He Made a Homeland of Words

Salman Masalha

He Made a Homeland of Words

(Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008)

"My homeland is not a suitcase and I am no traveler," Mahmoud Darwish wrote in an attempt to give poetic expression to the Palestinian tragedy. But it seems that after he decided to up and leave Haifa of his own accord in 1970, eventually joining the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization, he wandered between airports and "sat on suitcases" more than any other Palestinian did.

His first departure from Palestine took place in the year of the Nakba ("The Catastrophe"), like the rest of the Palestinians. This exile didn't last long, and he returned as a boy with his family, among a group deemed "infiltrators" by the state, to Birwa, his birth village, only to discover that the village had been destroyed and no longer existed. And thus the young Darwish joined the band of "present absentees"-people who hadn't been in the country when the first census was taken.

The meaning of the term watan (homeland) is narrow in Arab culture, confined to the borders of the village. Therefore, Darwish discovered upon his return that he had come back from exile in Lebanon to a new kind of exile: "I had been a refugee in Lebanon and now I was a refugee in my own country," he wrote on the return to the village that was no longer, to the "lost homeland." That, in effect, is the common thread woven through Darwish's entire body of poetry throughout the years.


He went to school in Deir al-Assad, a Galilee village not far from the ruins of Birwa, his lost paradise. In those years, his teachers hid him from the police, because as an "infiltrator" he was illegal in the eyes of the enforcers of the new Israeli law.

As the years went on, Darwish began looking for an outlet to express the complexity of his life in a country that had changed its visage. He found his way to the Arabic-language press of the Israeli Communist Party, and his star as a poet quickly rose. After the war of June 1967, not only were the two sides of Jerusalem connected, but Palestinians on both sides of the border were joined as one group with a fresh wound. Even the neighboring Arab world suddenly discovered an Arab-Palestinian minority, whose members had been forgotten in parts of Palestine and who had become citizens of the State of Israel.

Darwish felt suffocated in the country, and wanted to aim higher, stronger and farther. He aspired to reach the Arab spotlight, beyond Haifa, in the capital cities of the Arab world. And thus, after he left in 1970 and was received abroad with open arms, he found that scores of spotlights were turned on him. But as the years passed and the dreams of the liberation of Palestine grew more distant, his remorse over his hasty departure from the land, his personal homeland, began to eat away at him. He settled in Lebanon and wrote poems about Beirut. But the Lebanese, who were embroiled in their own wars with the Palestinians, weren't happy to haveone of them, albeit a popular poet, writing about Beirut. He later explained to Halit Yeshurun in an interview that they told him, "'This isn't your city.' They said I was a stranger. I felt temporary."

Following the First Lebanon War, Darwish and the rest of the PLO in Lebanon were uprooted, first to Cyprus, then to Tunisia. From then on, terms like "here" and "there" began to appear frequently in Darwish's poems, part of his new search for belonging. "I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here," he wrote in the collection "Fewer Roses," becoming submerged in his memories: "I come from there and I have memories / Born as mortals are, I have a mother / And a house with many windows / I have brothers, friends / And a prison cell with a cold window-/ I learnt all the words and broke them up / To make a single word: Homeland" (from "I Come From There," translation by Fady Joudah).

From this feeling of foreignness in exile, Darwish began to make his way to his true homeland: "I love to travel / to a village that never hangs my last evening on its cypresses." But he knew that his way back wasn't a bed of roses: "I will have to throw many roses before I reach a rose in Galilee" (translations by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche)

It was no coincidence that Darwish chose the name "Al-Karmel" for the literary quarterly he edited over many years of exile-in Beirut, Cyprus and eventually Ramallah. Though he had left the Galilee and the Carmel, his "private" geography, in search of glory in Arab capitals, he continued to carry his small homeland on the wings of metaphor.

In more honest moments, he would reveal his true feelings (not just the slogan) regarding his real homeland, which he kept under lock and key. He admitted in the interview with Halit Yeshurun that he wouldn't want to live in Gaza, that he didn't like Gaza and that Gaza wasn't his homeland. But it wasn?t only that Gaza felt like exile: So did Ramallah, where he settled after the Oslo Accords. Again, he felt he was living in exile in a "political homeland." As he told Adam Shatz in an interview with The New York Times in 2001, "I had never been in the West Bank before... it's not my private homeland. Without memories you have no real relationship to a place." With these words, "the Palestinian national poet" exposes the problematic nature of belonging to the Palestinian homeland, but he evades an explanation of what his real homeland is.

