Najwan Darwish was born in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978, exactly three decades after his family was exiled from their home in the western part of the city. When he turned ten, the First Palestinian Intifada was just beginning. Six years later, the Oslo Accords marked the start of the “Peace Process” era—what Darwish later described as “a process of immense political corruption.” Growing up under the Israeli Occupation instilled a deep sensitivity to injustice and oppression in the young Darwish, as well as a sense of rage and rebellion. “I turned rebellion into poetry,” he would later say, “or rebellion turned me into a poet.”
In 1997 Darwish crossed the border to study law in Amman, Jordan, but abandoned the profession shortly after becoming a lawyer to devote himself more fully to writing. He published his first collection of poetry in 2000, and his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of Palestinian resistance. Darwish has received various accolades over the years, and in 2009 he was on the Hay Festival Beirut’s list of the “best 39 Arab authors under the age of 39.” He has engaged in the broader Palestinian cultural struggle in ways that extend well beyond writing as well: he has been an organizer and advisor for a large number of artistic projects, among them the Palestine Festival of Literature. He has also been very active in the fields of publishing and journalism: he founded a literary press in 2009, and worked as a cultural critic for the prominent Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar from 2006 to 2012. He is currently involved in establishing a new pan-Arab newspaper, where he will be the chief editor of the cultural section. But every individual is much more than the sum of such biographical facts, and Darwish himself is of the opinion that biography is a kind of fiction or fabrication. In turning to Darwish’s poetry, what quickly becomes apparent is that there is not one Najwan Darwish, but many voices, many different versions of the ever-present lyric “I.”
Nothing More to Lose, Najwan Darwish’s first collection of poetry to appear in English, presents a selection of the young poet’s work from 1998 to 2013. Readers will quickly discover that there is no typical Darwish poem, and that often one poem even seems to contradict the next. I began translating Darwish’s poetry in 2009, when the American poet Jack Hirschman invited him to participate in the San Francisco International Poetry Festival—a festival he was unable to attend because of a delay in issuing his entry visa to the U.S. The complexity of his work posed an immediate challenge to me. As the translator of several different Arab poets and novelists, I have often faced the challenge of finding the right tone, of keeping the language consistent and unified as it is in the original. With Darwish’s work I’ve had to suppress this tendency, and instead consider each poem as its own singular entity. I am not translating one poet, but many, I often told myself as I grappled with—and learned to embrace—the apparent inconsistencies in his poetry. I have come to realize that this wide range of voices is behind much of Darwish’s remarkable success as a poet: no Palestinian has ever written poetry quite like this before.
While practically the whole of modern Palestinian poetry has, by force of circumstance, taken up the theme of resistance, Darwish’s work has approached this in a new way, from multiple perspectives. He has written poems that evoke resistance in what might seem to be more traditional expressions of defiance against oppression. We see this in the poem “I Will Rise One Day,” which begins: “I will rise one day and speak it / I, the Kurd, will rise one day / and speak it / I, the Amazigh, your voice / will rise one day.” Yet even here Darwish’s outlook is not limited to the Palestinian experience—the indignation is more complex. This poem, while taking on an “Arab” perspective (which is far from unified), is also critical of Arab regimes, for they are the ones who have persecuted the Amazighs (in North Africa) and the Kurds (in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere). Nothing escapes Najwan Darwish’s relentless critical gaze—neither dictatorial Arab regimes, nor the corruption of the political ruling class in Palestine, and certainly not the violence-laden discourse of fundamentalist groups. Time and again he asks the reader: How can we possibly resist the Israeli occupation of Palestine without also criticizing the injustices that “we” Arabs are committing or allowing to happen?
It should be noted that Najwan Darwish bears no relation to his more famous namesake Mahmoud Darwish, who was the indisputable giant of Palestinian poetry until his death in 2008. And while there are Palestinian poets who have been clamoring to follow in the great poet’s footsteps and become the next “national poet of Palestine,” Najwan has consciously rejected any aspirations for that role. Indeed, Najwan Darwish’s “Identity Card” is a quiet rebuke to Mahmoud Darwish’s 1964 poem of the same title, which is perhaps the single most famous poem to come out of modern-day Palestine, its repeated line presumably addressed to an Israeli soldier or security officer: “Write it down! / I am an Arab.” The rage of this earlier poem is replaced with a much gentler tone, and the asserted identity isn’t limited to mere Arabness. In Najwan’s “Identity Card,” a multitude of identities is assumed by the lyric voice (Armenian, Turk, Egyptian, Greek, Aramaean...), but one stands out from the crowd:
There is no place that resisted its invaders except that I was one of its people; there is no free man to whom I am not bound in kinship, and there is no single tree or cloud to which I am not indebted. And my scorn for Zionists will not prevent me from saying that I was a Jew expelled from Andalusia, and that I still weave meaning from the light of that setting sun.
