Mahmoud Darwish

A River Dies of Thirst

I am still struggling with reading as a writer. I have always had a hard time removing myself enough from the work to study the craft of the artist. I notice feelings evoked by the readings and will remember a book or author by how I felt while reading. Mahmoud Darwish makes me feel like a child. I am painfully aware that I do not know enough about his life (and life in general) in Palestine and Lebanon, past and current. I am made painfully aware of how blissfully ignorant I have remained in global understandings. His life was spattered with death, despair, and an overwhelming presence of wartime and disruption. I can't begin to imagine what that was/is like. I have a hard time fully absorbing what he has written. I feel quite removed from it. The obscurity and metaphor he uses is beautiful and also out of my grasp. I feel ill-equipped to judge his work. He was obviously well-read, his allusions eluding me at every turn. His intelligence is unquestionable, reminding me of the deep and daunting intelligence of Dante.

The work of reading Darwish, for me, is trying to connect to the work on a personal level. I understand much of what he is conveying, but do not feel much emotion. Much of what he writes seems to come from a place that is accepting of a desensitization that is necessary for self preservation. The tone seems melancholy to me, or rather absent of emotion, as though he is looking out a window at the world, or in a window at an individual and reporting on what he sees, because that is the life he knows...wonder and surprise, shock and disgust are luxuries not afforded him. (This is not a lacking in the work, this is a reality of life for those who have experienced death and destruction on a consistent basis).

There are glimpses of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and a splitting of the self. I sense a divide between a desire to know "what it's all for" and a dreary realization that perhaps it is all for nothing. I love the entries on the aging process, they seem to be among the most tender.

This is all brutal honesty. Every word of it. It doesn't seem to be a calculation or a formula to make the reader feel something. As the back jacket lets us know, Darwish reminds us, "Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance." Through his act of resistance and his conveyance of a world in turmoil, I am compelled to understand I have taken my own safety and blissful ignorance for granted.