Hamdi YeatssIrelandDarwishs 2014

Yeats's Ireland, Darwish's Palestine: The National in the Personal, Mystical, and
Mythological
Author(s): Tahrir Hamdi
Source: Arab Studies Quarterly , Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 92-106
Published by: Pluto Journals
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.36.2.0092
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YEATS’S IRELAND, DARWISH’S PALESTINE:
THE NATIONAL IN THE PERSONAL,
MYSTICAL, AND MYTHOLOGICAL
Tahrir Hamdi
Abstract: William Butler Yeats’s and Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic oeuvres can safely be said to
have contributed significantly to building distinct national consciousnesses for their respective
nations of Ireland and Palestine. These poets have equipped themselves with unique repertoires,
which include the personal, the mystical, and the mythological, not to escape into a more ideal
or abstract world, but to create anew their homelands, which have been placed under political,
social, cultural, and in Darwish’s case, geographical erasure by oppressive imperialist/Zionist
invaders and occupiers. Both poets take on their roles as politician/artist/magician seriously by
using hypnotic and other magical techniques in order to focus their people’s psyches on the idea
of cultural and national liberation. The poetry of both Yeats and Darwish shows poignantly how
a poet can embody the nation and how poetry can indeed make something happen.
Keywords: William Butler Yeats, Mahmoud Darwish, Ireland, Palestine, national, mythological
“The search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided
by colonial history, for a new pantheon of heroes and (occasionally) heroines, myths,
and religions—these too are made possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by
its people”
(Said, 1994: 273).
When the tree, the sky, the river, the goddess and her garden, dancing faeries,
the ant, and its ant food all coalesce and become the homeland, we realize that
we are in the presence of an art that endows the poem with the power not only
to challenge but also to create a new reality. It can be said that William Butler
Yeats and Mahmoud Darwish forged for their peoples unique national traditions,
which they hoped would create their Ireland and Palestine, respectively, against
opposing hostile forces of erasure. The seeming hopelessness of their peoples’
predicaments and histories have inspired these poets to demand of their poetry
the ability to offer something beyond the feebleness and insincerity of this world,
Tahrir Hamdi, Associate Professor, Postcolonial Studies, Arab Open University (Jordan Branch),
Amman, Jordan.
www.plutojournals.com/asq/
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YEATS’S IRELAND, DARWISH’S PALESTINE 93
something inspirational, irrational, and imaginative, which would create a reality