These kinds of utterances never found their way into interviews with the Arab press. The homeland is a slogan touted by many, but no one tries to pick it apart, discuss its deeper significance or indicate its limits and what it symbolizes in the private and collective consciousness of the Palestinians and of the Arabs in general. Arab mass media treated him like a symbol surrounded by an aura of sanctity. Therefore, a real discussion of those kinds of questions seemed like the desecration of something holy.

"Record! I am an Arab"

Against his will, Darwish turned into a Palestinian symbol, from both a poetic and a political perspective. It was hard on him, and he tried more than once to free himself from the shackles of the narrow Palestinian niche that other Arab poets, envious of his success, designated for him. The masses, as is their nature, look for symbols, and the masses loved him. Moreover, Arab culture has always, even before the advent of Islam, looked to its poets to be the spokespeople of the tribe. And suddenly in the midst of the Arab masses appeared an ideal spokesman for the Palestinian tribe, the Arab tribe-standing tall before his enemies: "Record! I am an Arab," he said defiantly in one of his early poems.

And thus, consciously or not, Darwish turned discourse on the watan into his poetic profession. "He said to me on his way to his prison: I will know when I am released, / that speaking in praise of the homeland / like speaking dispraise of the homeland / is a profession like any other profession," he wrote in "State of Siege." And indeed, being a skilled craftsman, Darwish wrote extensively about the homeland. He even described his native land as being made of words, "lana balad min kalam"-we have a native land of words (from "Fewer Roses").

On some level, admiration of Darwish was a form of permissible defiance of Arab regimes, insofar as discussions of Palestine in the Arab world were the only shelter for dissidents. These repressive regimes were essentially throwing a bone to Arab citizens by letting them wave the "flag of Palestine," on the condition that they not go near the rulers themselves. The masses loved Darwish's inferior poems, not the better poetry that he crafted in his last years. The masses would often request that he read one of the poorer poems, and he would refuse, attempting to free himself from the constraints of those works, the constraints of the symbol that so burdened him.

Being faithful to classical Arabic poetry, Darwish rightly continued to adhere to the tradition that gave weight to the musical aspect of poetry, the aspect that differentiates it from prose. But he tried in recent years to soften his strict adherence to metrical poetry. To his credit, he never rested on his laurels, but rather persisted in his quest for his own poetic expression. Darwish?s poetry flowed out of him like a fountainhead, although, in my opinion, he sometimes had a penchant for the flowery superficiality of irritating metaphors that lacked poetic foundation. For example, "Saqf al-sahil" (The ceiling of the horse's neigh) and other such kitschy metaphors that sound like they came off the assembly line of a factory for plastic toys.

Darwish didn't like criticism (though who does?), and my own criticism, published in Arabic here and abroad, did not spare him in recent years. Darwish looked for love at any cost-from both the regime and the people, and there is no greater contradiction. In his desire to have his cake and eat it too, he never took an unambiguous position based on a moral foundation, and he always tiptoed. On the one hand, he didn't want to upset the regime, any regime-not the corrupt Palestinian regime on which he was dependent for many years, and not the regimes in the rest of the Arab world. On the other hand, he didn't want to upset the Arab masses, whose populist love he needed like oxygen.

However, let's put aside the populist aspect that surfaced in his pamphlet poems-poems that were published under the influence of events, moments of anger and justified emotional outbursts. Darwish is a wonderful poet who discovered early on in his artistic path the hidden secret of true poetry. He gave his readers moments of happiness, albeit melancholy happiness, as is befitting great poetry.

Now, at the end of his poetic wanderings, he will remain, for many years, the ultimate poetic "present absentee," both in the Palestinian canon and in Arab poetry as a whole.

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Published in English: Haaretz Books Supplement, September 2008

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The Cat, the Cross and the Cream

Salman Masalha

THE CAT, THE CROSS AND THE CREAM

Is the Israeli cat trying to guard the cream? Or are we going to get lost in Nazareth? And what is the connection between all this and the people that is vanishing as the end of the millennium approaches? Are you confused? This is a sign that you are on the right track.

Once upon a time in the land of the Galilee, in the time before the state of Israel, there was a village where the children of Ismail, Christians and Muslims, lived side by side, or, as we like to say here - in peace and tranquillity. The years passed, each man under his vine and his fig tree, until one day someone in the Christian neighborhood began to excavate foundations for an additional house for his growing family. He dug and dug, until he suddenly found that he had exposed an ancient mosaic decorated with a cross and depictions of figures from the New Testament. The entire Christian neighborhood came out to see this discovery. The heads of the community decided that instead of building a house on the site, they would keep on digging until the whole archeological site was uncovered. Thus they unearthed another cross and another Virgin, and the celebrations got underway in the Christian neighborhood. Sheep were slaughtered in honor of the discoveries, and the sounds of rejoicing reached the homes of the Muslims, whose neighborhood was at the other end of the village.

