Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview
- 1 The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel
- 2 Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile
- 3 Gender and the Palestinian Narrative of Return in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani
- 4 Darwish's ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation
- 5 Israeli Jewish Nation Building and Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature
- 6 Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir's He Walked in the Fields
- 7 Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel
- 8 Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives
- 9 Marginal Literatures of the Middle East
- 10 The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English
- 11 The Nation Speaks: On the Poetics of Nationalist Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Darwish's ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Literature and Nation in the Middle East: An Overview
- 1 The Production of Locality in the Oral Palestinian Poetry Duel
- 2 Irony and the Poetics of Palestinian Exile
- 3 Gender and the Palestinian Narrative of Return in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani
- 4 Darwish's ‘Indian Speech’ as Dramatic Performance: Sacred Space and Transformation
- 5 Israeli Jewish Nation Building and Hebrew Translations of Arabic Literature
- 6 Between Myth and History: Moshe Shamir's He Walked in the Fields
- 7 Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel
- 8 Arabic Poetry, Nationalism and Social Change: Sudanese Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives
- 9 Marginal Literatures of the Middle East
- 10 The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English
- 11 The Nation Speaks: On the Poetics of Nationalist Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The paradox underlying national movements based on ethnic-religious-cultural claims is that, short of a distinctly zero-sum outcome in which one group survives at the expense of the other, there is a need both for clear boundaries and for coexistence. At the level of geographic identity, concern for physical boundaries makes political sense: physically separating populations can enhance the reality of self-determination, as was the logic of the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. However, at the level of psychic and cultural identity, the drawing of clear boundaries – boundaries which distinguish us from them, and which promote group solidarity, giving it political momentum – also makes coexistence of such clearly delimited groups more difficult. Self and other become brittle constructs. It is of interest then, that a ‘national’ poet of the status of Mahmoud Darwish writes poetry that both galvanises Palestinians around the Palestinian national enterprise and provides a means by which the boundaries can be bridged, making coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis imaginable. As well, his is a poetry that reaches beyond the frontiers of Palestinian nationalism. It speaks not only to a broad literary audience, but in translation, to an audience of peace educators whose focus (in effecting peace) is on the possibilities resident within blurred boundaries.
Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, whose people ‘chant his odes in their fields, in their schools, on their marches, and in their miserable tin shanty-towns’ (Darwish 2000: 19), taps universal concerns with identity when he explores the paradox of being Palestinian.
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- Information
- Literature and Nation in the Middle East , pp. 79 - 99Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006