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Exile Poetry

1) Poetry of exile often expresses sentiments of loss and separation from one's homeland due to political conflicts or occupation. It explores themes of estrangement, marginalization, and disjointedness from one's origins. 2) Mahmoud Darwish was a prominent Palestinian poet who spent time in exile in Lebanon and France after his hometown was occupied and demolished by the Israeli army. His poetry captures the rambling of a mind at war and deals with the loss of home and national identity. 3) Darwish's poem "Passport" suggests that Palestinian identity cannot be defined by documentation, as nature and the land represent an inalienable connection that transcends political borders. His work aims to preserve Palestinian

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Muntaha Fawad
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256 views2 pages

Exile Poetry

1) Poetry of exile often expresses sentiments of loss and separation from one's homeland due to political conflicts or occupation. It explores themes of estrangement, marginalization, and disjointedness from one's origins. 2) Mahmoud Darwish was a prominent Palestinian poet who spent time in exile in Lebanon and France after his hometown was occupied and demolished by the Israeli army. His poetry captures the rambling of a mind at war and deals with the loss of home and national identity. 3) Darwish's poem "Passport" suggests that Palestinian identity cannot be defined by documentation, as nature and the land represent an inalienable connection that transcends political borders. His work aims to preserve Palestinian

Uploaded by

Muntaha Fawad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Exile Poetry

Poetry ‘fighting’ and ‘resisting’ the ‘dominant repressive narrative’ propagated by the colonizer
with available weapons in wars, battles and other forms of foreign occupation. In a way the poet
becomes the language, the tongue of his people, his tribe.
Characteristics:
 Sentiments of loss of place—of a separation from one’s permanent home and of the
stability of identity.
 Political reason for this separation, be it war or repression (conflict of interests). In other
cases, exile is a self-imposed response to the politics that made the poet’s home seem less
homelike.
 Poetics of exile means estrangement from the origin—disjointedness, disparity,
decentralization, and marginality.
Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian, hometown occupied and later demolished by the Israeli army).
Exile in Beirut, Lebanon and Paris, France. Earned the Lannan (Established by Patrick Lannan)
Cultural Freedom Prize & the Lenin (named after Russian revolutionary leader) Peace Prize
(Soviet Union). Just as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under
house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song.
Darwish poetry characteristics:
Rambling of a mind at war, mind dealing with loss. Arabic poetic forms, modern sensibility,
lyrical, haunting and passionate
Theme: Arab Identity - sharing the same language, history, geography, values, and inheritance.
Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora,
he is the voice of the fragmented soul.”
Poem Passport is from Olive Leaves (1964). Images of Sword, hands and light as Sense of
Resistance. Imagery of bird, wheat fields, water and the land = Nature which is Free, can’t be
confined or controlled.
Passport: Darwish suggests that the trees and the valleys know who they belong to. Darwish
concludes that his Palestinian identity cannot be defined by a piece of paper, a document. This
poem highlights the Israeli government’s attempts to define Darwish’s identity and separate him
from his homeland by taking away his passport. In response, Darwish draws on nature to
demonstrate that his Palestinian identity does not depend on a document.
*His poetry preserves the national memory of Palestine’s invasion by intersecting the collective
and personal memories. Loss of home, loss of identity. Israeli state politics have pursued a policy
of erasing Palestine politically, socially, and even physically from the world map. Palestinian
people are still being subjected to dislocation, imprisonment and alienation. Palestinian poetry is
political since it is born of resistance and a desire for freedom.
Said (2013) states that Palestine as a homeland is a “site of an ongoing conflict for control” (p.
26) Same as Kashmir & Afghanistan.
Objectification/ subjection of victims: Sharbat Gula, whose piercing portrait on the cover of
National Geographic in 1985 put a face on war-torn Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War.
The photograph is taken by American photojournalist Steve McCurry near the Pakistani city of
Peshawar.
In Identity Card (a manifesto for the resistance movement), the symbolic identity of an
ordinary ‘Palestinian’ who is a victim of ‘Zionist oppression’ being interrogated by an Israeli
official.
Darwish identifies himself as a kind of prisoner whose family is impoverished under the
colonizing state of Israel although he is living in his homeland. Darwish presents the homeland
as a physical place that could be reclaimed once the colonizers are dismissed. By dismissing the
colonizer, Darwish claims the homeland as an exclusive right for the natives.
The loss in this sense is that of belonging, which takes different forms: the physical, including
land and property, and the metaphorical, such as memory and language. Darwish states that his
poetry has accepted the responsibility of documenting the Arab memory “to prevent those who
colonized the land from colonizing memory” (as qtd in Abu Eid, 2016, p. 60). In other words,
Darwish uses the textual homeland to preserve Arab memory and identity from colonial
distortion. Hence, the textual homeland embeds the chronicles of the Arab national memory as a
form of resistance to the Israeli attempts to erase the “Arabness” of Palestine and Palestinians.

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