Suparna Sengupta (India) has over 18 years of experience teaching at the undergraduate level in Calcutta and Bangalore. Since 2008, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Jyoti Nivas College Autonomous. She completed her graduate studies at Bethune College (2002) and her postgraduate studies at the University of Calcutta (2004). A published translator, her work has appeared in multiple national and international online journals, as well as in anthologies on Partition poetry and South Asian literature. Sengupta has translated modernist poets from Bengal and Bangladesh and has edited anthologies of contemporary Bengali poetry, which were released at the Calcutta Book Fair in 2017 and 2018.

 

 

English

 

HOME & THE HOMELESS: NATIONALIST IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE OF RESISTANCE IN SELECT WRITINGS OF MAHMOUD DARWISH

 

 

 

 

 

The social and political context of territorial, systemic and cultural violence is central to the understanding of reading, speaking and writing as a mode of resistance. Resistance Literature as a category of narrative is critical in the ways it de-canonises the dominant modes of expression and extends the purview of literature to the domain of ethical activism. As a discipline, literature not only explores narratives and aesthetics of resistance; literature also asks questions about politics and ethics of the said representation. Thus, literary authorship works within a field of ideological construct, which goes on to shape the reader's outlook towards a social issue. Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet-activist, has been one of the pioneers in the field of modern resistance poetry. Employing his state of exile, he has scripted a language of resistance, that constructs nationhood and home, as an idea and as an experiential reality. Darwish’s in-betweenness between home and migrancy, engenders an idiom of poetry, exploring the poetics and politics of resistance. The paper intends to look into select writings of Darwish that capture the Palestinian’s confrontation with Israeli neo-colonialism and the shifting notions of home and identity, thereof.  

 

 

 

 

 

Keywords: resistance, literature, ideology, identity, Palestine, poetry

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION & METHOD

 

 

 

In the 1970s,  the Dalit Panther poet Daya Pawar in his poem Oh Great Poet, questions why Valmiki denied his caste in writing the epic-in so doing, he denied his community and his descendant the agency to narrate their history. In speaking of Valmiki’s betrayal, Pawar speaks of an entire history of literary silencing. In 2009, women fighters of the Tamil Eelam Struggle in Sri Lanka witnessed a state-sponsored genocidal war being whitewashed with mainstream monickers like “war hero”, “humanitarian work” and “rehabilitation”. As survivors of war-time sexual violence - three Eelam women combatants, Captain Vaanathi, Captain Kasturi, Captain Aatilatchumi take recourse to poetry. Meena Kandaswamy’s book The Orders were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle records their resistance. In 1911, when American scholar Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Pichu, Pablo Neruda travelled to the site to pay homage to the indigenous community and its history of Spanish colonial genocide. This was published as Neruda’s most significant expression of anti-bourgeoisie resistance-Canto General. Through these three examples, I intend to highlight that oppression and therefore resistance is political, gendered, racialist, and sometimes even geographical. To these we can add several other axes of repression-ethnicity, religion, language, sexuality-and we can therefore deduce that every act of resistance and mode of resistance has a situatedness within a power matrix. Literature too falls within this ideological ambit of control and resistance. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish traverses these many arc-points of resistance-political, historical, geographical, literary. His dual position as an ideologue of resistance and of exile, brings about a new idiom of nationalist identity in the history of Palestine. My contention in this paper is that Darwish has employed his state of refugeeship to script poetry that explores the poetics and politics of resistance; exile, in his writings, is a condition and pre-condition of the dynamics of his resistance. Under the double bind of being an internally displaced refugee as well as a political émigré, Darwish developed a language of poetry which evolved with his shifting identities. I have selected three of his poems -Identity Card, Who Am I Without Exile and In Jerusalem-through which I examine the tone, voice, nature of the speaker, and his shifting relationship with his homeland.

