Mahmoud Darwish and my political alienation
Imaginary Living Room
Imagine a living room. There's a couch and a TV on the wall. On the coffee table is whatever book(s) I've been reading recently. There's whatever cold or hot beverage you want on a coaster on the table because in this imaginary living room we use coasters. It's good to see you, friend.
Author's note: My original intent for this first issue of my new newsletter was to write about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and how his work has impacted me as I have lived the last few months as a spectator to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hands of their colonizers. I wrote the following paragraphs as the frustrated output of several weeks of futile writing and drafting and re-drafting. I was not sure if I was going to send it, and then this morning I watched the censored video of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation this morning outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. Though he will undoubtedly be cast as a mentally-ill radical of no consequence in the following days in the press and public discourse, it is clear if you watch the video that he had a strong sense of moral clarity about what he was about to do.
The impact this video and this act of defiance has left of me is something I don't know how to express. I feel Aaron Bushnell was committing this ultimate act as a way to say, we must speak up. We must not live in silence. We cannot live full lives if we are always ignoring the annihilation of others that is paid as the cost for our living this way. So, I am casting aside my doubt about my little writing here because I know I am speaking from my own moral center. Even if it is not the full academic effort I wanted to achieve, I know I felt relief putting words down and making my thoughts known.
I don't really know how to conclude this preamble so I'll just say that there will be a free Palestine, there will be an end to colonialism and empire and American empire, there will be a day people in all cages will be free, and until that day comes, until all of us are free, none of us are free.
As of today (Feb 25, 2024), the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has lasted for 142 days. I wanted to write an essay here about my feelings of political and spiritual alienation during the last several months, where I have watched images and videos of people livestreaming their own ethnic cleansing with seemingly no end in sight for the violence. I wanted to write about how I do not know how to have normal conversations right now with people because all throughout the day I am thinking about Gaza, and what it means to pay taxes to send bombs and war machines to the Israeli occupying forces, what it means to be represented by a government who's official position is "there's nothing I can do" while it closely works and coordinates resources for the occupying Zionist forces, what it means to be told to protest and vote when my only voting candidates are people who all fall in line to reject a ceasefire, what it means to call my representatives and get canned responses back about "self-defense" and the "unfortunate" nature of civilian casualties in what they otherwise call a just war despite the myriad and frequent protests.
I wanted to write about Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who was displaced as a child during the first Nakba, who's home was razed to the ground by settlers, who's family returned to that same homeland years later only to be labeled as illegal refugees because there was no documentation of their existence because they fled when their home was being destroyed and thus missed the internal Israel-administered census, who was later exiled for decades as punishment for his advocacy for Palestinian liberation. I wanted to write about Mahmoud Darwish, who's book, Mural, I have leaned on heavily as an almost spiritual outlet for my own pathetic angst and anger. I wanted to beautifully interweave quotes and sections of his poetry to tell a coherent story about how the agency and power of his voice is saving me from despair, is reminding me that stories and poetry are powerful tools we have against the hegemonic narrative of colonialism and imperialism. I have read so many of Darwish's words, so many more than I had before this year, and there is still so much more to learn of his work and of Palestinian art, poetry, writing, and identity. I wanted all of this to come together into an essay about agency and faithlessness, that there is no identity I wish to have within the structure of American imperialism and that I seemingly must have one anyway, that I seemingly must pay my taxes and vote for Democrats and read the Times and go to my job, even when my body and mind is always turning back to Gaza, not wanting to see but needing to bear witness. (There is the alienation, then. The total separation of my ethics and morals from my actions and my material impact in the world.)
I say this not to despair. Every day I must refuse the shame of despair. I must actively fight the instinct to hide in resigned sighs about the state of the world. I must organize, and if I can't do that, then I must donate, and if I can't do that, then I must write, and if I can't do that, then I must read, and if I can't do that, then I must speak, and if I can't do that, then I must endure. I must feel with the wholeness of my heart the truth of my place as a spectator to this violence, that I paid the price of admission to the theater and I must not turn away now. I must humble myself to existing in this alienation, in this small way that I can understand a fraction of a fraction of what exile means.
I write this because every expression I make outwards of my feelings inwards brings relief. If I speak, I can hope to find some other way of existing in this world that demands so much silence from me.
I wanted to conclude my essay by assuring myself there was a way to exist in opposition to this false life, and that it meant refusing to repeat the same myths and stories about my place in the world and how to continue as the little worker bee of this churning of industry and human suffering and death. In reality, I do not know how to draw any conclusions. As I will show in the passages below, even Mahmoud Darwish does not know what the conclusion will look like for the survivors of this catastrophe.
For now, I will have to endure.
In hopes of a radically different future, I must endure.
I want to end this short essay with a few small passages from Mural that I think say more than what I can say. It is hard to offer larger quotes from Mural as it is one long 40 page poem with many cycles of themes and motifs to pull the reader in. I have chosen some specific sections that I think can stand alone for an essay like this, but they do not do his words justice.
First, a passage where the author declares his desire to live, and specifically, to understand the conditions that have brought illness and starvation to the world around him:
I want to live...
I have work to do on deck
not to save the birds from our famine or sea sickness
but to study the deluge close-up
And after?
What do survivors do with the ancient land?
Do they take up the same story?
How did it begin?
What's the epilogue?
No one comes back from the dead to tell us the truth...
Second, a passage about the source of poetry that I love:
From where does poetry come?
From the heart's intelligence
from a hunch about the unknown
or from a rose in the desert?
The personal is not personal
and the universal is not universal
Third, a reprise of the theme in the first passage, here the author issues up his dream for his after-life. When I read these lines out loud I usually end up crying:
One day I'll become what I want
One day I'll become a thought
that no sword or book can dispatch to the wasteland
A thought equal to rain on the mountains split open by a
blade of grass
where power will not triumph
and justice is not fugitive
Finally, an entire poem that I think says everything I am trying to say. This is titled, I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater, and is translated by Fady Joudah. (Source: The Poetry Foundation)
I have a seat in the abandoned theater
in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall
the final act without longing ... not because of anything
other than that the play was not written
skillfully ...
Chaos
as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography
of the spectators’ impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts
and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses
sitting in our seats
I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon,
and wait, unless you’re the author!
—No
Then he asks me: And you are you the author?
—No
So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral
hero to escape from an obvious fate
He says: No hero dies revered in the second
scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would
revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend
what the iron has done to my brothers
So I say: It is you then?
He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked
witnesses
I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator
He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no
one is neutral here. And you must choose
your part in the end
So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?