Reading Mahmoud Darwish: A Polemical Note
Some years ago, I read Darwish's famous poem "Identity
Card," thinking of how we seem to need plastic and passes, ink, paper and photographs
----legitimate or forged documents ---to move through and across geopolitical
territories. Is it not strange that we
require inscriptions to authenticate our flesh, our blood and bones, our
cognitive activities?
"Identity Card" is a finely executed act of
self-fashioning, proof of what and how symbols signify. In Darwish's case, the signifying and significance
are apparently anti-Zionist. It is the
trace of an Arab, a Palestinian who sends words as weapons of self-defense into
real and imagined space. As luck would
have it, I had written "I Didn't Ask to be a Palestinian" before I
read "Identity Card." I was
not under his influence in the poetic appropriation of identity, despite the
empathy that links his poem and mine.
Links matter. The joy of linking
informs what I think of his epic lyric " The 'Red Indian's ' Penultimate
Speech to the White Man" from If I
Were Another. Trans Fady Joudah. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009. I say with due caution that this
poem is superior to "Identity Card" as an aesthetic critique of "the ideology/ of
madness." One of my paternal
great-grandmothers was no more named "Red Indian" than her husband
was named "Negro." It is a
truth, acknowledged by the cosmos, that in their pathetic love/hate affair with
symbol and substance, human beings are damned to rarely see what is uncertainly actual. I suppose the very best
poets on Earth do blacken our eyes and our minds to help us see better.
The illegal, alien entity that calls itself "the white
man" is at one with the bogus entity that calls itself "the black
man" and other diversely mixed and
thoroughly raced and gendered entities
in America in forgetting what/who decimated indigenous peoples and continues to rape
and violate the Earth that belongs to
them and to us. Darwish, thousands of
miles away from the Father of Waters, knew "the stars/are illuminated
speech…if you stared into them you would read our story entire:" I salute Mahmoud Darwish for helping me to
remember a few things which #ultimately matter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 23, 2016