 

 

 

The social and political context of territorial, systemic and cultural violence is central to the understanding of reading, speaking and writing as a mode of resistance. The tradition of authorship- and theories associated with it- thus explore how the author has transformed from being an individual creator to being a public entity entrenched in political, cultural, and historical structures. From being the Aristotelian moral guide to being post-colonial voice of resistance, the figure of the author as a public intellectual has evolved. The literary author thus not only connotes autonomy, creativity and inventiveness but also ideology, positionality and point of view. If the emergence of Resistance Literature was to voice out nationalist movements and liberation struggles, it is but natural that authors of resistance writings would ‘read against the grain’ of canonical literature. Literary authorship and canon-formation have colluded and collaborated to push forward empire-building and nationalism. For every Neruda there is a Matthew Arnold, for every Kandaswamy there is a Kipling speaking of “timelessness” and “eternal truths”. Resistance is thus an idea opposing a status-quo. As the exiled intellectual, Darwish is this opponent to political/ideological status quo. His language of poetry engendered concerns of home, homelessness, alienation, belonging-while as an ideologue of resistance, his poetry spoke of nationalism, nationhood, confrontation with Israeli neo-colonialism and identity-reclamation. Through select poems of Darwish I intend to explore how the positions of exile and resistance have constituted his poetic consciousness and indeed his attitude towards Palestine.

 

 

 

 

 

SURVEY

 

 

 

Since my paper is trying to look at resistance through the lens of exile, the framework will try to establish the convergence of the two. Although Barbara Hurlow’s 1987 book Resistance Literature laid down the academic domain, in theory and in practice, many viewpoints on resistance had emerged out of anti-colonial and post-colonial movements. From the Marxist to the Negritude to the Deconstructionist - resistance as an act, has been located in what has been written and how it has been written. Writing as resistance, resistance against theory and theorizing towards resistance -all have formed the bedrock of resistance literature. Written in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth explores the role of the native intellectual in framing a language of resistance. This native intellectual-in the Gramscean sense an organic intellectual someone, capable of mobilizing his class-must try to understand why and how resistance can be built up through understanding of colonialism, use of violence, mechanisms of oppression and decolonizing the native nation. Fanon calls for a pan-Africanism that must return to myths, legends, practices through which Black identity could be resurrected. The native intellectual must go through stages of imitation, rejection and re-adaptation-however, he must also critically question his own culture and its prejudices. Fanon suggested a national literature/national culture, a collective Negritude movement where Black-African writers theorized about the capacity and agency of native literature to resist colonialism. ‘Ngugi Wa Thiongo in Decolonising the Mind and On Abolition of English Departments talks about the ways in which Eurocentric scholarship deflects attention from colonialism and turns to abstractions of universalism and humanism. English and the English canon have forced natives to internalize the imperialist logic and therefore he advocates return to Gikuyu and rejection of English. Thus, the role of literature and language in resisting imperialist practices and Eurocentric narratives was emphasized upon by post-colonial thinkers. (Nayar, 2023)

 

 

 

It was two Palestinians whose own political positionings, brought about a turn in theorizing this field-Ghasan Kanafani and Edward Said. Himself a political activist, Kanafani proposed a mode of writing-poetry, play, memoir, journal-that would speak against Israeli Apartheid State. Kanafani also wanted to understand strategies by which social change and public opinion could be mobilized. In his study Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948-1966, Ghassan Kanafani, in referring to Palestinian literature as “resistance literature,” invokes the importance of historical and political situatedness. He draws comparison with popular liberation struggles of South America and Africa, where resistance is in writing and interpreting these contexts.  He identifies certain conditions for resistance writings-political repression, military occupation, censorship, and a collective population’s  shared relationship to their land. It was important that through resistance literature, this collective-now a body of refugees-was constantly reminded of their right to the abandoned land. Unlike Western canon’s insistence on universalism, resistance literature therefore focussed on the local, the historical and the political. Much like the Negritude thinkers, Kanafani too warns us about the gatekeepers of Western canon and their ideological manipulation-resistance starts with opposing these aesthetic and ethical standards. A political siege was followed by a cultural siege as Arab voices were cut off from global politics; military and administrative occupation controlled publication and circulation of Palestinian writings.  (Arif, 2022)

 

Under the circumstances, exile proved to be a necessary and productive condition for literary creativity and resistance. Edward Said’s works theorise this history and outcome of social, political and geographical displacement of Palestinians. Said’s theory emerges out of his lived reality of exile and a series of displacements. He saw the consequences of the 1948 Palestine tragedy of Naqba and the foundation of Israel through his parents’ experiences and through the collective statelessness imposed on the Palestinians. His own personal experience of exile intensified when he moved to the USA.  In his 1984 work, Reflections on Exile Said describes exile as a series of departures and returns wherein there is constant anxiety and uncertainty for the diaspora who move away from home, not knowing when or if they can see it again. Drawing on the example of his homeland Palestine, he observes how another exiled community, the Israelites, exiled Palestinian people. Said did not view the state of exile as being transient, something which ended with a return to the homeland. Rather, Said views exile as being permanent, an experience which is irreversible because it is not just a physical displacement but a change in thought and perception. The exilic mind therefore does not accept the status quo, but challenges, criticises and evolves. Therefore, according to Said, exile can offer a state of agency, necessary for intellectual and creative freedom. In his article Perspective: Exile Literature and the Diasporic Indian Writer (2009), researcher Amit Shankar Saha cites a Doordarshan interview of Edward Said, where he reflected on the condition of exile:

 

“I think that if one is an intellectual, one has to exile oneself from what has been given to you, what is customary, and to see it from a point of view that looks at it as if it were something that is provisional and foreign to oneself. That allows for independence—commitment—but independence and a certain kind of detachment.” ¹ (Said as cited in Saha, 2009)

 

Vinay Lal in his paper The Enigmas of Exile: Reflections on Edward Said (2005) encapsulates that for Said, the ideal intellectual is a metaphorical emigre, committed to a willing state of homelessness, an ‘exilic consciousness’ (Said as cited in Lal, 2005). Resistance is born out of this wandering identity, a creative shape-shifting, a political camouflage against the state which has made one stateless in the first place. Said’s exilic consciousness thus engenders a form of resistance of the banished Other to be able to write his own selfhood; resist Orientalist biases; and indeed challenge ideas of citizenry and its rigid allegiances. Resistance thus becomes literary, ideological, political. The perception of the exiled keeps on changing, so does their relationship to the homeland and their view of nationalism.

 

 

 

CONTEXT & PURPOSE

 

This position I have taken that exile and resistance are not antithetical but complementary to each other, is demonstrated through the writings of Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish wrote about his identity as a Palestinian Arab living as a refugee-internally displaced as also exiled. Darwish was born in al Birwah village, located in present day Israel. Following the Israeli occupation of Palestine, his family had to move to Lebanon for a period of two years. In their absence the village was raided and colonised by Israeli troops. Much of Darwish’s early life was overshadowed by military encounters and intervention. Darwish took up journalism as his profession when he settled down in Haifa. In his daily encounter with Israeli neo-colonialism and state persecution, he realized his mode of resistance was his poetry. Darwish fell under scrutiny as his poems became widely read and circulated. They became a channel for transmitting political messages, which led to his multiple imprisonments. He later joined the Communist Party of Israel in 1960. In 1970 he went to Moscow to study for a year and the following year he settled in Beirut, beginning his 26 year-long exile from his homeland.

 

( “Mahmoud Darwish's Biography”, 2008)

 

 

 

In reading Palestine’s history we find, that Palestine has witnessed the rule of several pastoral groups such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and even the Crusaders. The Ottoman Empire controlled Palestinian territory for almost three centuries till Britain established its control over the region following World War I. Palestine was placed under the ‘League of Nations’ in 1922 where all the territories eventually became independent nation-states except Palestine owing to Western economic and political interest. The period beginning from 1922 witnessed an influx of Jewish population returning from Europe who occupied over 75% of the Palestinian land by 1947. This process was facilitated by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 whereby Palestinian land was declared to be the national home for the Jews, completely disregarding the Arab claim to the land. In 1948 when the State of Israel was established, the Arabs failed to retain control over their land, which was subsequently shared amongst Jordan, Egypt and Israel. This period witnessed a mass expulsion and migration of Palestinian Arabs. Those who chose to stay back were victimised by majoritarian politics. The Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestine Liberation Army were established in 1964 to fight for the Arab cause. This led to a series of violent attacks and clashes with the Israel army and civilians. During this time of great disturbance, Darwish was under exile. The Palestinian struggle culminated in the Intifada uprising between 1987 and 1993 where hundreds of Palestinians were killed and thousands were injured and imprisoned. The peace-making process began in 1993 with the Oslo Accords. Since then there have been several attempts to restore peace but Palestine remains a conflicted territory till date. Darwish was forced to move away from his home because of the prevailing social and historical realities. The sense of uprooting from home and the need to form a new identity and live in exile is reflected in the language of resistance in his poetry (“The Question of Palestine”, 2024).