of extremity, challenge, and an unearthly defiance.
This article will attempt to show how Yeats and Darwish used the personal,
mythological, and the occult to mobilize people around a national heritage and
the creation of a homeland, and not, as many believe, to escape into abstract and
mystical worlds of unreality. Both poets attempted to penetrate to the deepest
levels of the human psyche through mysticism, history, and myth to be able to
speak to the collective mind of their peoples, to unite them around the idea of
a nation.
As Marjorie Howes (1996) argues in Yeats’s Nations, Yeats was interested in “the
permeability of individual minds, their access to one another and to some larger
entity” (85) and the use of symbols and ritual, which are elements of the occult,
to penetrate the “unconscious ‘depths of the mind,’” (ibid) in the way a hypnotist
would in order to be able to guide the people towards Irish national unity. Yeats,
then, as Howes shows, would be the magician whose magic would greatly impact
the thoughts and actions of his people. In this sense, Yeats’s art, especially the Irish
theater “was intended, not merely to express the Irish nation, but to help create it,
to ‘give Ireland a hardy and shapely national character’” (ibid). The idea is to be
able to make possible what in the rational world of reality seems impossible. The
irrational mind, which Yeats attempted to tap in his theatre, can be “immeasurably
bold—all is possible to it” (Yeats quoted in Howes, 1996: 69).
This is precisely the effect that Darwish hoped to create in his audience, as I will
argue, through the magical effects of his hypnotic poetic lines, especially those
borne out of an intensely personal and close brush with death in his poem “Mural,”
published in the year 2000 after complicated heart surgery in 1999. Here Darwish
(2003) has a long negotiation with death in which he enlists the help of “armies”
that have defeated death, including “all the arts ... ” (139) and Anat, the Canaanite
goddess of fertility and war whom he implores “O Anat, my special Goddess, sing”
(ibid: 135) to help him triumph over death, and as we shall see to help Palestine
triumph over the forces of annihilation and erasure. It becomes obvious to the
reader/listener that Darwish’s “I” in this poem coalesces with the poet’s name
and the land and all become Palestine; he, Mahmoud, is the poem and Palestine.
Darwish in the poem likens his condition as one who has a brush with death to that
of the Palestinian when he says, “I find myself present in the fullness of absence,”
(ibid: 125), which is a play on the identity that the then newly established Israel
bestowed upon Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes in 1948 (the
absent-present status) and some who then returned as Darwish’s own family did.
Throughout the poem, Darwish is obsessed with documenting his experience:
“Write to be. Read to find. If you wish to speak, you must take action” (ibid: 126).
ASQ 36.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals
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94 arab studies quarterly
The poem dwells on intensely personal experiences in the hospital, such as the
poet’s struggle to go to the restroom: “I want to walk to the restroom on my own”
(ibid: 145), but again from the personal, we enter the national: “A nation is as
great as its ode,” (ibid: 129) a line that echoes Yeats’s declaration: “There is no
great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature” (quoted
in Regan, 2006: 88) and an often repeated line in Darwish’s (2003) “Mural”:
“Green—the land of my ode is green” (129). Darwish’s personal triumph over
death is also Palestine’s triumph over erasure, and like Yeats, Darwish is creating
for his people a great tradition, which would be protected by the Canaanite
goddess, Anat: “Every time I turn to face my gods, there is a land/of lavender
and I bathe in the light of a moon ringed by Anat./Anat is legend’s guardian of
metonymy” (ibid: 147). And as if to bring home the point of the total collapse
between the personal and the national, Darwish declares “What is personal is not
personal, what is cosmic is not cosmic./As if I am. As if I am not” (ibid: 147).
The poet strives to define and undefine, he is and is not; this elusive quality of the
poem makes Darwish’s words difficult to define, possess or occupy. This elusive
strategy, which Darwish (2003) uses in “Mural” is the same one he employs in
“The Phases of Anat” (2000) in which he declares, “there is neither life nor death./
Where I neither live nor die./Where there is neither Anat/nor Anat” (102). This
oscillation between meaning and non-meaning, “I” and Palestine, the personal
and the cosmic, the general and the detail, death and life, reality and unreality is
Darwish’s triumphant poetic and national strategy.
In hypnosis, the individual is put in a “trance-like state” where there is
“heightened focus and concentration” on a particular idea by means of using “verbal
repetition and mental images” according to Mayo Clinic (Mayo Clinic Staff,
2012). Similarly, in the part of “Mural” where the personal most noticeably slips
into the national so easily and mysteriously, the emphasis on one word—“mine,”
along with Darwish’s hypnotic tones as he recites, unites the individual minds of
his audience around one thought—“mine.” What is mine? Well, for the poet and
his audience, Palestine, every part and particle of Palestine is “mine.” The word
“mine” swings back and forth in the lines, sometimes ending the poetic line and
sometimes beginning it. The hypnotic swinging back and forth of this word, falling
and rising, becomes the focus of the “finale” of this long poem as the mesmerized
audience listens to the magician pronounce his magic. I will here quote at length
from the poem in order to show how the poet achieves the required effect by
playing on the word “mine”:
This sea is mine. The fresh air is mine.

This sidewalk, my steps and my sperm on the sidewalk are mine.
The old bus station is mine.
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Mine is the ghost and the haunted one.

