This relatively small book deals with not only one of the greatest modern Arab poets but also one of the potentially most problematic issues of his poetry, namely, the issue of contingency. From the beginning of his poetic career, Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was aware of this issue. He was deeply committed to writing poetry in support of his Palestinian people and against all injustices they suffered at Israel's hands, but he also wanted his poetry to remain lyrical and earnestly dedicated to absolute truth and human ideals.
Khaled Mattawa is a highly awarded poet writing in English who, most recently, has been named a 2014 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. He is a competent scholar of Libyan origin, a noted translator of Arabic poetry, and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan. In this book, he offers a lucid, sustained, and perceptive literary analysis of some of Darwish's major poems. The seven chapters follow the development of the Palestinian poet as he lived through the evolution of his nation's political problem with Israel. While discussing this contingency affecting the poet, Mattawa successfully brings out the aesthetic elements of Darwish's poetry.
Although he does not mention using reception theory or any other literary theory for his analysis, he speaks of how one of the earliest and most popular of Darwish's poems, “Identity Card,” was received differently by Arabs in Israel and Arabs in the Arab world: the former received it as an expression of defiance to Israel and the latter as an articulation of pride in being Arab. In his study, Mattawa shows how the clear political contingency of Darwish's later poetry was in line with the committed literature (adab al-iltizam) of social realism zealously published in the Arab world in the 1950s onward. He cleverly demonstrates how Darwish gradually became the spokesman of his people—a poet committed to fostering a collective consciousness among them, to helping them develop an empowered subjectivity and not to give in to despair, and to demythologizing Israelis and communicate with them about their harsh deeds against his countrymen and about the resilience of the Palestinians.
Doing this, Mattawa analyzes Darwish's art in his poems. He notes how Darwish uses the pronouns I, we, and you to create identification with suffering Palestinians, never mentioning the names of Palestinian victims in his early poems but holding them as symbols of the nation enduring the travails of Israeli occupation. He studies how Darwish's imagery, metaphors, and personae are used to represent ideas for transforming and empowering Palestinians. For example, he analyzes Darwish's love poems, where the beloved female is Palestine, and he shows how connected to the land this love is, in contrast to the proclaimed Zionist love based on excavating history and excluding others. As Darwish's inamorata is inaccessible, Mattawa shows how the poet invariably expresses the ever-living hope of attaining her. He also shows Darwish's deep knowledge of the Bible and Qurʾan in his analysis of poems like “al-Hudhud” (The Hoopoe), “Hajar Kan‘ani fi al-Bahr al-Mayyit” (A Canaanite Stone in the Dead Sea), in order to demonstrate the poet's view of the necessary coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians living on the same land.
Mattawa also discusses the change in Darwish's poetry after leaving Israel in 1970–71 and asserting the aesthetic elements in his poems without abandoning Palestinian issues. Considering Darwish's poems that were written in France after major heart surgery and other notable achievements, Mattawa explains that Darwish began to insert himself in myth in order to embrace reality: “The poet earns authority through the works that endure beyond their context and that continue to provide a renewable philosophical, existential, and political outlook for his reader” (158–59). In discussing “Halat Hisar” (State of Siege), Mattawa shows Darwish's concepts of peace and Palestine as “a place for continuous and rewarding contemplation of the human condition” (167).
Mattawa demonstrates that the political contingency of Darwish's poetry has been transcended while being embraced, his achievement being—as many critics acknowledge—in John Bailey's words, the creation of a poetry that is “wholly contingent and yet makes of that very circumstance its own power” (The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature—Essays (1962–2002), W. W. Norton, 2005, 373).
Apart from errors and inconsistencies in transliterating Arabic words, names, and titles, Mattawa's book is an insightful and well-documented study of Mahmoud Darwish. It is a welcome contribution to understanding this great poet of Arabic literature and an outstanding paradigm for future studies.
