Summary
Palestinian poet whose short work Bitaqit Hawia (Identity Card), from the late sixties, Said calls the closest thing to a Palestinian national poem: a poem that did not so much represent as embody the Palestinian, whose political identity had been reduced to a name on an identity card.
Details
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Arabic literature now boasts a genre of Palestinian resistance writing — a writing of self-assertion and of resistance to anonymity and political oppression — and if anything written by a Palestinian can be called a national poem, it is Darwish’s Identity Card (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.176 / printed p.155).
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The entire poem is governed by the imperative Sajil — Record — repeated periodically, as if to an Israeli police clerk who can only be addressed in the impoverished framework provided by an identity card, but who must be reminded that the card’s language does not do full justice to the reality it supposedly contains (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.176 / printed p.155).
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Said quotes the poem (poetry): its opening records an Arab, identity card number fifty thousand, with eight children and a ninth coming; its middle records the narrator’s private genealogy, a litany of misfortunes and losses; and it ends with the motif that became standard in literature by and about Palestinians in the seventies, the Palestinian emergence — a warning against the narrator’s hunger and anger (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.177 / printed p.156).
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Until 1975 or 1976 the Israeli Palestinian Arabs, Darwish’s identity-card existence inside Israel among them, lost out to the glamour of the exiles; their emergence was as important for its essential irony as for its record of concrete achievements (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.178 / printed p.157).
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The booklet in The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine also names Darwish: Taufiq Ziyad is quoted there calling the revolutionary poetry of Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and himself an extension of the revolutionary poetry of the 1930s poets (see Resistance Poetry).
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In Pappe, Darwish appears as the famous contemporary Palestinian poet born in Birwa, a Galilee village of more than 1500 inhabitants that was easily forced out in Operation Palm Tree in July 1948 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.191).
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In Manna’s Preface, Darwish encouraged him to write and publish the story of his family’s expulsion, camp life and return for the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba in al-Karmel magazine in 1998 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.18).
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Manna also cites Darwish in the Introduction — ‘Save Us from This Cruel Love’, his reply to the Arab capitals’ embrace of the resistance poets — and repeats his saying that usurpers fear memories (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.36, 46).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Resistance Poetry, Ghassan Kanafani, Tawfiq Zayyad