The copper pots, The Throne Verse, and the key are mine.
The door, the guards and the bell are mine.
Mine is all that was mine.
The pages torn from the New Testament are mine.
The salt of my tears on the wall of my house is mine.
And my name, though I mispronounce it in five flat letters, is also mine.
This name is my friend’s mine, wherever he may be, and also mine.
Mine is the temporal body, present and absent.
.......................................................
What was mine: my yesterday.
What will be mine: the distant tomorrow,
and the return of the wandering soul as if nothing had happened.
And as if nothing had happened:
a slight cut in the arm of the absurd present.
History mocks its victims and its heroes.
It glances at them in passing and goes on.
The sea is mine. The fresh air is mine. (Darwish, 2003: 161)
As can be seen in the above lines, not only does the word “mine” sometimes
begin and sometimes end the poetic line, but grand and small topics, the historical
and the personal, presence and absence, the Quran and the Bible appear inter-
changeably in the lines above and sometimes appear together in the same line.
Yeats wrote out his theory, and it seems Darwish more successfully applied it.
Therefore, the element of resistance in Darwish’s later poetry can be felt more
intensely than in his earlier nationalistic poems. Here, the deepest levels of the
mind have been penetrated; the irrational domain has been successfully tapped by
the poet/magician, thus allowing for a revolution from within the very depths of
the human psyche.
It is important to keep in mind that Arabic poetry depends heavily on oral
presentation, sometimes to masses of people, and this is indeed especially true
of Darwish’s poetry, which was always publicly performed by the poet himself
to large audiences. The poet and translator of many of Darwish’s poems, Sinan
Antoon (2008), states that Darwish’s “recitals could fill sport stadiums,” and the
poet Nathalie Handal (2002) comments, “he draws crowds of thousands, from
government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students.” The well-known
Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka (2008) writes,
Then came silence. Mahmoud Darwish began to read. We did not know a word of
Arabic, but we heard his voice reach out and sink deep down to pluck the strings of the
Palestinian soul.
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It was a magical night in Ramallah, the magician’s night in Ramallah, the magician,
Mahmoud Darwish, whose spell was cast the way it has been through ages ... (25)
It is in the very depths of the irrational domain that the poet/magician hopes to
stir people to action, to unite the minds of the masses around a single idea, which
in the case of Yeats and Darwish, is the idea of the national homeland. Tapping
the irrational domain allows the poet/magician to break through the restrictions of
reality and to bridge the gap between thought and action (Larrissy, 1997a: xxiii).
Both poets took part in both realms—the realm of thought and that of action. Yeats’s
belief in Irish liberation, as Edward Larrissy points out in his introduction to W. B.
Yeats: The Major Works, led to his joining of the “Irish Republican Brotherhood,”
and his “later membership of the Irish Senate” (ibid: xxiii). Darwish, on his part,
was jailed several times by Israel and later became a “member of the executive
committee of the PLO” (Shaheen, 2009: viii). Because Darwish, as Mohammed
Shaheen points out in his introduction to almond blossoms and beyond, strove “to
create a ‘national poem’” (ibid: x) that would act as the guide to his people, he,
like Yeats, needed a vehicle to do that. These poets/magicians needed to not only
influence their audiences, but to communicate to the depths of the human mind,
which as Yeats (1997) believed could be tapped through magic-like effects as he
explained in his essay entitled “Magic” (344). Perhaps it is Ireland’s nationhood
based on an ancient Celtic consciousness that Yeats hears “in the deep heart’s
core” in his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (ibid: 20).
Thus, as I have been trying to argue here, Yeats’s and Darwish’s resort to the
personal, mystical, and mythological is not an escape from reality, but actually
an attempt to effect a change in reality, to bridge the gap between thought and
action, to make something happen despite W.H. Auden’s (1940) insistence in
his dedication to W.B. Yeats, “For poetry makes nothing happen.” In fact, Yeats
wondered whether his play Cathleen ni Houlihan inspired the Irish rebels of the
Easter uprising: “Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?”
(1997: 179). In the same vein, Darwish took on his role as poet/magician naturally.
In 1982, Darwish noted that “‘the poet was once everything to Arabic culture:
journalist, professor, leader’” (quoted in Cleary, 2002: 190). Like Yeats, Darwish’s
interest was in the power of art to effect change. This could most potently be
done, as Darwish believed, in the novel “because the novel can expand to
include everything ... In the novel you can sing, and speak poetry, prose, ideas,
and practically everything’” (ibid). With Darwish’s words in mind, Joe Cleary
pointedly adds, “When they dream of the ‘big’ novel that ‘can expand to include
everything’, it is as if these leading intellectuals look to the novel imaginatively
to prefigure a restored national collectivity that has still to be realized politically”
(ibid). Thus, for Yeats and Darwish, the vehicle by means of which a new reality
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can be made would entail collapsing the borders between the rational world of
reality and the irrational world of poetry by using mysticism and the occult,
especially in Yeats’s case.
As Howes argues, Yeats’s interest in crowd theory is directly related to his
attempt to create a collective Irish national consciousness. Yeats was especially
interested in the strategies for controlling crowds as described by the crowd
theorist Gustave Le Bon, who argued that “‘a crowd thinks in images’ and is most
influenced by ‘illusions and words’” (quoted in Howes, 1996: 80). Howes goes
on to argue how, for Yeats, the theatre was the public arena where the “politician/
artist” could hypnotically control his audience through symbol, image, ritual,
incantation, and song in order to transform them and effect change (ibid). Yeats
(1997) wrote in “Magic”: “... this great mind and great memory can be evoked by
symbols” (344).
In his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats posits the otherworldly Old Woman
whom we learn is the legendary “Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan” (ibid: 218),
