Language and nationalism

A poem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Amira El-zein:

A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaquat)

No one guided me to myself. I am the guide.
Between desert and sea, I am my own guide to myself.
Born of language on the road to India between two small tribes,
adorned by the moonlight of ancient faiths and an impossible peace,
compelled to guard the periphery of a Persia neighbourhood
and the great obsession of the Byzantines,
so that the heaviness of time lightens over Arab's tent.
Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but has no answer.
I am my language, I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.
I am my language. I am word's writ: Be! Be my body!
And I become an embodiment of their timbre.
I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where
my body joins the eternity of the desert.
Be, so that I may become my words.
No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,
a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins
before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me.
I stood on a wind, and my long night was without end.
This is my language, a necklace of stars around the necks
of my loved ones. They emigrated.
They carried the place and emigrated, they carried time and emigrated.
They lifted their fragrances from their bowls.
They took their bleak pastures and emigrated.
They took the words. The ravaged heart left with them.
Will the echo, this echo, this white, sonorous mirage
hold a name whose hoarseness fills the unknown
and whom departure fills with divinity?
The sky opened a window for me. I looked and found nothing
save myself outside itself, as it has always been,
and my desert-haunted visions.
My steps are wind and sand, my world is my body
and what I can hold onto.
I am the traveller and also the road.
Gods appear to me and disappear.
We don't linger upon what is to come.
There is no tomorrow in this desert, save what we saw yesterday,
so let me brandish my ode to break the cycle of time,
and let there be beautiful days!
How much past tomorrow holds!
I left myself to itself, a self filled with with the present.
Departure emptied me of temples.
Heaven has its own nations and wars.
I have a gazelle for a wife,
and palm trees for odes in a book of sand.
What I see is the past.
For mankind, a kingdom of dust and a crown.
Let my language overcome my hostile fate, my line of descendants.
Let it overcome me, my father, and a vanishing that won't vanish.
This is my language, my miracle, my magic wand.
This is my obelisk and the gardens of my Babylon,
my first infidelity, my polished metal, the desert idol of an Arab
who worships what flows from rhymes like stars in his aba,
and who worships his own words.

So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph.


If there ever was a poet who embodied Heidegger's desire of Being manifesting in language, it is surely Darwish. Similarly there are few poets that are so closely bound to the fate of their people as Darwish is. He condenses (coincidentally the German word for poetry is Dichtung, meaning condensation) the history of Palestine in his words. The readers of my blog will be familiar with my critique of the way Heidegger reifies the concept and will anticipate the materialist twist I will give to the interpretation of Darwish's poetry. Its first premise is that the desire for direct materiality of language is a historical factor (not like with Heidegger a timeless given), understandable with recourse to, if not reducible to, historical circumstances of its genesis. This does not mean poetry, and especially great poetry like Darwish's, can be reduced to its socio-historical circumstances, it does mean that validity can not be established independent from genesis. After all the desire for materiality of language can just as well take the form of Heidegger's abominable poetical dabbling. The task in which art is far from exhausted is to connect it to structures of feeling (to use Raymond William's term) or lived ideology (to refer Voloshinov's analogous concept) and trace these to material circumstances of the community it springs from and in which it is received, to the process of production and reproduction of life of real historical individuals.

Some nations were faced with the challenge of constructing a national language which had practical (enabling intercourse among individuals, bound together by their nationality) and ideological (creating a bond between these individuals) functions. There are other examples (like Germany) where the creation of a common culture preceded the political nation state and was the basis (Eric Hobsbawm referred to this function as proto-nationalism) on which the nation state was built - hence the stress Schiller put on the didactic function of theatre. In these instances culture enabled the material existence of a community, in a sense language itself was material. It is understandable then that Palestinians, especially after having their political (in the offensive of '82) and civic (in the most recent extensive offensive) infrastructure reduced to rubble by Israel, would feel the desire for materiality of culture.