Mahmoud Darwish

Surrealism is no stranger than the world we live in, but as an art form it is an act of good faith. Elena Koutrianos brought together several of the essays here at Oxford two years ago. Our delays, while we searched for funding, were bizarre.

Koutrianos’ excerpt from the surrealist manifesto by Bretón, Rivera, and Trotsky (p.11), cites Marx as saying "The writer [looks on his work as] an end in itself and so little a means . . . that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work . . . . The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity." The Marxist press and the capitalist press both aside, the idea is fundamental to any concept of art, journalistic integrity, or dialogue.

Surrealism seeks renewal by avoiding conventional modes of non-thought, contending that the pursuit of the conventional leads to dishonest rationalizations. Surrealism asks fundamental questions about the nature of creativity, freedom, and the possibility of honest discourse. And that is what interests me here, not propensity of people to see it as merely the odd and the bizarre.

In the feeding frenzy after the death of Diana Spencer, a universal hunger for what seemed a beautiful and courageous spirit was projected on her and magnified, in contrast to the royal family. People filled the streets with flowers to honor values that seemed to light on her like butterflies. There was enormous anger at those who failed to match her image of dignity. Dodi Al Fayed, the producer of Chariots of Fire, the fine film about anti-semitism in the UK, was dismissed as merely a playboy, perhaps because he was Arab, perhaps because of his wealth. Around the clock for weeks, there was little difference between the invasion of privacy by the paparazzi and the feeding on the tragedy by those reporting it. The commentators obviously felt on trial themselves. They and the paparazzi used each other; for them, anything is game. "Well you can’t take their jobs away," the commentators said, "they have children to feed." Their job is to invade the privacy of anyone whose photos are salable. And it helps sales if you tint the facts lurid.

The eloquent and relatively restrained eulogy of Diana’s brother, the Earl of Spencer—a eulogy more tasteful than the translation—was interpreted by the press as an attack on the royal family. Now the tabloids he attacked target his own troubled life.

Corporate telemarketers invade homes and offices like clockwork any day of the week or weekend and any time of the evening. We must buy protection to avoid them and surrender a bit of our taste and our openness to the world. This has nothing to do with journalism or feeding children and everything to do with commercialism.

The Conditions of Dialogue

In March, I spent three weeks in Israel and the West Bank to participate in an international conference sponsored by the Palestinian Writers’ Union. One can know little about the situation there without seeing and feeling it through the eyes and concerns of Israelis and Palestinians. And even then one will be confused. I talked to poets, artists, intellectuals in both Israel and the West Bank. I was struck by their honesty, in both cases, and their desire for reconciliation, mutual respect, and dialogue. And I was struck by the wailing walls between them. It was best put by one of the leading Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Darwish, much of whose life had been spent in involuntary exile because of a poem. He would, he said, have no problem entering a dialogue with Israelis who know and can say that Israel’s policy toward Palestinians undermines the hope of peace for all, "and I find no embarrassment in saying that this dialogue will deepen my knowledge of myself and my human dilemma in its meeting point with the other’s dilemma, for he and I will hold a duel in praise of the diaspora!"3

Everyone has a cell phone, for immediate access to crucial information. Back in the U.S., I heard by e-mail (before it hit the news here) about the Jerusalem market bombing in a mall I had walked through a few weeks earlier. But of course cell phones and e-mail do not assure a higher mode of dialogue.

Good Faith amidst Confusion

In East Jerusalem, I had met,through a friend, Nasser Eddin Nashashibi, the retired editor of major newspapers of the Islamic world. His living room had photos of him with (and signed by) almost every famous head of state—east and west—of this half-century. Outside of his home, he had suffered insults by the police. Even trusted Arabs and Israelis had the mark of survivors. There’s no mistaking the images. Nashashibi gave me a copy of his book, Jerusalem’s Other Voice4, about his uncle and mentor, a long time former mayor of Jerusalem. Neither its praise of moderation nor its historical point of view would make him popular with either side in an arena rife with distortion. But his book was an attempt to set the account of Jerusalem straight. While I was at his home, a young Israeli journalist dropped in. The young journalist had been the first Israeli to interview Arafat, a courageous act at the time. I was touched by the firm friendship between the older and younger journalists, Palestinian and Israeli, and their obvious mutual respect.

Though less disconcerting than the claims of divine right on either side, I was shocked to hear Israelis justify taking Palestinian land on the grounds that other countries, including Arabs, had expelled Jews and taken their possessions, or that there was plenty of Arab land.

