as Khaled Mattawa describes it, a modern poetic verse line that “exhibited a proximity to the vernacular poetry and evoked a sense of exuberance and youthfulness rather than the somber authoritativeness of classical Arabic poetry.”
14 Jubran, “The Image of the Father in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish,” 80.
15 A prominent example of this tendency is Khaled Mattawa’s examination of the poem in Mahmoud Darwish: A Poet’s Art and His Nation, which serves primarily as an opportunity to relate the history of the poem’s composition, its transformation into a nationalist anthem, and Darwish’s ultimate refusal to read the poem in public after 1971. See Mattawa, Mahmoud Darwish, chap. 1.
16 Harlow, Resistance Literature.
17 For a comprehensive account of the philosophical roots of Kanafani’s conception of resistance literature, see Holt, “Resistance Literature.”
18 Siskind, “Genres of World Literature.”
19 Resistance Literature, 39.
20 Fakhreddine, Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition, 16.
21 For a comprehensive account of colloquialism/conversational poetry as a form of committed poetic realism, see Fernández Retamar, “Antipoesía y poesía conversacional.”
22 Dalton, El turno del ofendido.
23 Dalton, El turno del ofendido.
24 Darwish, “ʿAn al-shiʿr,” 76.
25 By the time that Darwish joined the ICP, the party had begun to feel the influence of non-Soviet Marxisms; through the routes of Cuba, Vietnam, and other anticolonial struggles, currents of Marxist humanism gained wider popularity throughout the 60s. Under the influence of these currents, the “voice of the people” came to be imagined as a form of superstructural intervention that could transform the social world itself. The emergence of Third-Worldist humanist ideas about speech as material action are thus essential to understanding why projects of cultural resistance were prioritized alongside armed struggle across the Third World during the early 60s.
26 Darwish, “Dawawin,” 24.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Darwish, “Raʾy fi shiʿrina,” 39.
30 I take “the creation of dramatic personae” as a more precise translation for what Darwish means by tashkhīs in his writings on poetic realism.
31 Badawi, “The Recoil from Romanticism.” See also ʿAsfur, “Aqniʿat.”
32 ʿAsfur, “Aqniʿat.”
33 Darwish acknowledged his debt to Hikmet in several interviews. See Darwish, Beydoun, and Wazen, Entretiens sur la poésie, 100; Darwish, La Palestine, 23, 165. Many thanks to Robyn Creswell for these references.
34 Darwish, “Nazim Hikmet,” 7–8.
35 Han, “Nazım Hikmet’s Afro-Asian Solidarities,” 301.
36 Darwish, “Aurès,” 91.
37 Ibid, 92.
38 Ibid, 93.
39 Darwish, “Aurès,” 95.
40 Ibid, 98–99.
41 Darwish, “Anashid Kubiyya,” 108.
42 Articles about the Cuban Revolution appeared frequently in al-Jadīd throughout the 1960s. A text by Fidel Castro on the Cuban revolutionary party was even translated into Arabic for the same issue that featured Darwish’s article on the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Cairo.
43 Darwish, “Anashid Kubiyya,” 109.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid, 111.
46 Neruda, Canto General, 40.
47 Darwish, “Anashid Kubiyya,” 112.
48 It is well-known fact that Darwish read Neruda, and that Neruda was published in the pages of al-Jadīd; see Nassar, “Looking Out.” But the history of translation of Canto General offers little insight into the question of when this particular poem was translated into either Hebrew or Arabic.
49 Darwish, “Anashid Kubiyya,” 118.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid, 119–120.
52 Ibid, 120.
53 Mahler, From the Tricontinental, 8.
54 Ibid.
55 Guillén, “Crónica,” 2.
56 Darwish, “Bitaqat Huwiyya,” 5.
57 Creswell, “Unbeliever in the Impossible,” 70.
58 Ibid.
59 See Creswell, City of Beginnings, chap. “The Origins of the Arabic Prose Poem.” See also Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem.