Why Did They Resist Her?

From the cover of Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief.

Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941; he died in 2008. A few years before, facing a nightly curfew as Israeli tanks rumbled through his streets, Darwish spoke to BOMB about the genesis of his interest in poetry:

As a child I was physically weak. I could not take part in games. I could not wrestle or play football and could not distinguish myself in sports. So I turned to language. I also spent a lot of time with adults. I would attend the gatherings that used to be held in our house when my grandfather and our neighbors recited the old Arabic legends, which were interspersed with verse. They were romantic tales that as a rule included the lover and the poet. I would listen to them and feel stirred by the poetry. I did not understand why. All I knew was that the sound of the poetry appealed to me. I did not understand the high-flown language of much of the poetry, but it gave me a sense that my dilemma could be resolved through language. The experience aroused in me the love of language. I began to dream of becoming a poet. I believed the poet was a mysterious figure with superhuman faculties. I began to write poetry from a young age, but I was not aware that what I wrote was poetry. My parents and teachers encouraged me to write. I wanted to excel, and since I couldn’t do it through sports, writing became my arena and language my weapon.

The Review published his poem “A Song and the Sultan” in our Spring 1971 issue. As you can see from the lines below, its speak-truth-to-power message still resonates today:

When she told them the forest was abounding with secrets
and the moon was stabbed with a carving knife
and the blood of the nightingale was on that stone, abandoned,
why did they resist her?
Why did they torture her?

When she said, my country is a mountain of sweat
and on the small bridge a man is dying
and darkness burning
the Sultan was angry
and the Sultan is an imaginative creature.

He said, “The fault is in the mirror
so let your singer be silent
and let my kingdom from the Nile to the Euphrates be.”
and he shouted, “Put that poem in prison!”
The torture room, for security,
is a thousand times better than an anthem or a newspaper.

Read the whole poem here, and subscribe now for digital access to every short story, poem, portfolio, and essay from The Paris Review.

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2mG6VB5

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog