In his 1986 memoir of the Lebanese Civil War, "Memory for Forgetfulness," Mahmoud Darwish remembers a news conference in which a journalist asks him, "What are you writing in this war, Poet," To which Darwish responds, in playfully paradoxical fashion, "I'm writing my silence." He then goes on, more seriously, to defend the importance of silence--and of what calls "patience"--against the popular demand for "poems that match air raids or at least upset the balance of forces." In such demands, Darwish argues, "The political conception of poetry has become confused with the notion of event." Darwish's defense of a poetic of silence and cunning over one of voluble immediacy can be read as a form of self-criticism, one that he would insist on and deepen over the last two decades of his career. For Darwish's own early poems are indeed rather clamorous texts (they are full of double and triple exclamation marks) in which the poet often argues, with an almost apocalyptic intensity, for the primacy of the present, the urgency of the now. My paper will focus on several of these early poems, in an attempt to understand their strategies for asserting poetry's immediacy and "eventfulness," its nature as, in Wallace Stevens words, "the cry of its occasion, / part of the res itself and not about it." Looking at such canonical texts as "Bitaaqat Huwiyya," " 'An al-Shi'r," and "al-Ward wa-l-Qaamuus," I examine the role of self-dramatization, the appeal to radical contemporaneity, and figures of innocence and beginning. All these tropes and themes, I argue, show a poet attempting to break out of the realm of signification and into the world of action, or what we might call praxis. I will end by suggesting how Darwish's later rejection of these strategies--in whole or in part--gives way to a very different conception of the relations between the poetic and the political.

Mahmoud Darwish's poem, "*Dhahibuna ila al Qasidah: Ila Pablo Neruda*" (Going to the Poem: To Pablo Neruda) published in 1975 in memory of Neruda's death signaled the beginning of a new lyricism in his poetic style; a shift and development that is characteristic of his later poems. It was also a tribute to Neruda the poet and revolutionary icon who influenced several generations of Arab poets. My paper will explore Darwish's engagement with Neruda on the textual (stylistic, structural, thematic) and sociopolitical levels. It will begin with an analysis of Neruda's influence on Darwish's later lyrical development in terms of themes and imagery. This will be followed with an examination of the ways in which Neruda, the revolutionary icon, has affected and changed the means by which Darwish viewed the role of the poet in a society engaged in a struggle to decolonize itself politically as well as culturally. Just as Pablo Neruda came to be known as the poet of Chile, Mahmoud Darwish emerged as the poet of Palestine. How did these two men construct the nation? What kind of tools and textual strategies have been utilized in the process? The paper will conclude by tying these threads together and linking Darwish and Neruda to the larger international network of leftist poets of the decolonization period.

My paper examines Darwish's depiction in Jean-Luc Godard's 2004 film, _Notre Musique_, a reflection on war, conquest, and genocide and on poets' and intellectuals' efforts to make sense of and to intervene in these man-made horrors. Although this is not the first fictional feature to include Darwish's poetry, Godard's film is unique in that it presents the poet at a conference with a number of European intellectuals and poets, including, among others, Pierre Bergounioux and Juan Goytisolo. Godard initially creates in viewers a sensation of waiting for Darwish to appear. His name is mentioned near the beginning of the film, after a lengthy and devastating montage of actual war footage and cinematic war depictions has been flashed on the screen to the accompaniment of pounding piano notes, but he does not appear until after Native American characters have demanded justice in a burned-out library in Sarajevo, the city where the conference is being held. My paper focuses on a scene at the heart of the film during which Darwish is interviewed by a reporter from Tel Aviv. She speaks in Hebrew to him, quoting from his political statements and poems and pressing him to explain these lines, and he answers in Arabic, using in most cases more excerpts from his poetry. Speaking as a representative for his people, a role that he had elsewhere explained that he prefers to avoid, he directly implicates his interviewer in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by explaining that the reason the world is so interested in Palestinians is "because you are our enemy. The interest is in you not in me." He also speaks over one of her questions, correcting lines from his poem that she is quoting and telling her "there has to be an error for it to be this way" and that "there's another meaning to those lines . . ." My concern in the paper will be to analyze the way in which Darwish is presented and to examine the effect of his presence and of his recited poetry on the film as a whole. I will also consider Darwish's relationship with French intellectuals during the period when he was living in exile in France and his relationship with the film's director Godard in particular, who has been active in telling Palestinians' story in films such as _Until the Victory_ (1970) and _Here and Elsewhere_ (1976), which includes recitations of Darwish's poetry.

Mahmoud Darwish was thrust by a variety of coincidences, events, and historical circumstances into becoming the official re-memberer, or chronicler of Palestinian collective memory. Undoubtedly, this is a daunting task that would, sooner or later, drain the poeticity and creativity of any poet, but Darwish took the challenge head on and excelled in the many and rich ways in which he transformed this daunting ask into an aesthetic challenge. He used to say that he considered himself to be a "Trojan poet" whose text was lost. He was concerned with recollecting and reconstructing the lost voices exiled from the Homerian master narrative: "What can a poet do when confronted with the bulldozers of history. . . except guard language from being emptied of the voices of victims who ask for their share in tomorrow's memory." My paper attempts to trace and unpack some predominant topoi revolving around "return" and the poet's complex relationship to a past and present that are dialectically implicated in an ongoing struggle. It explores some of the modes and strategies through which Darwish reconstructs and remembers his home/land in his late poetry. How does Darwish grapple with memory and history and what textual strategies does he deploy to "rescue the memory of the victims"r It also finds echoes of some of Benjamin's notions about dynamic remembering and confronting triumphalist history in one of Darwish's late poems. Both Benjamin and Darwish were concerned with rescuing that "past which never had a chance to live, [but] lives on as a trace," to use Benjamin's words. The paper uses Benjamin's notion of the "now-time" and the figure of the materialist historian to read Darwish's "return poems" and suggest a more radical notion of the political future than the one previously detected by his readers.