When the Muslims heard the sounds of rejoicing coming from the direction of the Christian quarter, they decided to send duly appointed representatives -- the mukhtar and other notables -- to find out the reason for the sudden jubilation. The delegation set out, and when they came to the gates of the Christian quarter, they were greeted by distinguished representatives of the Christians. The latter conducted the delegation to the site and explained to the Muslims that the cause of the rejoicing was the discovery that the village had been a Christian site since ancient times, and as proof of this they displayed the antiquities that had been uncovered. The Muslims looked, and were awe-struck, yet gradually a veil of unhappiness descended on their faces. After feasting with their Christian friends, they returned to the Muslim neighborhood, where they related what they had beheld. After some discussion, a decision was taken in the Muslim quarter that the following morning they too would begin to excavate in their neighborhood. They dug and dug but they found nothing. For seven days the excavations continued, and then they dug for another month or more and still they found nothing. Despair began to trickle into their hearts. But, as they were trying to decide what to do next, all of a sudden everything changed. One of the diggers came running to the mukhtar and told him that they had found proof that the village belongs to the Muslims. Everyone rushed to the site and they were overwhelmed with joy. That night, the festivities began. They slaughtered sheep. Sounds of singing filled the air and their echo was heard in the Christian neighborhood on the other side of the village.

From a distance, the Christians heard the joyful noise coming from the Muslim neighborhood and decided to send representatives to find out what was happening. The priest and a number of other people volunteered to set out as a delegation. They went to the Muslims, who greeted them smiling from ear to ear and invited the Christians to partake of the slaughtered sheep, as the customs of hospitality require. After the feast was over, the Christian delegation inquired as to the cause of the rejoicing. The Muslims did not want to answer in words because they knew that what the eye sees is far more telling than what the ear hears. They conducted the Christian delegation to the site, where the mukhtar stood and announced to the Christian delegation: Here we have discovered that the village has always been a Muslim village. When the priest asked: And what have you found? The mukhtar, without blinking, said: Behold. Here we have found Muhammad's cross.

Is there any connection between Nazareth and Islam? And will the millennium bring bloodshed? At the beginning of the century that is about to end, a French scholar named Casanova published a study of the beginnings of Islam. His book was entitled Muhammed et la Fin du Monde. Among other things, Casanova noted that Muhammad's new religion, Islam, which was born in the Arabian Peninsula, came into the world under Christian influences. Muhammad, according to Casanova, had a very strong sense that the end of days was imminent, and therefore preparations must be made.

I myself have vague memories of the city of Nazareth. At the end of the 1950s I got lost in its lanes. In the mind of a little boy who had come from the village, the visit to the developing city of Nazareth was an unforgettable urban experience. I and a friend, another little boy of about my age, walked hand in hand through the maze of the market, when suddenly my family disappeared from view. Thus we found ourselves lost among the crowd that filled the market on weekends. Many years have gone by since then, and even today I sometimes feel like I am still looking for something in Nazareth, but it seems that I have not yet found myself there. In the Nazareth of today, on the brink of the millennium, the people of Nazareth are looking for something else there. In the Nazareth of today, they are looking for their bones, not for themselves.

Now, we are but a footstep away from metabolism of the toxic spiritual materials of the end of the millennium. And Casanova, whom I have recently recalled, is also the name of a street in Nazareth. Not far from there, on the road that leads up to the market of Nazareth, stands the Christian Church of the Annunciation from which the streets branch out that lead to the market where I got lost. There, in the open space in front of the church, Muslim activists have taken possession of a piece of land. There, a large tent stood that became an improvised mosque on the grounds that exactly on this spot is the grave of Shihab al Din, a soldier who served in Salah al Din's army, which liberated the holy places from the Crusader conquest. This site has become a source of friction between Christians and Muslims in the city on the brink of the millennium.

To paraphrase the previous story: Have the Muslims at the end of the millennium in Nazareth also found Muhammad's cross? Or is this another sword that is destined to rip the city to shreds and not leave any bit of it standing? The Israeli government, of course, is trying to mediate between the Muslims and the Christians! And in this state of affairs, I cannot be sanguine. Peace in Nazareth is already in the process of being slowly digested in the gut of the Israeli cat that is guarding the cream in Nazareth.

Jerusalem, Autumn 1999

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French: "Le chat, la croix et le pot crème", Qantara: magazine des cultures arabe et méditerranéenne, Nº 34, 1999‑2000

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Salman Masalha

The City of the Walking Flower

Here, on the watershed of the winds, between reality and imagination, between the utopia of the celestial spheres and the doom of the underworld, stands Jerusalem. The city is a pile of stones that separates sea from sea, tomorrow from yesterday, the green from the desert, and, above all, the sacred from the profane. It is like a broad cosmic-political terminal, the starting line for the competitions in which participants race to other places, other times. Here in Jerusalem, and in the four corners of the earth, the descendants of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad jostle one another on the track, taking part in an Olympics of the evil spirit that knows no rest. They are all poised, crouching to the ground in awe of the holy, waiting for the starting gun in order to defeat gravity.

When I was a child, Jerusalem was inextricably linked in my imagination to the apocalyptic day of the great dash forward, from which there is no return. The scenario, including the instructions issued by the official sitting on a raised platform in the dome of the sky, was determined in advance and minutely detailed. In the play of the End of Days, mortal actors have no freedom to improvise. They must play the roles determined for them, with complete faith and no reservations or questions, such as what if, maybe, nevertheless. According to the scenario, the Jews are destined to destroy the Muslim mosques in Jerusalem. Because of the support the primarily Christian West gives the Jews and the Jewish state, the Muslims will retaliate by rising up and destroying the Christian churches. The West’s reaction will be swift: it will gather its armies to conquer the K’aba. And thus, in an uncontrollable chain reaction, a great world war will break out: the Apocalypse. Eventually, the Messiah will come and bring a new world order, entirely different from the one we have now. As a child, I never imagined fate would call me to rub shoulders with the inhabitants of this city, nor did I conceive of the possibility of living in what was destined to be the eye of the storm at the End of Days.

In the year 1690 there also lived someone who thought the End of Days was happening before his lightless eyes. No one knows his name, and chances are no one ever will. A man from Aleppo, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, arrived that year in Jerusalem. He prayed there, strolled through its markets, met its people, and as is the habit of many pilgrims, put his impressions down in writing. One day he went out to a hill west of the city walls. The hill served as a Muslim cemetery, and the graveyard still exists in the center of Jerusalem in the Mamilla quarter. His guides related that here, at the edge of the cemetery, someone once dug a grave and, within the grave, found a Muslim man sitting and reading the Quran. The man from the grave addressed him and asked what had happened, whether the Hour, the End of Days, had come. The digger, frightened by what he saw, fled for his life. However, after a while he returned to the place, accompanied by other people, and found no trace of digging or the man in the grave.

Nearly two centuries later, someone else thought the End of Days was near. In 1874 a Dutch woman came to Jerusalem; the citizens called her the Dutch Princess. She decided that it was not enough to dream. She wanted to anticipate the practical needs of the Redemption and the End of Days. Therefore, she embarked upon the construction of a building that was to serve as a huge hostel meant to accommodate the 140,000 Children of Israel who would remain alive at the End of Days. The place she selected was none other than that same plot west of the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla. The man from the grave in the previous story is of the Children of Ishmael, but had his luck been with him, he might have been able to lodge in a five-star hotel as the “Shabbes goy” (a Gentile who performs household tasks prohibited to Jews on the Sabbath) for the surviving Children of Israel. The Dutch Princess ran out of money and never completed her project, which shows that even in the business of the End of Days, the earthly marketplace reigns.

Independence Park now stands on that site. Like many of the gardens in the Holy Land, it represents the Garden of Eden and, by extension, the expulsion. So, throughout the years, the people of Jerusalem, the living and the dead, dwell there in expectation of the Day of Judgment. Jerusalem is slowly borne above the earth’s surface, as if the stone of the city were not the same stone, as if the wind were not the same wind, and as if the people were not the same people.

Jerusalem is unlike other cities. It has laws of its own. For example, the laws of physics do not apply here. The city of Jerusalem is borne above the earth’s surface by supreme metaphysical forces, and any attempt to descend with it to the firm ground of reality—to the street, the café, the noise of the buses, the municipal garbage—leads to the crashing of dreams soaked in the holiness of the End of Days and fantasies sprinkled by divinity. Therefore, the city is famous for its syndrome, the Jerusalem Syndrome. Anyone who strolls through the streets is likely to encounter people whose dreams have all shattered on the ground of reality in this strange city. Where else in the world is there a city with a syndrome all its own?

Jerusalem is best kept in the cellars of the imagination. It is recommended, and perhaps desirable, to write about it, especially poetry. The city does right by poets. It provides them with an abundance of color, images, and metaphors. However, it is not a good idea, perhaps it’s even dangerous, to break it down into small details. Reality could hit you in the face, and dealing with this will be difficult. All of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are strangers, yet she does not welcome strangers. Here, strangeness has a hierarchy. I, too, am a stranger in Jerusalem, and it does not welcome me either. But what am I, a mere mortal, compared to the many days through which so many mortals have passed?

During the 1870s, about a hundred years before I came to Jerusalem, a man from Damascus named Nu’man al-Qasatili came to the city gates seeking progress and openness. The Damascus of those days looked to him like the epitome of backwardness, so he set out for what he imagined to be the city of lights. He did not find the city of lights, of course, but he immortalized his impressions in a chronicle of his journeys through the provinces of Greater Syria. He noted that there were about forty thousand inhabitants in the city at the time. The natives were a minority in Jerusalem. The rest were a motley of strangers: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The majority of the city’s inhabitants had arrived there from distant places, beyond the sea and desert. Today the population of Jerusalem is more than four hundred thousand souls. The inhabitants of today are new strangers, or the descendants of yesterday’s strangers. The strangers of today are the fathers of the strangers who will be born here. Gradually, it becomes clear that strangeness is an inseparable part of the city. The strangers who have settled in the city enjoy when strangers come to visit. They wait expectantly for the visitors because they provide a significant part of their income, as al-Qasatili says. Those who have already settled in Jerusalem do not love the other strangers who have already settled here, but all of them want the strangers’ money, that is to say the tourists, because that is how they earn their living.

Who builds whom? Does man build a city in his image, or is it the city that builds the man? This question may seem simple, but with respect to Jerusalem, it is not. Cities built along the coast take their character from the sea. They face the sea and draw serenity from it. The cycle of the waves beating endlessly on their shores pervades them with a sense of life without end. In Jerusalem, too, there is a cycle, but it is the cycle of a volcano, and you never know when it will explode. There is also a sea near Jerusalem. But in this Jerusalem sea, you always lie on your back with your eyes looking up toward heaven. You needn’t lift a finger in order to float because Jerusalem’s sea always pushes you upward. You can sink only into hallucinations of other places and other times. Any attempt to stand with your feet on the ground, to be in reality, demands a supreme effort, and in many cases it demands a lot of tears, and not always because of the salt of the Dead Sea.

As I told you, I was not born in Jerusalem. I came there in the seventh decade of the twentieth century to join the congregation of strangers that inhabit it. Jerusalem is ultimately a city of eternal strangers. The connection to the city is not a connection to place, but rather a connection to time. The connection is not to stone, object, or anything earthly, but rather to moments, feelings, experiences. And Jerusalem, as opposed to many cities, has too much time, too many moments, and too much past. And with so much past in Jerusalem, it is hard to see the future, because the future of Jerusalem always pulls toward the past. The people of Jerusalem walk through it with their eyes stuck in the backs of their heads and their faces eyeless. This is perhaps another reason why the people of Jerusalem frequently fall down in the street. Every movement in it, even the smallest, leads to a wound. Every stone you turn over in this city could be hiding a scorpion because, as the tradition has it, Jerusalem is a golden chalice full of scorpions. The Jerusalem of yesterday, today, and presumably tomorrow sits on the watershed of the winds, between the desert and the mountain. It is a mixture of Hebron and Warsaw. Two seas battle for it, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and the Dead Sea to the east. A sea of life and a sea of death, exactly like its history. Though it seems, more and more, that it is turning its back to the West and not dwelling in the East. It pulls towards the past, to Creation. Too much past has passed in Jerusalem, and in a place where the past is so dense, it is hard to see the future.

And at that very place in Mamilla, al-Nabulsi writes, he saw something wonderful. He noticed a plant the size of a finger, green in color and with a flower. The plant had two arms, four legs, and a small red head with a white tuft on top. It also had a reddish-pink tail with vertebrae, and this plant was alive and walked on its legs. Hope hides in al-Nabulsi’s legend. The day will come when not only the Torah will go forth, but the flowers of Jerusalem will begin to walk freely on its earth. I have been living in Jerusalem for a number of years now, and I pass by this place often. Every time, I examine the ground, hoping to see that walking flower. However, in the meantime, I make do with other walking flowers, which I have been seeing for years. They have arms and legs, but not their own. These are the arms and legs of the girl who makes the rounds at night, selling flowers in the bars of Jerusalem.

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