Take me to Australia, she said

By Author and Lawyer, Ms Randa Abdel-Fattah

In Mahmoud Darwish’s beautiful prose recollections in Memory for Forgetfulness, he recounts scenes with his Jewish lover, Rita. After they make love, she tells him, “Take me to Australia, where there’s no one belonging to you or me; not even you and me.” ... “Take me to Australia,” she said. And I realised the time had come for us to get away from discord and war. “Take me to Australia” - because I couldn’t reach Jerusalem.

That is where we Palestinians in Australia find ourselves today.

 Often enough when we visit our families and friends in Palestine, having made a journey that has crossed more than one ocean and more than one continent, we are often lauded for our travelling stamina. And then almost suddenly impressed upon us is the striking and almost angry realisation that our tragedy has the ability to disperse us as far as possible from our homeland - even “to the end of the world.” Palestinians in Australia are “at the end of the world,” but Palestine has remained close to their hearts, consciousness, and actions.

For the vast majority of Palestinians in Australia, there is no lived experience of Palestine. The link to Palestine as a homeland has therefore passed through one generation to the next by acts of memory. But how have Palestinians, whether under occupation or in exile, been able to express the pain of only having memories?

Mahmoud Darwish, widely considered our national poet, was able to do so, evoking the loss of one’s homeland in more than two dozen books of poetry and prose, which sold millions of copies and made him the most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world. He gave expression to our people's ordinary longings and desires and, without intending to be, was our collective therapist. His famous poem, "Mother", a jailed son's nostalgia for his mother's bread and coffee, was, as he said: “a poet writing a simple confession that he loves his mother. But it became a collective song. All my work is like that. I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory." 

His earlier collections, Leaves of Olive (1964) and Lover From Palestine (1966), made his reputation as a poet of resistance although he considered this a burden which he both relished and chafed against. Indeed, Hanan Ashrawi observed that Darwish, "started out as a poet of resistance and then became a poet of conscience." 

My first introduction to a Darwish poem occurred when I was a teenager. I was browsing through my father’s bookshelf when I came across a book called The Disinherited by Fawzi Turk. I emerged from that book transformed, confronted as I was by the tormented, alienated Palestinian living in exile. All the barbecues, social gatherings and fundraisers organized by the Palestinian groups of which my family was a member and which we attended on weekends were nothing compared to the power of words to capture the suffering and frustration of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. And it was while reading this book that I came across Darwish’s electrifying poem, ‘Identity Card’, written in 1964, and which was addressed to an Israeli policeman. I was mesmorised by the rallying cry of defiance, by Darwish’s audaciousness, by the fact that the poem was unsentimental yet intensely moving. I copied out the poem, word for word. It was the process that intrigued me. Reading the words, writing them down, trying to put myself in the headspace of Darwish. It was as if, by writing his words down, allowing his admired style to occupy my brain, I could train myself in his image. A hopelessly delusional teenage yearning, I concede, but I was overcome by how his words could convert the mind and soul. One is inclined to think that Darwish lost a little of that kind of idealism when he said: "I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."   

Or perhaps that statement reflects, not a loss of idealism, but his humility, for Darwish’s poems did transform, did change hearts and minds and like it or not, he was our voice, a repository of national consciousness, our way of mediating on our identity, anguish and dreams, of expressing our narrative and telling our story, particularly when our narrative is often represented by the media and some politicians in the language of “isms”: terrorism, extremism, fanaticism, radicalism; a four-letter suffix capable of systematic dehumanization and de-legitimisation of our legitimate struggle for liberation. 

But to speak of Darwish only as a poet of resistance is inadequate a and ignores the fact that while his earlier work may have been conceived as explicitly political writing, his later works were dominated by themes of love, human mortality, freedom of expression and of thought, ideas that people identify with universally. Much has been said about his poetry containing a universal humanity, the fact that he wrote mainly about love, for example his collection A Bed for the Stranger (1998) his first book entirely devoted to love. On this Darwish said: Yet even the ability to love is a "form of resistance: we Palestinians are supposed to be dedicated to one subject - liberating Palestine. This is a prison. We're human, we love, we fear death, we enjoy the first flowers of spring. So to express this is resistance against having our subject dictated to us. If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don't allow me to write love poems." 

Perhaps, then, there is more subversive potential in love and beauty. As one writer observed, the range of his work was ‘proof that Palestinian life is not reducible to victimization and loss.’

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye beautifully described Darwish’s legacy: He was “the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging, exquisitely tuned singer of images that invoke, link, and shine a brilliant light into the world’s whole heart. What he speaks has been embraced by readers around the world – his in an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered.”