Lines of Resistance
(Mahmoud Darwish on the relevance, refinements and restrictions of politics in poetry)

"No less intriguing than this position is Darwish's manner of defending it, which echoes the youthful militant poems that first earned him the reputation of being a poet of resistance. The early poems ring with calls for defiance of Israeli efforts to uproot Palestinians from their land; Darwish's opposition to the pressure of political relevance, which is a defense against being dispossessed of private imaginative terrain, strikes the same heroic note. Even when confronting his readers, Darwish cannot help but behave as a poet of resistance, a writer who defines himself, and finds himself somewhat confined, by rhetorical acts of defiance."

"This predicament isn't Darwish's alone. In 1967, on the first day of the Six-Day War, the poet Samih al-Qasim, an Israeli Arab and a member of the Israeli Communist Party, was arrested by Israeli forces and sent to Haifa's Al Damoun prison. The experience shook al-Qasim to the core. "In prison I discovered--when the Israelis were declaring, 'Sharm el-Sheikh is in our hands, Jerusalem is in our hands'--that I had to make one of two choices," al-Qasim told British journalist Roger Hardy in 1982: "either to find a cave in the mountains, isolated from mankind, or to find a higher stage in the struggle. I lost my belief in nationalistic big words." Al-Qasim had to extricate himself from nationalism's fastened-down ideological positions while also trying to remain samid, or steadfast, a phrase coined by Palestinians to describe someone who remains attached to his or her land and culture despite imposing obstacles. The thirty-two poems collected in Sadder Than Water, the first collection of al-Qasim's poems to be published in an English-language translation, suggest that the task has been arduous. Although al-Qasim has managed to escape from the prison of nationalism--"beware the rights of rhetoric dancing on blood," he warns in the volume's title poem--remaining samid has landed him in an open-air cell of sadness, melancholy and absurdity, one from which there appears to be no way out. As the escape artist of "The Tragedy of Houdini the Miraculous" explains, "And here's the knottiest problem of all:/Entry or exit?" "