Mural
Mural, by Mahmoud Darwish, contains the long poem, “Mural,” and Darwish’s final poem, “The Dice Player.” This vital reissue, translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami, was first published in 2009, a year after the poet’s death. Like much of Darwish’s oeuvre, comprising more than 30 books, this work explores themes of watan, Arabic for homeland, exilic consciousness, and the poet as visionary prophet: “There is no nation smaller than its poem.”
Echoes of Edmond Jabès, Aimé Césaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Sufi poets Rumi and Hafez inform Darwish’s singular voice, shapeshifting between dreams, reality, birth, and oblivion. The speaker addresses, apostrophically, Death, Being, the Heart, the Real, Friend, and female figures, in verse haunted by mortality and dispossession: “I am that absence / The fugitive from heaven.”
Born in Al-Birwa, a Palestinian village, in 1941, Darwish was the national poet of Palestine, whose Declaration of Independence he wrote in 1988. Darwish’s topos is place, and he traces the spiritual perils of unmooring, oneirically:
where now is my where?
Where is the city of death
Where am I?
In this no-here …
no-time
Mural conjugates the subject of Palestine, which remains unnamed, into universality, interrelating being, rootedness, and language: “My language is a metaphor for metaphors / I don’t speak or indicate a place […] I am from there […] I am from what was or will be.” These oracular poems testify to the co-constituency of world and word: “I’m scared for my language […] is this how language dies”?
Darwish’s search for terra firma is inextricable from fragmentations of self and speech (“I have no say in my life / except that I am,” he writes, and “Who am I to say to you / what I’m saying?”). The poem “Mural” was written after serious heart surgery, and Darwish read “The Dice Player” in Ramallah a month before his passing. These memento mori, “a visible message to be read by the invisible,” leave behind a bracing testimony of courage in the face of death: “It was by chance / I escaped.”