who works her magic upon the young man, Micheal, a day before his wedding,
putting him in a trance-like state and making him follow her towards the cheering
crowd outside heard at the beginning of the play and whose cheers keep getting
louder as the play progresses. It is interesting to point out that it is basically
Cathleen’s singing that most attracts Micheal, “What is it that you are singing,
ma’am?” (ibid: 216). However, the Old Woman’s trouble is made clear a little bit
earlier in a dialogue with Bridget, Micheal’s mother:
Bridget. What was it put you wandering?
Old Woman. Too many strangers in the house.
Bridget. Indeed you look as if you’d had your share of trouble.
Old Woman. I have had trouble indeed.
Bridget. What was it put the trouble on you?
Old Woman. My land that was taken from me.
Peter. Was it much land they took from you?
Old Woman. My four beautiful green fields. (ibid: 215)
Of course, the strangers referred to here are the English and Scots who have settled
in Ireland and taken the Irish people’s lands. The “four beautiful green fields”
that have been taken from the Old Woman are a reference to the “four ancient
provinces of Ireland—Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, and Munster” (Larrissy, 1997b:
521-522).
Micheal (Yeats, 1997) is so taken by the plight of the Old Woman that he forgets
about his own wedding, “What wedding are you talking of?” (219) and follows the
cheering crowd that has “come to our own door” (ibid) outside. The play closes
with Micheal joining the crowd and leaving his love behind; he has been completely
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transformed, and the Old Woman at the end has been physically transformed, as
Patrick, Micheal’s younger brother, informs the audience: “I saw a young girl, and
she had the walk of a queen” (ibid: 220). Ireland has been recreated, revitalized
by the transformation of Micheal, who has joined the cheering crowd. Yeats hopes
to effect a transformation in the minds of his audience (i.e., the theater) through
the hypnotic effects of his play, which include the use of song, incantation, and
symbol. It is easy to see how this play is a reenactment of Yeats’ own theory of
how he can transform the Irish people’s consciousness through the theater which
brings crowds together. Yeats is the magician (as represented by Cathleen in the
play), who would make the crowd follow him in achieving his aim of creating
a national homeland in the same way Micheal is transformed by Cathleen and
follows the cheering crowd, leaving behind his selfish earthly interests. The
physical transformation of Cathleen into a young lady represents the revitalization
of Ireland, which Yeats hoped would be achieved by the performance of his play.
The minds of his audience would have access to each other and to the Anima
Mundi or “The Soul of the World” (Larrissy, 1997a: xvii), which Yeats hoped
to unite around the idea of Irish liberation, thus facilitating the movement from
thought to action. This transition would be impossible in the rational realm of
reality, and this is precisely the reason that Yeats emphasized the irrational mind,
which could make possible the impossible.
The emphasis on the irrational realm in Darwish’s and Yeats’s work also explains
the preponderance of heroic female figures and goddesses, which in literature are
known to traditionally inhabit the irrational domain probably first brought to the
surface in recent times (as opposed to the classical period) by Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre, a novel that has fueled plenty of critical and literary material about
the madwoman in the attic phenomenon. This makes women ideal symbols of
resistance to the world of reality. Feminine resistance seems to play a more pivotal
role in both poets’ work than that of the masculine, which seems to be inseparable
from the rational domain of reality, and which for Yeats and Darwish represents
an oppressive imperialistic construct. Howes (1996) points out that women for
Yeats (and I would add Darwish), have a “mediumistic access to other powers,
other realms of thought” (37). The Celtic Deirdre and the Canaanite Anat represent
an unearthly, otherworldly supernatural power that can overcome the power of a
masculine rational world of reality.
For Yeats, the Irish peasant and women possessed an instinctive, mystical
knowledge and power not possessed by the masculine world; Yeats sought this
supernatural power through his studies of the occult and mysticism (Howes,
1996: 38), and delved into them not in an escapist manner nor for metaphorical or
poetical purposes, but precisely because he recognized the “material existences”
that such “occult technologies” can be put to in terms of the manipulation of
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crowds (ibid: 84). The defiance of Deirdre in Yeats’ eponymous play, which
draws on Irish mythology, is especially pronounced. As Stephen Regan points
out, the traditional readings of Yeats which emphasize Yeats’s decorative use
of Irish myths are misleading. Regan (2006) argues that Yeats “endeavoured to
create a number of powerful and enduring myths of Irishness that might shape a
new national consciousness” (98). We are told early on in the play that Deirdre
(Yeats, 1997) is possibly “of the gods,” (222), and she does not subscribe to
earthly protocols; she believes in otherworldly knowledge: “I have heard terrible
mysterious things,/Magical horrors and the spell of wizards” (ibid: 231). The
significance of Deirdre’s supernatural beliefs as opposed to her lover’s (the young
King Naoise’s) more earthly and thus realistic beliefs as seen in his response
to her otherworldly preoccupations—“I will not weigh the gossip of the roads/
With the King’s word” (ibid)—is directly related to the kind of imagination and
power that Yeats is calling forth that would bring about a total transformation of
his audience’s consciousness, away from the mundane and stale status quo of the
reality of Ireland’s condition.
Deirdre’s disdain for earthly wisdom echoes Yeats’s own belief in the occult as
a resource for the kind of power that Yeats (1997) seeks: “My rhymes more than
their rhyming tell/Of things discovered in the deep” (25). This same “deep” that
is possessed by Yeats, which is not possessed by “Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,”
who are three great Irish nationalist writers, is the same kind of deep that enables
Deirdre (Yeats, 1997) to see and know much more than her male kinsmen because
their vision is blinded by the wisdom of this world:
No, no old man,
You thought the best, and the worse came of it;
We listened to the counsel of the wise,
And so turned fools. (234)
Deirdre’s connection with the supernatural mimics Yeats’s connection to the