The resistance expressed here is more inclusive, and escapes any simple formulation of “us versus them, ” for the Jews, too, are part of “Arab” identity, no matter the tragedies of Palestinian history since 1948.
Yet any comparison to the suffering of the Jews is fraught with peril, particularly comparisons between the experience of Palestinians under the Israeli Occupation and that of the Jews in the concentration camps during the Second World War. Such relativist comparisons merely serve to erase histories. Najwan Darwish is acutely aware of this, and knows that decrying the injustices of the Israeli occupation inevitably entails the danger of being labeled an anti-Semite. But he also refuses to avoid the issue for the sake of political correctness. Instead, he turns the irony of the Palestinian situation—suffering oppression at the hands of those who suffered extreme oppression (far too light a term for the Shoah, I know)—into poetry. “I don’t have a grandmother who died in the gas chambers,” he writes in his poem “The Gas Chambers,” and then goes on to invoke the Nakba, the catastrophic mass exodus from the lands of Palestine in 1948, when the state of Israel was founded: “Grandmothers, you didn’t suffer enough / for us to be saved / How horrific was the Nakba? / How harrowing to be a refugee? / These are but small pains / for niggers like us.” As horrific as the Holocaust was, the injustice—and the cruel irony—of the Palestinian situation remains and cannot be ignored.
The suffering, too, continues and cannot be ignored. Najwan Darwish’s lyric voice obsessively takes on the mantle of the savior born in Bethlehem and crucified just a few miles away in Jerusalem, the poet’s birthplace and home. Darwish personifies the role of Christ as a symbol of both personal and universal suffering, while also connecting his suffering with a clear political message, as in the poem “Sleeping in Gaza,” a powerful remembrance of the Israeli air raids on Gaza in 2008 and 2009: “The earth is three nails / and mercy a hammer: / Strike, Lord / Strike with the planes // Are there any more to come?”
Time and again in Darwish’s poetry, we also catch glimpses of the poet’s despair, of his doubts as to the efficacy of poetry amidst the physical realities of politics and war. He has no illusions about the role he is playing: “Even in war,” he writes, “I was just a passerby.” And this too is a significant aspect of his resistance—the willingness to reveal doubt, to call into question the very act of writing poetry in the face of daily suffering. In “Bint Jbeil,” the name of a town in Southern Lebanon that became a symbol of Lebanese resistance against the Israeli invasion in 2006, Darwish writes: “A little while later / dawn reveals the dead / and I go to sleep, broken / by the debt I now owed / to those who hoisted dawn for one more day / over the hills of Bint Jbeil.”
Najwan Darwish uses his position of privilege to write verse that bleeds onto the page, that transcends the Palestinian experience while still being deeply rooted within it. Even in its darkest moments, his poetry is a poetry of healing—it gives voice to hope, however rare and faint any hope might be. “The world will be good,” Darwish writes in a poem addressed to his fictitious son, “there will be nothing but the love / I left you as your inheritance.” And we should not forget that there is hope, too, in the crucifixion. According to some, Christ wasn’t born the “Son of God,” he wasn’t born the embodiment of love and compassion. He becomes “God,” becomes love, by passing fully through the dark night of despair, through the agony of the cross. In the poetry of Najwan Darwish, the crucifixion has not yet ended.
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While working on this book, I consulted translations —into English, French, and Spanish—of many of Najwan Darwish’s poems. I would like to thank the following translators for their work: Kamal Boullata, Marilyn Hacker, Sousan Hammad, Antoine Jockey, Andrew Nance, Beverly Pérez Rego, and Ahdaf Soueif. I would also like to thank Jack Hirschman, former poet laureate of San Francisco, for first introducing me to Najwan and his poetry.
—Kareem James Abu-Zeid