 

 

 

DISCUSSION

 

 

 

The term exilic consciousness according to Said (1999) is the ability of the exiled individual to seeking of home and thinking of home while being outside of the physical space of home. Said also states that the diaspora constantly feels ‘out of place’ and the striving and anxiousness to belong gives rise to the exilic consciousness. Darwish was a child of Nakba, the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe. Darwish’s exile became his strength to question and criticise Israeli injustice and domination of the Arabs. The taking away of Darwish’s homeland was the erasure and denial of the existence of the history of an entire community. He therefore repeatedly talks about the quest for a homeland and his poems become the collective voice of the Palestinians. Darwish has constantly emphasised the importance of history and memory. The idea of home and the Holy Land of Jerusalem in his poetry has undergone a shift over time, life and career. In the initial phase of his career, Jerusalem was a symbol of nostalgia and a desired romantic object. Jerusalem in his later poetry became a political symbol, a place where Arab identity is rooted. In the final phase of his poetry, Darwish comes to terms with the reality of Jerusalem, anchored in mythology, history and geography of both the space and the mind. The period of homelessness in Darwish’s exile was spent in great agony and a strong longing for the home that he had to leave behind. In Identity Card,(1964), Who am I Without Exile (1999), In Jerusalem(2005), he examines his own shifting attitude towards Palestine, what exile actually means to him politically and intellectually and thereafter what language of resistance can be formed out of this. At times anger, at times resignation and at other times an acceptance of the pervasiveness of home and homeland, no matter how far away he is. This allows Darwish to construct his own nationalist identity, much in the vein of the post-colonial thinkers, Fanon and ‘Ngugi. (Ramona, 2016)

 

 

 

The poem Identity Card (1964) refers to the document issued by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Arabs as a means of monitoring their movement and activities. He wrote it at a time when he was growing up under the Israeli occupation. The state of Israel decreed that no Arab could access any public resources of Israel without the possession of the identity card. Without the identity card, a Palestinian is rendered stateless and hence an internally-displaced refugee in his own land. As a response to this Darwish claims that he, as a Palestinian, works hard for his survival and does not leech off the state’s resources. Darwish like many other Arabs lost what belonged to his family and is therefore enraged at the continued Israeli surveillance which reduces Palestinians to citizens of an Apartheid state. The identity card paradoxically lays down various categories of entitlements, but also reinforces apartheid. The resistance in the poem comes in the form of the refrain ‘Write down/ I am an Arab’²(Darwish as cited in TWN 2016), whereby he identifies with the pre-Israelite identity, mythical and historical at the same time. Arab history is of the land, of the region and of the several generations of Arabs and hence his connection to rocks and stones deepens his roots. Much like post-colonial Negritude thinkers, he reflects on the impossibility of reconstructing the ‘pure’ home (Nayar 2023). The poem lays down the opposition between being an Israeli inhabitant and an Arab refugee at the same time. But this self-same ID card is also his means to subvert the state of Israel-the ‘other’ now confirms Israel’s fractured being. When Darwish says he does not hate or encroach, he is directly accusing Israel of doing so. The hard work and compassion with which his family has raised him is slowly diminishing because of the rising anger and resistance against the Israeli oppression. There is anger, warning, defiance but above all pride in being an Arab. Through an open confrontation with the police, he issues a forewarning-deprived of dignity and livelihood, the Palestine would not hesitate to turn the usurper’s flesh to food. The repetition of the first person pronoun ‘I’ and ‘my’ asserts Darwish’s nationalist identity paradoxically born out of his victimhood and hence his resistance.

 

 

 

Darwish talks about his condition of exile in Who am I, Without Exile?(1999) where he refers to himself as a stranger who has been taken away from his land and no great force on earth is able to reunite him with it. This despair galvanises his resistance towards Israeli colonialism-he re-reads Palestine history through the history of Arab nationalism between the Nile and the Euphrates. Though the thought of his childhood memories and his community would make him yearn for home, there was a dilemma as to whether to return or stay in exile which had become his identity. He refers to himself as a stranger, yet, in speaking of the wandering Arab, he unites himself with the un-imprisonable Arab man. This is the Arab who has survived all forms of imperialisms-from Roman, to Ottoman to European. In contrast to Identity Card, where he despairs over the loss of the ‘pure’ home-in this poem, he finds exile is liberating for it takes away, the desire to go back to the ‘pure’ home again. He asserts he belongs to a larger community of Arabs, which is ever flowing like the river. Drawing upon the lost landscape, he writes of the river, water, palm tree striking a bond between the wandering Arab and his imagined community. The safety and leisure of ‘palm trees’ have never captured Arab imagination. Peace or war, no matter what, Arabs and their homelands have always been separated. Much like Fanon’s native intellectual, he undertakes an inward re-reading of his own identity as an Arab, contextualising his own exile. Said’s theory which makes exile as a permanent state, thus proves to be a necessary condition for his resistant Arab selfhood. Thousands of Palestinians lived in exile along with Darwish and on behalf of them all, Darwish says that their identity was constructed in exile. He uses nature imagery to build a sense of despair about the lack of unity in the Arab world and hence the need for transformation and resistance. He draws on mythology to look back at the liberation of Semitic races under Moses, originally in a state of exile. Greed, corruption and politics have laid siege to Arab identity-it is precisely because of his exile that he can question Arab nationalism and its impact on Palestine. The poet and the homeland are in a contradictory state-separated physically, yet bound to each other in thought, eternally. The Palestine man is dead, the Palestine poet lives. Exile kills; exile engenders resistance through poetry. In the trajectory of the poem Darwish expresses melancholy, despair, longing but above all a critical reflection of what it means to be a Palestinian man.  Palestine thus lives through its migrants. Exile is therefore reflection, examination and interrogation of Arab history. In fantasies, legends, oral tales, Palestine defies its colonisers.

 

 

 

When Darwish wrote In Jerusalem (2005), he began to come to terms with the divided nature of his land. In the poem, Jerusalem migrates several stages-from being a mythical setting to being an object of desire to being a place in world history rising above communal divisions. He views the history of Jerusalem not only from the point of view of an Arab but as a descendent of the land, transcending physical boundaries, predating history. Darwish addresses his inability to conceive what or who the city stands for. He does not know where he truly belongs. Throughout the poem, we see Darwish’s transfiguration, passing through every stage of Jerusalem’s history. The city and the poet migrate together.

 

 

 

Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

 

I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see

 

no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.

 

All this light is for me.³

 

(Darwish as cited in Poetry Foundation, 2024)

 

 

 

Darwish brings in aspects of mythology and history from various Semitic communites that Jerusalem has housed. He questions why humanity cannot accept differences in ideology like the prophets of different religions did. He embarks on a journey to understand this, he is lonely and ignorant but as he moves, his identity migrates with him. Throughout the poem he draws images from religions like Christianity and Judaism to show that Jerusalem is beyond nationalist definitions. Darwish’s quest is similar to that of the prophets who could negate identity politics and assert a common brotherhood. 

 

 

 

Alone, the prophet Muhammad

 

spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”

 

Then what? A woman soldier shouted:

 

Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?

 

I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die⁴

 

(Darwish as cited in Poetry Foundation, 2024)

 

 

 

The last stanza is indicative of the present conflict in his homeland. Darwish laments that the city has failed to live up to God’s prophecy. For the first time, in his career of writing exile literature, his perception of resistance changes. If in Identity Card resistance was through confrontation, in Who am I, Without Exile, we found a critical insider’s reflection. In Jerusalem, comes at the end of this trajectory, where his language of resistance is seeking co-existence and reconciliation. His tone has transfigured from being angry, despairing and alienated; it now seeks oneness with Isaiah’s message :

 

 

 

“If you don’t believe you won’t believe”⁵

 

(Darwish as cited in Poetry Foundation, 2024)

 

 

 

In a significant departure from his earlier poetry, he re-looks at the politics of nationalist identity and its entrenchment in violence.  At the centre of the poem, the word ‘transfigured’ stands firm and lonely, indicating his own transfiguration to a trans-national figure of seeker of peace, rather than a subject tied to a land. In Jerusalem brings a spiritualist and hence a radical approach in subverting nationalism and identity politics. Jerusalem is independent of both the Palestinian and the Israelite, and as such liberated from communalist segregation. The cycle of violence and destruction has bound the victor and the victim in an endless thirst for revenge that refuses to recognise the cross-cultural identities of the prophets and the messengers. Darwish becomes an objective observer, a historian reporting on the evolution of the land he is exiled from. 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION:

 

 

 

In an interview, Darwish says:

 

 

 

“..poems can’t establish a state, but can establish a metaphorical homeland…I think my poems have built some houses in this landscape”⁶ (Darwish as cited in Toha, 2020)

 

 

 

Darwish is a poet of exile who is defined by this exilic identity. Operating from a place outside his home, he reflects on the history, political condition of Palestine and therefore the modes of resistance. As Said theorised, exile becomes a permanent state because it results in a change in thought and perception. Darwish could not look at himself without exile. A return therefore did not mean an undoing of exile, rather it meant living with continued exilic consciousness. Darwish faces constant anxiety about a home which does not belong to him anymore. He speaks not only as an individual but also on behalf of his community, to validate a shared migrant experience. Darwish in some sense ‘chose’ exile to be able to write and continue the act of resistance through poetry. He therefore becomes ‘cultural migrants’ in a globalised world as John C Hawley terms in his essay Theorizing the Diaspora. As an exiled intellectual, Darwish revisits history to understand the processes that have shaped his homelessness-in the world outside, he found a home, as the homeland remains a distant dream (Joseph et al, 2006) . Marxist critic Theodore Adorno in his essay Culture Critique and Society laid bare the establishment’s ideological collusion with intellectuals, promoting reification of belief systems. According to Adorno, culture must be subjected to scrutiny for it produces everything from philosophy to art to science to criticism of poetry and of course literature. In Adorno’s reading, the Holocaust was a culmination of a series of civilisational practices, where genocide and silence around genocide is normalised. Literary silence falls within this ambit too. He famously states:

 

 

 

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…Absolute reification, which presupposed

 

intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.”⁷

 

(Adorno, 1955 as cited in Schmidt, 2013)

 

 

 

He is drawing attention to the role of the author, critic, reader which must be alert to the

 

production of those cultures that result in humanitarian disasters like Holocaust. Adorno

 

implicitly talks of authorial accountability-neutrality must raise suspicion about the agenda of

 

the author. Czeslaw Milosz in his monograph The Witness of Poetry records the modern poet

 

as a witness, documenter, journalist, participant, memory-keeper, mythologiser. The author in this post-colonial/postcolonial context is shifted from his third person role to being a witness or a bearer of truth. The literary author as a witness endures exile, censorship, political persecution, arrest, conflict and violence. Act of writing for such an author is an existential choice of self-expression and self-transformation. The author’s act of witnessing problematizes their own understanding of an event, it’s impact on their consciousness and the responsibility they bear to narrate the truth. The text -in aesthetics and in politics -thus becomes a necessary historical archive for readers who now emerge as new witnesses, as new modes of storytellers. My paper attempts to explore this existential and political dimension of literary authorship as represented by Darwish. Through a select study of his writings I have tried to examine, how exile defines resistance, tackles questions of ethics, interprets social injustice and captures his own subjectivity as a historically displaced agent. Hannah Arendt’s provocative report The Banality of Evil speaks about the dangers of normalising violence -she argues it creates “holes of oblivion” (Arendt as cited in Birmingham 2003), preventing enquiries into injustices of any kind. Darwish fills up these holes with his resistance poetry of anger, despair, resignation and at times, of faith.

 

 

 

By

 

Suparna Sengupta

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INDEX

 

1. Saha, Shankar Amit. “Perspective: Exile Literature and the Diasporic Indian Writer”. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Volume I, Number 2, Autumn 2009. Rupkatha. www.rupkatha.com/0102exileliteratureanddiasporicindianwriter.pdf, © www.rupkatha.com
2. Darwish, Mahmoud. Third World Resurgence No. 310/311. TWN. June/July 2016. https://www.twn.my/title2/resurgence/2016/310-311/poetry1.htm
3. Darwish, Mahmoud. Poetry Foundation. PoetryFoundation. 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52551/in-jerusalem
4. Darwish, Mahmoud. Poetry Foundation. PoetryFoundation. 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52551/in-jerusalem
5. Darwish, Mahmoud. Poetry Foundation. PoetryFoundation. 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52551/in-jerusalem
6. Toha, Abu Mosab. “Who Am I Without Exile?”. Arrow Smith. arrowsmith. 2020.

 

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/journal/without-exile

 

7.      Schmidt, James. Poetry After Auschwitz – What Adorno Didn’t Say. Persistent Enlightenment. https://persistentenlightenment.com/2013/05/21/poetry-after- auschwitz-what-adorno-didnt-say/ . 2013

 

WORKS CITED

 

PRIMARY SOURCES:

 

1. Darwish, Mahmoud. Third World Resurgence No. 310/311. TWN. June/July 2016. https://www.twn.my/title2/resurgence/2016/310-311/poetry1.htm

 

 

 

2. Darwish, Mahmoud. Poetry Foundation. PoetryFoundation. 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52549/who-am-i-without-exile

 

 

 

3. Darwish, Mahmoud. Poetry Foundation. PoetryFoundation. 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52551/in-jerusalem

 

 

 

SECONDARY SOURCES:

 

1. Layoun, Mary. “Harlow, Resistance Literature”. Middle East Report. Merip. July/Aug, 1989. https://merip.org/1989/07/harlow-resistance-literature/

 

 

 

2. Arif, Nida. “Resistance Literature: A Critical Reading of Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature (1987) and After Lives (1996)”. The Text. Vol.4, No.1, ISSN: 2581-9526. Thetextjournal. Jan, 2022. http://thetextjournal.com/text_admin/issue/60619-3-nida-arif-jan-2022-pdf.pdf

 

 

 

3. Nayar, Pramod. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism. ISBN 978-81-317-2735-5. Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd. 2023

 

 

 

4. Joudar, Ahmed. “Exiles and Plurality of Cultures in Edward Said’s Perspective”. European Academic Research. Vol. VIII, Issue 9, Impact Factor: 3.4546 (UIF) DRJI Value: 5.9 (B+). Dec, 2020. EUACADEMIC
5.  https://www.euacademic.org/UploadArticle/4698.pdf

 

 

 

6. Lal, Vinay. “The Enigmas of Exile: Reflections on Edward Said”. Economic and Political Weekly, January 1, 2005 (30-34). http://vlal.bol.ucla.edu/Vinay/SaidExil.pdf

 

 

 

7. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile”. Granta. Granta Trust (charity number 1184638). Feb, 2012. https://granta.com/reflections-on-exile/

 

 

 

8. Tenorio, Marcos Sayid. “Palestinian resistance poetry by Mahmoud Darwish”. MEMO. Middleeastmonitor. 2021. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211030-palestinian-resistance-poetry-by-mahmoud-darwish/

 

 

 

9. Hamdan, A Marwan. “Mahmoud Darwishe's Voicing Poetics of Resistance: A Receptionist Review”. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, Vol. 6, No. 10; Oct, 2016 (171-175). IJHSSNET.
10. https://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_6_No_10_October_2016/25.pdf

 

 

 

11. Wadi, Ramona. ‘Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the politics of Palestinian identity’. MEMO. Middleeastmonitor. 2016. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211030-palestinian-resistance-poetry-by-mahmoud-darwish/

 

 

 

12. “The Question of Palestine”. United Nations. un. Copyright © United Nations. Aug, 2024. https://www.un.org/unispal/history/

 

 

 

13. “Mahmoud Darwish's Biography”. Mahmoud Darwish Foundation. mahmouddarwish. 2008
14. https://mahmouddarwish.ps/en/article/80000166/Mahmoud-Darwish-Foundation

 

 

 

15. Hawley, J. C. “Theorizing the Diaspora”. In C. Joseph and J. Wilson (Eds.), Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (pp. 3-16) Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 2006.
16. https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1121&context=engl

 

 

 

17. Schmidt, James. Poetry After Auschwitz – What Adorno Didn’t Say. Persistent Enlightenment. 2013. https://persistentenlightenment.com/2013/05/21/poetry-after-auschwitz-what-adorno-didnt-say/