The concern of poets for the violence to poetry, to language, to the soul, shows up again and again in the poems of both Israelis and Palestinians, poets a few miles away from one another, who hunger for a context that would enable them to speak to each other, for they have much in common and are conversant with each others’ disordered houses.5

Israel is an important state in the Middle East and in the world. Neither Palestine nor Israel will be destroyed except at an unrecoverable cost to all in the region and the world. And the destruction of either will most likely come from within, from those who do not want peace with the other. For most on both sides clearly want values that are only possible with peace and stability. Jerusalem is the key to peace. If it can be shared and if humiliation of all parties can cease. But peace will never come by holding onto and nurturing fantasies, grievances, mistakes, and the simplistic thinking of the past. The future must have a different and better shape than the present, and better dialogue. There are lessons to be retained from the past, and propriety of deportment, argument, and discussion are among them. Much flawed contemporary thinking and practice needs burial. What we do—in businesses, universities, the media, and the government—drowns out our arguments.

Recognizing the Other

In April I was invited to another writers’ conference. A book review editor from a large newspaper, on a panel of book editors, asked the audience how many had read a work by Henry James and urged them to raise their hands. When many did, he thrust his point in their mouths—"and you didn’t like him, right?"—of one of the great explorers of the language and the human spirit. Then he freely faulted subtle and complex interiority. These are not the conditions of dialogue. So when the panel was over, I asked if he knew William Dean Howells—the turn-of-the-century reviewer, author, and journalist known as "the dean of American criticism."

He did.

"I think his genius," I said, "was shown in his ability to value the greatness of both James and Twain, who could not stand each other’s work." When I think of him as an arbiter of taste, I think of the Colossus of Rhodes, straddling the harbor, so that ships must sail between his legs. The reviewer, whose only credentials seemed to be his dislike of James, asked me to recommend some James I thought was good. I asked what James he had read. He admitted he had tried to read The Ambassadors and had given up, and that was it. I suggested "Daisy Miller" and "The Real Thing" as starters that would be easy to find, but he wanted me to find just two pages and send them to him. I wanted to say, "Don’t die without reading The Spoils of Poynton. But what I said was, "your education is your responsibility." The next week his hurried column, sent me by one of the bemused sponsors of the conference, was about a large bearded poet in a lumberjack shirt who came up after his talk and intimidated him. (I had worn a red-striped dress shirt, a gray sleeveless cardigan, and dress trousers.) I never wrote him.

Bridging Worlds

In late October, Carlos Fuentes, at a conference for literary translators in Dallas, praised several writers, including James, for the very complexity that took pains to capture the fullness of the human drama, but as Fuentes said, the writer had to sit long hours at a desk alone. The truth has the power to heal us. Fuentes is among the great contemporary magical realists, a movement related to but distinct from surrealism, who have kept faith with history and who have enriched and are helping to heal the complex Americas. He does this by being able to stand in two worlds: both North America and South America, and in both Europe and the Americas. And knowing that there are two sides to everything, and that to take any side too narrowly is false, and is bad faith.

I recently began a poem about Jerusalem. The blood was fresh and the words dripping. A poet in Israel thought it strong and asked what I would do with it. I still do not know. Such poems I must hold in my throat a long time—

  Two hours away, in Ramat Aviv, Rachel weeps—Jerusalem   fileted like a fish, history dissected. Truth erased by denials.    The nearer to God, the further from the divisions of religion.

 Karen dips her pen in her veins to write her Life in Israel:            I pass Peres on the street, a wizened good man out of power.  Leah carts truth in shards. Terrorist Bibi, terrified, terrifies.

I passed the bulldozers in Hebron. Even asleep they mumbled in many tongues, lebensraum, cleansingroom, both to Palestinians and to those Jews whose identity the religious right in Israel questions for political reasons. The religions rooted in Jerusalem are connected seas of faith and civilization, their spiritual roots go deep and are complex. No matter whether we are religious or not. Our traditions flow into one another, wash back and forth. No strict orthodoxy can rule Jerusalem if it is to heal. It has suffered enough over the centuries. Until it is shared in peace, not one of us can be innocent.

Or as Mahmoud Darwish put it in Birziet: "Who will save Jerusalem? Who will save Peace? We will love . . . the peace of justice and liberation . . . more than we ever loved it before . . . to dream together of a new reality, of a new world where there is no hero and no victim." 6

—1 Mahmoud Darwish, "Poem of the Land, IV" — trs. from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton. An Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ed. by Salma Khadra Jayyusi: NYC: Columbia, 1992. 149

—2 Mahmoud Darwish, "Psalm 9," ibid. 158.

—3 Mahmoud Darwish, "Elegy for an Unborn Peace," Al-Kalima /"New Themes for a New Era." Issue # 4. Summer 1997. (trs. from the Arabic by Sirin Huleileh) 141.

—4 Nasser Eddin Nashashibi, Jerusalem’s Other Voice Raheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920-1948. Exeter: Ithaca Press. 1990.

—5 Two web news sites for those interested are BatShalom (batshalo@netvision. net.il), an Arab-Israeli women’s alliance dedicated to sharing Jerusalem, with both the Israeli and Palestinian capitals there. Hebcom (hebcom @actcom.co.il). is a Hebron-based watch group for abuses of the human rights of Palestinians by both the Palestinian Authority

and the Israelis.

—6 Darwish, Al-Kalima . . . , 143.