The Butterfly's Burden

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The Stranger's Bed, the first book in this volume, explores even the most intimate of gestures in imagery resonant with the exile's desire for Palestine: "in your closed up gardens // Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white" yet "I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place" ("Sonnet V"). Yet the range of his work — from the stark social realism of “Identity Card” to the visionary mode of “We Travel Like Other People”— makes him both a figure of Palestinian persistence and proof that Palestinian life is not reducible to victimization and loss. Though many poems in the collection allude to the Israeli occupation of Palestine—or rather, to its consequences—most are not overtly political. But Darwish’s weaving together of selves is not the divine one of the Sufis: rather, it has to do with an irreparable loss of self, and with a yearning for an undefined, and perhaps indefinable, other, who at times seems long lost, at times, just within the poet’s reach. It presents images that set our conscience and imagination free: lapis lazuli, lilac nights, olive trees, birds, moons, bodies of water.

If Darwish and others still long for their homeland, sixty years after losing it, why should we be surprised? They are from the poem “Low Sky” in the latest collection of the wonderful Palestinian poet’s work, The Butterfly’s Burden. In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges. He spent most of his life far from his homeland, living in Lebanon, France, Egypt, and other countries. The Butterfly’s Burden— a collection of his most recent books translated by Fady Joudah into a supple and lush English — The Stranger’s Bed (1998), A State of Siege (2002), and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003) — aptly represents the range of Darwish’s mature style.Reality" can and must be remade; and Darwish, writing from embattlement, knows that to refuse the status quo he must refuse fixity. This potentially discomfiting, albeit powerful, poem is framed by the work we are more used to when we think of Darwish: nostalgic and lovely—love-ly. Keeping things in flux, refusing to let them fall into place as circumstantial givens, is the political act this poetry carries out. The result is a collection of poems that reads as one would ‘read’ a butterfly’s wings; what one encounters is elusive, heart-breaking, wistful, yet hopeful.

He is the author of To See the Earth (2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Instants (chap, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (chap, 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). By reshaping ancient stories, Darwish has attempted to form a bridge between cultures, so that a new version of an old story becomes “a counter-text, a kind of replacement of the original text by a new understanding, thus enabling the reader to confront the canon of the ‘other’ with a newly established or newly affirmed canon of his own. There is no name for what life should be / other than what you've made of my soul and what you make . In this way, perhaps, Darwish’s love poems resemble his previous oeuvre, except the beloved is no longer a cipher for the lost land of Palestine; rather, it is a map to the private geography of human relation. If I had to capture the essence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in one brief passage, these are the verses I would choose.State of Siege,” a book-length poem placed in the middle of the collection is an exception to that, showing an angrier side to Darwish.

Yet, to my ear, some of these poems seem lost in translation, foundering in their gentility, courtly gestures, and spiritualism. While resistance to Israel may be the engine for part of his work, the pain and isolation of exile is the fuel. Poetry is the closest thing to granting a sense of belonging for the poetic voice that poses it as a question.Rather, Mahmoud Darwish is one who often contemplates, and questions, through a myriad of thoughts and images, what it means to be in a state of exile, and what it does to one’s identity. The images and characters are those of war and siege: tanks, guns, bombs, soldiers, martyrs, guards, and mothers grieving for their sons. If in the sonnets, the long lines tend to slacken, in a poem like “The Damascene Collar of the Dove,” the short lines vibrate: “In Damascus:/I see all of my language/written with a woman’s needle/on a grain of wheat” (105). It is also a fragmented diaristic rumination of the psychology of siege — the siege of bodies and consciousness alike.

Best known as the poet of Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish has a poetic range far wider than his politics. If such imagery, for some, might quickly dissolve into anti-Semitism, Darwish asserts that the victims of the Holocaust do not have a monopoly on victimhood, and that the reshaping of myth is intended to remove us from the assumptions we’ve made about them and their “suffocating knowledge,” and to expand the dialogue among us all.A sense of intrinsic mutability becomes not the fear of death, but an engine for survival: "On my ruins the shadow sprouts green". With only exile and no homeland, Darwish has often re-invented ancient myth, as if the reshaping of myth itself might become a new homeland, a “land made of words. Much more than simply a vocabulary for personal isolation, this symbolic oscillation is, as in the oldest poetry, a form of sympathetic magic which enables Darwish to imagine, not a remedy, but a healing: "No blood on the plows.