occult, which enables him to discover more in the deep than his fellow nationalist
compatriots. In Deirdre’s final defiantly radical act, she takes her own life so as
not to surrender herself/body to Conchubar, who here represents England. Thus,
Yeats’s use of mythology is obviously aimed at preserving the Irish nation against
the ultimate act of erasure/rape as is here represented by Conchubar’s attempt
to “occupy” Irish Deirdre’s body through marriage after disposing of her Irish
husband, Naoise. Deirdre’s radical act of self-destruction is echoed by the Ulster
hero Cuchulain in On Baile’s Strand, who in fighting the waves at the end of the
play and thus certifying his own death, is, like Deirdre, also denying Conchubar the
chance to realize the colonization of Ireland, which depends on what Rob Doggett
(2002) calls the “co-dependent relationship: to be the Saxon master Conchubar
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requires his Celtic slave” (563). Cuchulain’s final radical act is a clear defiance
of Saxon reason that can only understand the enslavement and obedience of the
“inferior” and submissive Celt. Yeats (1997) documents this same battle in his
poem “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” in his volume of poems called The Rose.
By means of the mythological reenactment of the breaking of this “co-dependent
relation,” (i.e., the Celts’ refusal to be a slave nation) Yeats seems to be rallying
the Irish behind the idea of an Irish national consciousness that is at once ancient,
pagan and non-sectarian.
Yeats’s emphasis on the ancient and the pagan is not an escape into an
otherworldly realm, but a rejection of Ireland’s divided and sectarian (Protestant/
Catholic) present. Yeats hopes to revive a Celtic past, a history of Ireland that is
pre-Christian where the emphasis would be on an Irish non-sectarian Ireland as
he suggests in his poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times.” In this poem, Yeats
(1997) makes note of the occult magic of the Celtic Druids who in the poem are
represented by the “faeries, dancing under the moon” declaring “A Druid land, a
Druid tune!” (25). This history of Ireland, for Yeats, is significantly pre-Christian,
and thus pre-sectarian as can be seen in the following lines: “Because the red-rose-
bordered hem/Of her, whose history began/Before God made the angelic clan”
(ibid). Yeats is creating for Ireland a unifying myth “of belonging and identity”
(Regan, 2010: 90), from which a new Irish consciousness can be forged that is
neither Catholic nor Protestant, a sensitive topic for the Protestant Anglo-Irish
Yeats. The past that Yeats calls up does not belong to the past, but to the present, the
present that Yeats (1997) hopes to create within the Irish national consciousness as
is clearly shown in one of his last poems, “Statues,” which Regan describes as the
summation of his career (ibid: 89):
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide. (172)
Padraic Pearse, one of the main leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against British
forces and who read the proclamation announcing the birth of the Republic
of Ireland from the Post Office (Ramazani and Hena, 2010-2013), summons
the ancient Ulster hero Cuchulain, thus forcing what Yeats sees as a heroic
non-sectarian past upon a “filthy modern” present, which can only be purged
through a “gestation and birth, as with the ‘terrible beauty’ that is ‘born’ in 1916”
as Regan (2010: 90) explains with reference to Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916” in
which Yeats celebrates the Irish rebel martyrs of the Easter Rising in 1916, giving
birth to a new consciousness, a change requiring violent, but nonetheless beautiful
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sacrifice. The Irish rebels’ deaths were a sacrifice which the underequipped rebels
knew was imminent, but necessary, thus continuing the Celtic self-sacrificial
tradition of Deirdre and Cuchulain:
I write it out in a verse----
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. (Yeats, 1997: 87)
A similar gesture of reviving ancient mythological figures is found in Darwish’s

