Tag: Catherine Cobham

Poetry as an act of resistance: A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish

A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read.

A River Dies of Thirst, the last volume of Mahmoud Darwish’s work to be released in Arabic, just eight months before his death in 2008, offers a precious opportunity to spend a little more time with a great poet as he casts a sorrowful eye at his beloved Palestine, and reflects on love, life, time, and memory. But more than anything this collection of poems, reflections, and journal fragments is a meditation on what it means to be a poet. And for him that is a distinctive vision, for Darwish was not only one of the most remarkable and humane poets of our time, but he gave  voice to the Palestinian consciousness and was someone who believed that “every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”

To read this final collection now, more than eleven months into the longest, deadliest sustained attack on Palestinian citizens since the creation of the Israeli state, is to hear that voice of resistance resounding so clearly that it is almost unsettling. So many of the pieces here feel as if they could have been written yesterday, beginning with the opening poem “The girl/The scream”:

On the seashore is a girl, and the girl has a family
and the family has a house. And the house has two windows
.       and a door.
And in the sea is a warship having fun
catching promenaders on the seashore:
Four, five, seven
fall down on the sand. And the girl is saved for a while
because a hazy hand
a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father
Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’
Her father doesn’t answer, laid out on his shadow
windward of the sunset
blood in the palm trees, blood in the clouds

The girl becomes the endless scream, echoing without echo across the land, as an aircraft returns to bomb the house with two windows and a door, silencing her family’s story.

This heartbreaking  image is followed by a series of poems and short prose pieces that speak to war and Palestinian suffering in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. The uncanny timelessness of his poetry betrays the truth: there is nothing new about what we are witnessing today save for the intensity. And as Darwish reminds it, the violence is not just directed at people—it is an attack on the land, on nature, and the memory held in the soil. Consider the olive tree, the venerable grandmother-like figure, “modest mistress of the hillside.” She is spoken of with reverence: “In her restrained silvery greenness is a colour too shy to declare itself openly, a glance toward something beyond description, for she is neither green nor silver. She is the colour of peace, if peace needs a colour to distinguish it.” It is message lost on the occupying forces:

But these soldiers, these new soldiers, surround her with bulldozers and uproot her. They crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air. She did not weep or shout, but one of her grandsons who witnessed the execution, threw a stone at a soldier and was martyred alongside her. When the soldiers left triumphantly, we buried him there, in the deep hole, our grandmother’s cradle. For some reason we were convinced that after a while he would become an olive tree, spiky and – green!

(from “The second olive tree”)

As a late work by a poet who is simultaneously conscious of his timelessness and his mortality, it feels as if Darwish is allowing himself to focus his attention on what is most important to him as he knows, not necessarily that his own end is as near as it would happen to be, but that time, and the heart, has its limits. As such, the themes that recur throughout these pieces reflect elements common to all his work, but are tinged with the melancholy that comes with age and a long life marked by exile and the ongoing occupation of his homeland.

Amid the poems that reference war and occupation directly—the more political pieces—are quieter reflections on the poetic existence, that is, on poetry as a way of being and engaging with world. Darwish is a poet immersed in his environment, the sights, scents and sounds all echoing longing and loss, but now the atmosphere evoked is more ephemeral, his awareness more attuned to the spaces between sleep and waking, in the flickering shadows where words might be found:

Leaves in summer whisper modestly, call out shyly, as if to me alone, stealing me away from the burden of material existence to a place of delicate radiance: there, behind the hills, and beyond the imagination, where the visible equals the invisible, I float outside myself in sunless light. After a short sleep like an awakening, or an awakening like a short sleep, the rustling of the trees restores me to myself, cleansed of misgivings and apprehensions.

(from “Rustling”)

There is also a more direct engagement with the idea of writing  poetry and recollections of his past encounters with other prominent poets, their conversations and interactions. And the two sections of fragments that round out this collection contain many wise observations about the  life, identity, perception and, of course, poetry.

With a total of 127 short pieces—including fully finished poems (both prose poems and verse), commentaries, and assorted observations and aphorisms—A River Dies of Thirst is a collection that may be best read slowly, taking in a little at a time. There is so much beauty in the language and so much to reflect on. It might also serve as a good introduction for those who have yet to hear Darwish’s masterful voice. And this certainly is the time to listen.

A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish is translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham and published by Archipelago Books.

“The city is bigger than a poet’s heart and smaller than his poem”: Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun

We who are strewn about in fragments, whose flesh flies through the air like raindrops, offer our profound apologies to everyone in this civilized world, men, women and children, because we have unintentionally appeared in their peaceful homes without asking permission. We apologize for stamping our severed body parts into their snow-white memory, because we have violated the image of the normal, whole human being in their eyes, because we have the impertinence to leap suddenly on to news bulletins and the pages of the internet and the press, naked except for our blood and charred remains.

—from “We”

There is an eerie and uncomfortable synchronicity in coming to Ghayath Almadhoun’s Adrenalin while, on the TV, a reporter stands against the skeletal structures of the besieged Yarmouk Camp in Damascus, once home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees, now a ghostly battleground where Syrian government forces are closing in on the last remaining Islamic State fighters in the capital region. That is because this devastated neighbourhood is also the birthplace of the Stockholm-based, Palestinian poet whose first collection to be published in English is one of the titles long listed for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. From a part of the world that has been producing poetic visionaries for more than a millennium, Almadhoun offers a powerful twenty-first century testament that reinvents earlier forms and imagery to create a vivid, contemporary lament for the futility of war and the costs it extracts.

I was going toward death when the fighters stopped me. They searched me and found my heart on me. It was a long time since they had seen a heart with its owner. One of them shouted ‘He’s still alive,’ and they decide to condemn me to life.

—from “Schizophrenia”

His is a poetry about dying or not dying or being dead already too many times to count. About that which death can neither ennoble, nor ensure. In history, in the recent past, and in the ever present. In the world he conjures up, massacre and Damascus are personified, grief and angst are objects that can be purchased, new or second hand, and “suicided” is a verb. Employing a mix of prose poetry and free verse, the images he draws are coloured with unexpected juxtapositions and observations. It is a poetic reality at once modern and ancient, speaking to displacement as does the poetry of an earlier generation of Palestinian poets, but bound with the more recent flow of  refugees who have fled the Middle East and North Africa seeking new lives in Europe.

He is among those refugees, whether he fled or was lured away by love, the place he left behind lies in ruins. Yet, he is aware that the safe quiet space he has found in Stockholm confers upon him a privileged perspective and particular responsibility to be a voice for those people and places who have been rendered mute by conflict. And that elegy extends beyond Damascus, and yet is ever beholden to her—at once his mother and his first lover—and to his Palestinian identity. Take, for example, “Schizophrenia” a poem written following a visit to Ypres on the 100th anniversary of the first chemical weapons attack. Among the visitors to the reconstructed city he notes the contradictions and the burdens his presence represents:

I am the Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish refugee, wearing Levi’s jeans invented by a Jewish immigrant from Germany in San Francisco, filling my camera with pictures like a Russian peasant woman filling a bucket with milk from under her cows, nodding my head like someone absorbing a lesson, the lesson of war: I am the Palestinian distributed over many massacres, standing here naked, trying to wear my poem in the hope that it will hide my wounds, confusedly gathering pieces of me from here and there in order to become a witness.

As this series of poems and collected facts will go onto illustrate, the gas attacks of one hundred years ago, the recent sarin attacks on Damascus, and all of the wartime deaths  rendered by chemical means in between have taught us nothing. Nothing at all.

Almadhoun’s poetry is a potent blend of defiance, passion and melancholic nostalgia. It is a heady mix that produces work of raw beauty. Throughout this collection, his beloved birthplace is never far from his imagination, a bond evoked most intimately in “The City,” where Damascus is portrayed as a multifaceted female figure, timeless and complex:

She is the earliest cemetery, which people have celebrated as evidence that memories are real. I pass her, a stranger to myself, so she passes me without recognising my face. I distinguish her in the faces of strangers who have belonged to her, so she and I are briefly deluded into believing we are one. She is old like a fossil and I am new like the end of history, I hold on to her dress like a child and she holds on to my heart like a woman and we commit a poem, I the dreamer hunting down verse and she reality giving birth to children and not raising them. I the ephemeral and she the eternal, everlasting, I the fatalist stuffed with transcendental truths, she the heretical realist. There is no consolation for me, and no harm done to her, except that by chance we are lovers

The most striking quality of the poems that comprise Adrenalin is the urgency that comes through. These are fiercely intelligent political pieces that invite historical figures, philosophers and other poets into the conversation. Deeply rooted in the intertwined tragedies of recent Palestinian history and the Syrian civil war, it offers an urgent, compelling commentary presented in a style and manner that even those who tell themselves they don’t read poetry will find remarkably accessible and compelling.

Finally, if you would like an opportunity to experience Almadhoun’s poetry in the best way possible—hearing him read it himself—I strongly recommend this poetry video in which  he reads from “Details,” one of the most powerful pieces in the collection. Presented with Catherine Cobham’s piercing translation, against visual and musical accompaniment, this is the best endorsement for this book that I can think of.

Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun is translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books.