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<\/a><\/p>\nWith this collection of Najwan Darwish\u2019s poetry \u2014 beautifully translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid \u2014 The New York Review of Books has made available to English-language readers the work of one of Arabic literature\u2019s biggest new stars.<\/p>\n
Darwish, born in Jerusalem to refugee parents, had his first collection of poetry in his native language published in 2000, when he was just 22. Since then he has been named one of the Hay Festival Beirut\u2019s \u201cbest 39 Arab authors under 39\u201d and his work has been translated into at least 15 languages. It\u2019s an impressive record.<\/p>\n
Nothing More to Lose, as the collection is titled, amply demonstrates why Darwish has received such acclaim. A selection of poems written between 2000 and the present day, the works contained in this slim volume are pugnacious, bitterly angry, tender, witty and sharply intelligent.<\/p>\n
Many are highly political. Where the classic Palestinian resistance poets \u2014 Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and their comrades \u2014 sought to describe and depict Palestinian culture and their people\u2019s oppression, and to present often nostalgic or romantic views of the society they remembered or aspired to, this new political poetry is in your face, and often cynical.<\/p>\n
After almost seventy years of Nakba (the forced dispossession and displacement of Palestinians that began in 1948), he seems to say that the dreams are harder to sustain. The questionable attainments of the political struggle up to now are skewered in \u201cLiberty,\u201d in which Najwan Darwish notes that the \u201cbarefoot Liberty\u201d of classic French revolutionary iconography \u201ctramples the people beneath her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Damning<\/p>\n
The most damning words come, perhaps, in \u201cPleading Before History,\u201d where we meet \u201cthese elderly lawyers\/\u2026 still striving to defend our case.\u201d Darwish portrays them as utterly impotent men who \u2014 in their dogged refusal to make themselves heard, or to say anything worth hearing \u2014 it is hard not to equate with current political leaders:<\/p>\n
Despite their words still not being understood in the assembly rooms
\n\u2026
\ndespite their prolonged absence from the reality that keeps turning a cold shoulder to their dreams
\ndespite our continued discontent, our weariness of their short sporadic speeches that seem like seas drowning on dry land\u2026
\n\u2026
\nThese elders have washed their hands of reality.
\nGrim humor<\/p>\n
Maybe such clear-eyed harshness is the result of growing up in Jerusalem, a city brutally sliced in two, where constant Israeli encroachments \u2014 physical, legal, administrative \u2014 continuously change the rules for Palestinian inhabitants. The ways in which this leaves them dangling is, it seems, best evoked through grim humor:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be banished from being
\nbecause I\u2019m partial to the void
\nI\u2019ll be banished from the void
\nfor my suspect ties to being<\/p>\n
In particular Darwish uses, to vicious effect, the imagery of the three monotheistic faiths, especially Christianity, with its varied and ambiguous roles in Palestine\u2019s history and culture. Reflecting on the way in which his home city has been torn apart by politics and the demands of competing faiths, he writes:<\/p>\n
We stood on the Mount
\nto raise a sacrifice for you
\nand when we saw our hands rise empty
\nwe knew that we were your sacrifice<\/p>\n
Right to anger<\/p>\n
And on the winter 2008-09 bombing of Gaza, he offers excoriating words, condemning not only the killers but those who talk, exploit or fail to act. This is a Palestinian voice which refuses to tailor itself to the desires of audiences who want to hear about steadfastness and valor, and demands instead the right to be angry, and to decide for itself who its enemies are:<\/p>\n
\u2026there are two types of people:
\nthose who cast their suffering and sins
\ninto the streets so they can sleep
\nand those who collect the people\u2019s suffering and sins
\nmold them into crosses, and parade them
\nthrough the streets of Babylon and Gaza and Beirut<\/p>\n
But \u2014 with the inevitable comparison with his namesake \u2014 we also find that Najwan Darwish can take the personal and use it to open up huge political issues. Where Mahmoud Darwish\u2019s \u201cmother\u201d figure baked the sweet-smelling bread of lost, happy memories, Najwan\u2019s is a less stereotypical, more complex figure:<\/p>\n
\u2026 this woman I never failed to disappoint: I was not martyred in the first intifada, nor in the second, nor in the third\u2026
\nAs she reads, her orthodox imagination crucifies me with every page\u2026<\/p>\n
That is not to say that the nostalgia and the deep-rooted appreciation of Palestinian history and culture aren\u2019t still there; Darwish is far too intelligent a writer to resort to slogans and stock images. He well knows that the \u201cpolitical\u201d points he makes are all the more ravagingly poignant because they are set in contexts which are beautiful, heartfelt and\/or evocatively melancholy.<\/p>\n
In \u201cIdentity Card,\u201d for instance, Darwish opens with:<\/p>\n
Despite \u2014 as my friends joke \u2014 the Kurds being famous for their severity, I was gentler than a summer breeze as I embraced my brothers in the four corners of the world.<\/p>\n
He then goes on to emphasize the connections between Palestinian culture \u2014 and oppression \u2014 with the histories and experiences of other peoples, from Armenians, Amazigh and Aramaeans to someone \u201cimmersed in springtime in the gardens of Shiraz, and Isfahan, and Bukhara.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the title poem combines the bitter anger of \u201chear the houses sliced open\/ in the village of Lifta\u201d with the limpid, wistful but sophisticated beauty of:<\/p>\n
listen like a fish
\nin a lake guarded by an angel,
\nhear the tales of the villagers, embroidered
\nlike kaffiyehs in the poems
\nhear the singers growing old.<\/p>\n
In the end, though, it is a dark, edgily modern vision with which Darwish presents us. The flickers of beauty which the world offers us are, it seems, ephemeral and quickly lost to the past, and any victories we might hope for from struggle are equally fragile.<\/p>\n
This spirit is embodied in a brief poem, the title of which asks the famous question usually attributed to Adolf Hitler about the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 \u2014 \u201cWho Remembers the Armenians?\u201d<\/p>\n
I remember them\u2026
\n\u2026
\nYou, murderer, who remembers you?<\/p>\n
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with the Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She is the author of a biography of Leila Khaled and of the Bradt Guide to Palestine and co-author, with Sharyn Lock, of Gaza: Beneath the Bombs.<\/p>\n
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