poetry, where the figure of the Canaanite goddess, Anat, is omnipresent, especially
in his later poetry. Regan’s comment on Yeats’s endeavor to revive powerful
myths that would forge a new national consciousness can be seen with even more
potent urgency and thus agency in Darwish’s poetry, which deals with a people
that has literally and more thoroughly been dispossessed of their land, history, and
identity. This is perhaps the main motive behind Edward Said’s emphasis on the
cartographic element of place in his discussion in the essay entitled “Yeats and
Decolonization.” In his resort to pagan myths, Darwish shares with Yeats a strong
animosity for the sectarian present, but Darwish’s treatment of the past and the
ancient myths is more significantly directed towards the possession of the entire
history of the land of Palestine, which is being intentionally and systematically
erased by the Zionist state. Said’s (1994) comments about the inseparability
of history and the nation with reference to Yeats (286) are perhaps even more
applicable to Darwish since he is literally fighting the forces of “the erasure of the
memory of an entire nation” (Akash, 2000: 32). Darwish calls forth the unearthly
power of the Canaanite goddess Anat whom Munir Akash calls the “Palestinian
Moon goddess” (ibid: 34), but elsewhere Akash (2003) also refers to Anat’s
“ferocity in battle” (184):
Come back, and bring
The land of truth and connotation
The first land of Canaan,
....
So that miracles return to Jericho,
Return to the deserted temple door
....
....
Where no future arrives and no past returns. (Darwish, 2000: 101)
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By calling back Anat, Darwish hopes to return the land to its people—the
matriarchal Canaanite Palestinians, the original inhabitants of the land of Palestine,
which is significantly a land of feminine connotation, not masculine denotation;
connotation of course is more elusive than denotation, and thus more difficult to
capture and occupy. The return of “miracles” in Jericho, a Palestinian city, which
is significantly the oldest city on earth, can only be realized in the present if this
past returns, thus allowing for the arrival of a future Palestinian nation. Darwish is
positing the Palestinian as the possessor of the world’s most ancient history, which
is here represented by Jericho and Anat, whose fertile powers would invigorate the
sterile present where:
Wells dried up when you left us,
streams and rivers ran dry when you died,
tears evaporated from clay jars,
air crackled like wooden embers
from dryness. (ibid: 100)
Thus, like Yeats, Darwish rejects the sterility of the present, which in the words of
Yeats is a “filthy modern tide.” Both poets seem to relate the sterility of the present
to an oppressive patriarchal logic, which does not allow one to know or even
imagine liberation in the way that both Deirdre and Anat can. The loss of land and
nation is much more real and painful for Darwish than it was for Yeats, especially
as Darwish’s Palestine is a “lost realm” (Akash, 2000: 29); Berweh, Darwish’s
birthplace and ancestral village, is just one of 531 Palestinian villages, which were
totally and systematically wiped off the face of the earth by Zionist terrorist gangs
in 1948, a fact very specifically documented in Ilan Pappe’s (2006) long overdue
book entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This fact was clearly admitted by
the Israeli leader, Moshe Dayan in 1969, who said,
We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing
a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, State here ... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arabs
villages. You do not even know the names of the Arab villages, and I do not blame you,
because these geography books no longer exist—and not only do the books no longer
exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahala arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat
in the place of Jibita, Sarid in the place of Haneifs, and Kefar Yohoshua in the place of
Tell Shaman. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab
population. (quoted in Akash, 2000: 31)
In fact, Darwish documents his own family’s forced departure from his village after
its destruction and complete erasure in the poem entitled “Hooriyya’s Teaching,”
Hooriyya being Darwish’s mother, who for Darwish (2000) is an Anat-like figure:
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Do you remember our migration route to Lebanon?

