Mahmoud Darwish's Poetics of Desire: Visions and Revisions

Mainstream critics have overemphasized the idea that Darwish's poetry is fundamentally humanist and universalist, refusing to succumb to cheap nationalism, chauvinism, or jingoism. However, with close reference to a selection of Darwish's works, this paper aims to attenuate humanistic-universalist guises and demonstrate how his poetics of protest and resistance rather suffer from an incurable malady of hope to serve as the voice of the voiceless Palestinians, rally millions of Arabs around the national cause, and draw world attention to the plight of Palestinians. Though Darwish is often viewed as Palestine's prophet of humanism, evoking the entire experience of exile as a universal human condition at the heart of his poems, the study maintains that he devoted all his energy to portraying the Palestinians' constant dislocation, dispossession, and deprivation of a dignified human life. Darwish's poetics of desire, in fact, struggle against forgetfulness, strive to reconstruct memories of his homeland, act as an historical record portraying the baneful history of his people under colonial hegemony, reflect the communal desire for freedom, mirror Palestinians' feeling of up-rootedness, and dream of an identity that transcends the 'no-exit' position.