Who Am I Without Exile?
Said left, Darwish right
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”
— Edward Said
“Poems can’t establish a state but can establish a metaphorical homeland in the minds of the people. I think my poems have built some houses in this landscape.”
— Mahmoud Darwish
This May 15th marks the 72nd anniversary of the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba. For some, it is the 72nd anniversary of the establishment of Israel, a state built on the ruins of Palestinian cities and villages. In 1948, more than 700,000 people were displaced either to Gaza or the West Bank, or to the neighboring Arab states, many still stateless. Some could stay inside what is now Israel by emigrating to cities with a Christian majority like Nazareth or infiltrating back when things calmed. However, those Palestinians are not treated as full Israeli citizens in the “democratic Jewish State.” Other refugees made it to Europe and the Americas. Yet none of those who became refugees or their descendants, like me, could return or even visit their ancestral homes unless they had foreign passports. This means that I cannot visit Yaffa, my family’s original hometown, as a Palestinian. I would need to become an American citizen, say, in order to get permission to visit the home my family inhabited for countless generations.
As of 2019, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that about 6 million Palestinians live in Arab countries, and about 700,000 throughout the world. Meanwhile, 5 million live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 1.53 million live within the green line holding Israeli citizenship.
This brings the total to 13 million Palestinians in the whole world.
Mahmoud Darwish and his family were among those refugees who could sneak into Palestine, then named Israel, through the Lebanese border one year after the Nakba. They returned to the Acre area and settled in Deir Al-Asad, having found their village Al-Birwa razed to the ground. They and other Palestinians who stayed were called "present absentees."
Darwish left Israel in 1970 to study in the Soviet Union. When he joined the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in 1973, he was banned from re-entering Israel.
“Who am I without exile?” Mahmoud Darwish observed in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Was Darwish attempting to identify with exile as his fate, without which he could not be the Darwish he was? Or was he perhaps saying that exile is part of the human condition? That being cut off from his natural home had transformed the entire world into his homeland? That the whole world became his Home?
Home, in a sense, is about memory. I sometimes ask myself: “Would it be possible for one to create their memories in different places?”
Exile offered Darwish a new realization about the world and the meaning of Home. His exile keeps one eye looking back to the lost home, Palestine, and another eye wandering and searching for a world for all, where no one would be forced to struggle for their identity, and fighting for one is unimaginable. Darwish hated flags. He said that he would make socks from a flag.
Edward Said once criticized Yasser Arafat for recognizing Israel and being ready to sign for peace without fully addressing the refugee issue, among other fundamental issues.. Said thought that Arafat’s only aim was to see a Palestinian flag raised on at least one meter of Palestinian soil.
Both Said and Darwish lived in exile from the time they had left Palestine until their untimely deaths, in 2003 and 2008 respectively. Throughout the world, both were celebrated and hailed during their lives. Their work has kept them central even after their deaths. While Said settled in the U.S. to teach at Columbia University, Darwish moved between Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Tunisia, and Paris. He lived between Amman and Ramallah from 1995 until his death from complications following heart surgery in a U.S. hospital. He said he chose to settle in Amman “because it was close to Palestine, and it was a quiet city and its people are kind.”
The word “exile” in Arabic, “Manfa,” is derived from the verb “Yanfi,” which literally means “To make a statement negative, as opposed to positive.” When somebody is thrust into exile, he is in a way negated. Exiles lose so many rights we take for granted. They risk becoming non-persons.
In a long interview conducted by the Israeli poet and critic Helit Yeshurun in 1996 in Amman, Darwish stated that “It is possible to describe everything that I’ve written as the poetry of an exile.” Darwish continued, saying that “Exile has contributed greatly to the development of my writing.”
Darwish left his village of Al-Birwa in 1948 at the age of six:
“In my situation, there are no essential differences between the story of my childhood and the story of my homeland. The rupture that occurred in my personal life also befell my homeland. Childhood was taken from me at the same time as my home. In 1948, when this great rupture of ours took place, I jumped from the bed of childhood onto the path of exile. I was six. My entire world turned upside down and childhood froze in place, it didn’t go with me. The question is whether it’s possible to restore the childhood that was taken by restoring the land that was taken.”
Handala left, Naji Al-Ali right
It is true that Darwish grew up in exile, but his childhood remained in Palestine, waiting for him to return. This very notion reminds me of Naji Al-Ali’s Handala’s drawing of a small boy who turns his back to the viewers, clasping his hands behind his back, refusing to grow up. Al-Ali said that Handala would remain 10 years old, the age he was when forced out of Palestine in 1948, and that Handala would never grow up until he could make his return to Palestine. Sadly, Al-Ali was assassinated in London in 1987 and the barefooted Handala, dressed in worn-out clothes, has never grown up. He will remain a tragic Peter Pan forever.
In his poem entitled “Who Am I, Without Exile?” ¹ Darwish says:
A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water
binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war…
Nothing
carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing
and not promise. What will I do? What
will I do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?...
We have become two friends of the strange
creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened
from the gravity of identity’s land.
Darwish believed that neither war nor peace, neither nostalgia nor the promise of return, would bring him Home. He escaped the gravity of identity. The poet was equally ambivalent about going home and wishing to stay in exile. Exile had become his eternal makeshift home. Despite his relentless yearning for familiar people, landscapes rivers, palm trees, etc., exile had become his inescapable world. He chose to remain a stranger to his native land, to others, and to himself.
Darwish supplanted these familiar consolations and markers of identity with a country of his own creation — one made up of words and poems — which needed no land, borders, flags, or guards to build or protect it.
In “A Rhyme for the Odes,” ² Darwish wonders:
Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but have no answer.
I am my language, I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.
I am my language. I am words' writ: Be! Be my body!...
I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where
my body joins the eternity of the desert.
Be, so that I may become my words.
No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,
a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins
before me…
This is my language, a necklace of stars around the necks
of my loved ones.
Granted permission to visit Haifa for only four days, Darwish returned to Palestine in 1995 to attend the funeral of his colleague, the celebrated Palestinian novelist and writer Emile Habibi, author of The Pessoptimist. Darwish concluded the 1996 interview by saying, “Exile is so strong in me, I may bring it to the land.”
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1 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Butterfly’s Burden’ translated by Fady Joudeh.
2 Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Unfortunately, It Was Paradise’ Selected poems translated by Munir Akash, Carolyn Forché, Sinan Antoon, Amira El-Zein.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Gaza. He is the founder of the Edward Said Public Library, and in 2019-2020 was a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University. He gave talks and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Arizona (w/ Noam Chomsky), and the American Library Association conference. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Solstice, Arrowsmith, Progressive Librarian Guild, among others. Mosab is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, forthcoming from City Lights Books in April 2022.