Where you forgot me in a sack of bread
(it was wheat bread)
I kept quiet so as not to wake the guards.
The scent of morning dew lifted me onto your shoulders.
O you, gazelle that lost both house and mate. (86)
Connecting the Canaanite past of Anat to the Palestinian present, Darwish writes,
“My mother is a Canaanite” (ibid: 77) in his poem “On a Canaanite Stone at the
Dead Sea,” intentionally conflating the goddess Anat with his mother, Hooriyya,
who coalesce and become one, thus tying the Canaanite past to the Palestinian
present. Darwish, to use Said’s (1994) words, has skillfully created “a new pantheon
of .... heroines [and] myths” (273) centered upon the myth of Anat, which as Akash
(2000) points out “is an outcry against an exclusively male-dominated pantheon,
a strict patriarchal universe” (38). For Darwish, as for Yeats, the patriarchal world
order represents a logic that does not allow for a complete inversion of reality
since this rigid order itself represents the oppressive imperialistic status quo of
the Zionist and his Anglo-Saxon conspirator. Thus, Anat becomes, for Darwish, a
liberating unearthly force of fertility and ferocious power as opposed to the arid
patriarchal sterility of the Palestinian present whose logic of surrender the poet
rejects in the fourteenth-century historical figure of Ibn Khaldoun whom Darwish
sees as betraying the Arab nation: “I say: ‘We’re not a slave nation,/with all due
respects to Ibn Khaldoun’” (ibid: 80).
The urgency of belonging to the entire history of Canaan/Palestine is clear in the
following lines despite the different foreign invaders:
I am myself, despite being shattered on metallic air.
I’ve been handed over by the new Crusade
to the god of vengeance and the Mongol
skulking behind the mask of the Imam. (ibid)
The conflation between the past and present histories of Palestine is clear and
intentional in the above lines; the use of the word “Crusade” takes the reader back
to the old crusades hundreds of years ago, but the word “new” places the reader
in the more recent era, perhaps the British invaders of Palestine during the period
of the British Mandate of Palestine. Who does Darwish mean by the “Mongol
skulking behind the mask of the Imam?” Is it the actual Mongol of centuries past,
or like the new crusaders, are these new Mongols such as the current Zionist
invaders or perhaps the Arabs who conspired against the Palestinians since they
are “skulking behind the mask of the Imam?” The lack of clarity here is, I think,
intentional as Darwish wants to emphasize the point that in the same way that
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all these past conquerors have come and gone, so will the new invaders; only
the Palestinian has remained steadfast: “I am myself, despite being shattered on
metallic air.” The air is metallic, perhaps, due to all the wars that have been fought
on the land of Palestine. The contrast between the Palestinian and the different
invaders is that they have gone, but the Palestinian has remained, thus suggesting
that the most recent invaders, the Zionists, will likewise disappear. Emphasizing
the steadfastness of the Canaanite Palestinian, Darwish writes,
I have not gone, I have not returned
with elusive time.
I am myself despite my defeat. (ibid: 79)
Despite her or his defeat at the hands of the Zionist and past occupiers, the
Canaanite Palestinian has been:
... growing greener with the passing of years
on the oak’s trunk.
This is my place in my place,
and I see you now in the past the way you came,
but you can’t see me. (ibid: 76)
The foreign occupier who has “murdered, then inherited” (ibid) the people and
the land, respectively, cannot see the Canaanite Palestinian who has taken on the
whole topography of the land and has totally coalesced with the trees, skies, and
seas of Palestine.
Thus, this emphasis on house, home, land, and place is especially poignant for
the Palestinian poet, and one cannot but think that Said’s (1993) comments about
the reclamation of the land as being among the initial stages of resistance (273)
were first and foremost inspired by the tragedy of Palestine, Said’s own birthplace,
although Said makes these comments within the context of his discussion of Yeats’
decolonizing poetry. The strong desire to possess/reclaim the lost realm is not
restricted to the history of Anat and all the prophets who are the kinsmen of the
poet: “All the prophets are my kin” (Darwish, 2000: 77), but also incorporate the
ant and its ant food, trapped in the cracks in the marble:
Leave Jericho under her palm tree
but don’t steal my dream, don’t steal
the milk of my women’s breast
or the ant food dropped in the
cracks in the marble! (ibid: 76)
Whereas Yeats was hoping to revive and mold a new Irish consciousness,
Darwish’s more possessive and urgent reclamation of the land is a fight against
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the annihilation and complete erasure of Palestinian land, culture, history, and
national identity. For Darwish, it is not only about cultural annihilation, but as
Akash (2000) explains the very “extermination of a people’s sense of survival”
(44). Darwish offers his poetic oeuvre to maintain that sense of survival, which
