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"I Returned but Did not Return/"Odt Wa Laken Lam A'od”: The Exilic, Metamorphic self in Husayn al-Barghouthi’s “Al-daw’ al-‘azraq” and "Sa-akunu bayna al-lawz”
Abstract
Palestinian poet, writer, and academic, Husayn al-Barghouthi’s poetic autobiographies, “Al-daw’ al-‘azraq” (2003) and "Sa-akounu bayna al-lawz,” (2004) are written by a self positioned at the limit, the edge of experience; the former is recounted from a space of madness, marginality, and estrangement as a graduate student in the US, and the other recounts his experience at life’s edge in occupied Palestine, while battling cancer and facing death. Both of these autobiographies emerge from a space of intensification of life and death, and elaborate on an experience of exile and coloniality through “endless creation”: al-Barghouthi partakes in the tradition of Sufi mystics’ writing of the nafs, narrating the self through the voice of the other, wherein a ritual of transformation, metamorphoses, and renewal, and of a life transcending its carceral, bestial form is undertaken. For al-Barghouthi making an account of oneself involves questioning limits: between the human and divine, self and other, self and world, human and animal, colonizer and colonized, and myth and history. The creation inherent in his writing has much to do with those limits that mark finalities and boundaries, for he takes on a creative, inventive process that gives rise to a self that cedes control and wherein multiplicity of forms can find home. The space of writing becomes a bridge, wherein exile, madness, and death, demand a fluidity of form so as to cross thresholds, letting dreams, visions, poetry, and philosophies, undo and transform one’s relation to life and death. In this paper, I will be working through how the self is articulated as soul by drawing on the writings of Ibn Arabi and Al-Ghazzali, examining how the imagistic property of his poetic prose lends itself to a writing of the “I” as bearing a potentiality to metamorphose. Further, I will seek to elaborate on the tension between the particular and the universal, for the individual and the historical coincide while maintaining their own rhythms. The autobiographical writing of the self is not just a work of the imaginary, but of history too; for al-Barghouthi, the writing of the self becomes a historical site where the impossible and transcendental manifest themselves in concrete form. This paper will address how the limit comes to unfold the self, demanding a leap and suspension of the “I", so as to make a larger argument regarding al-Barghouthi’s exilic, metamorphic self-writing and its implication for anti-colonial aesthetics and politics.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Arab States
Palestine
Sub Area
None