can only be realized by traversing the shallow order of the present to the depths
of the matriarchal Canaanite Palestinian past represented by Anat who “suspends
over her garden” (ibid: 99) in Palestine and allows for Darwish’s poetry to become
the Palestinian’s “ladder to the moon” (ibid).
As Said (1994) so eloquently expresses it, Yeats, and I would add, Darwish,
“reconstruct[ ] [their] own [lives] poetically as an epitome of the national life”
(286). Whether the poem is personal, mystical, mythological, or more clearly
national, it all points to the homeland, the longing of the poet to be there. Yeats
(1997) will “arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/And a small cabin build there”
(19) while Darwish (2003) insists “I belong there./When heaven mourns for her
mother, I return heaven to her mother” (7) for the nature of Palestine has suffered
from the unnatural separation of its people from the land of Canaan/Palestine,
and for this reason, the poet has triumphantly endeavored to “break the rules”
(ibid) of the oppressive imperialistic/patriarchal construct of which the poet has
“dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home” (ibid).
References
Akash, Munir (2000). Introduction. In The Adam of Two Edens, ed. Mahmoud Darwish and Munir
Akash. Syracuse, NY: Jusoor and Syracuse University Press.
Akash, Munir (2003). Glossary. In Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and ed. Munir Akash and
Carolyn Forche (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein). Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press.
Antoon, Sinan (2008). “Farewell Mahmoud Darwish.” Al-Ahram Weekly Online. 14–20 August. Web.
Accessed June 28, 2013. <weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/910/fr1.htm>.
Auden, W. H. (1940). “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets
1997-2013. Web. Accessed July 15, 2013. <www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544>.
Cleary, Joe (2002). Literature, Partition and the Nation State Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel
and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwish, Mahmoud (2000). The Adam of Two Edens, ed. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse:
Jusoor and Syracuse University Press.
Darwish, Mahmoud (2003). Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. and ed. Munir Akash and Carolyn
Forche (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein). Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press.
Doggett, Rob (2002). Mixing Everything at the Beginning: Telling Stories about Empire in Yeats’s on
Baile’s Strand. Modern Drama, 45(4), 545-566.
Handal, Nathalie (2002). “Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet of Exile.” The Progressive. May. Web.
Accessed June 28, 2013. <progressive.org/node/1575>.
Howes, Marjorie (1996). Yeats’s Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Larrissy, Edward (1997a). Introduction. In The Major Works, ed. W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Larrissy, Edward (1997b). Notes. In The Major Works, ed. W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Mayo Clinic Staff (2012). “Hypnosis Definition.” Web. Accessed July 10, 2013. <http://www.
mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hypnosis/basics/definition/PRC-20019177>.
Pappe, Ilan (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Ramazani, Jahan and Hena, Omaar (2010-2013). “Imagining Ireland: Texts and Contexts.” The Norton
Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online. Web. Accessed July 10, 2013. <www.
wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_3_05/>.
Regan, Stephen (2006). W.B. Yeats: Irish Nationalism and Post-Colonial Theory. Nordic Irish Studies,
5, 87-99.
Regan, Stephen (2010). Chapter Six: Later Poetry. In W. B. Yeats: Irish Writers in Their Time, ed.
Edward Larrissy. Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press.
Said, Edward (1994). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Shaheen, Mohammad (2009). Introduction in Almond Blossoms and beyond Mahmoud Darwish.
Trans. Mohammad Shaheen. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
Soyinka, Wole (2008). A Night in Ramallah. Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, 33(Autumn/
Winter), 24-25.
Yeats, W. B. (1997). The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Hamdi YeatssIrelandDarwishs 2014

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Yeats's Ireland, Darwish's Palestine: The National in the Personal, Mystical, and

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something inspirational, irrational, and imaginative, which would create a reality

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This sea is mine. The fresh air is mine.

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Mine is the ghost and the haunted one.

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Deirdre’s connection with the supernatural mimics Yeats’s connection to the

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A similar gesture of reviving ancient mythological figures is found in Darwish’s

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Do you remember our migration route to Lebanon?

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