Najwan Darwish

Despite—as my friends joke—the Kurds being famous for their severity, I was gentler than a summer breeze as I embraced my brothers in the four corners of the world.
And I was the Armenian who did not believe the tears beneath the eyelids of history's snow
that covers both the murdered and the murderers.

Is it so much, after all that has happened, to drop my poetry in the mud?

In every case I was a Syrian from Bethlehem raising the words of my Armenian brother, and a Turk from Konya entering the gate of Damascus.
And a little while ago I arrived in Bayadir Wadi al-Sir and was welcomed by the breeze, the breeze that alone knew the meaning of a man coming from the Caucasus Mountains, his only companions his dignity and the bones of his ancestors.
And when my heart first tread on Algerian soil, I did not doubt for a moment that I was an Amazigh.

Everywhere I went they thought I was an Iraqi, and they were not wrong in this.
And often I considered myself an Egyptian living and dying time and again by the Nile with my African forebears.
But above anything I was an Aramaean. It is no wonder that my uncles were Byzantines, and that I was a Hijazi child coddled by Umar and Sophronius when Jerusalem was opened.

There is no place that resisted its invaders except that I was of one its people; there is no free man to whom I am not bound in kinship, and there is no single tree or cloud to which I am not indebted. And my scorn for Zionists will not prevent me from saying that I was a Jew expelled from Andalusia, and that I still weave meaning from the light of that setting sun.

In my house there is a window that opens onto Greece, an icon that points to Russia, a sweet scent forever drifting from Hijaz,
and a mirror: No sooner do I stand before it than I see myself immersed in springtime in the gardens of Shiraz, and Isfahan, and Bukhara.

And by anything less than this, one is not an Arab.
...

When I leave you I turn to stone
and when I come back I turn to stone

I name you Medusa
I name you the older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
you the baptismal basin that burned Rome

The murdered hum their poems on the hills
and the rebels reproach the tellers of their stories
while I leave the sea behind and come back
to you, come back
by this small river that flows in your despair

I hear the reciters of the Quran and the shrouders of corpses
I hear the dust of the condolers
I am not yet thirty, but you buried me, time and again
and each time, for your sake
I emerge from the earth
So let those who sing your praises go to hell
those who sell souvenirs of your pain
all those who are standing with me, now, in the picture

I name you Medusa
I name you the older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
you the baptismal basin that still burns

When I leave you I turn to stone
When I come back I turn to stone
...

The mouse in the trap says:
History is not on my side
the reptiles are all agents of men
and all mankind is against me
and reality too is against me

Yet despite all this I have faith
my progeny will prevail
...

Sometimes I glimpse in the mirror and see
the ideal I strive for
the gallant savior I wait for
I see a thread of beauty rippling
like a river of nobility
But instantly I tell myself:
Shut up and look away
narcissus surrounded by Zionists' lies
walls and checkpoints rising all around you
Shut up
and avert your gaze
from your so-called beauty
...

Often I was the stone the builders neglected
But when they came, worn out and remorseful
after the destruction
and said, "You are the cornerstone"
there was nothing left to build

Their denial was more bearable
than their belated recognition
...

Judas did not mean to "betray" me—
he never even knew such a big word
He was simply "a man of the market"
and all he did—when the buyers came—
was sell me

Was the price too low?
Not at all. Thirty silver coins
are no small matter
for a man made of dirt

My dearest friends were all Judases
they were all
men of the market
...

I.
In the 1930s
it occurred to the Nazis
to put their victims in gas chambers
Today's executioners are more professional:
They put the gas chambers
in their victims

II.
To Hell, 2010
To Hell, you occupiers, you and all your progeny
And may all mankind go to Hell if it looks like you
May the boats and the planes, the banks and the billboards all go to Hell
I scream, "To Hell…"
knowing full well that I
am the only one
who lives there

III.
So let me lie down
and rest my head on the pillows of Hell
...

It's no use hiding and locking the doors
Moving into buildings where no one could know us
is also no use
Even if you run off the precipice
and into the void
history
will still hold onto your name
...

You take off from the earth
but can't help falling back again
You'll land
on your feet or on your face, you'll land
Even if the plane explodes
your pieces, your atoms
will still land
You're nailed to it:
the earth, your small cross
...

He is hung now on a piece of wood
and all I can do is scream
in these chambers no voice can penetrate:
He is hung now on a piece of wood

Night and day
in winter and summer
in wind, fire, earth, water
in darkness and light
he is hung now:

The world is hung on a piece of wood
...

You shone like daybreak in the mind
I could not believe it:
You were a voyager death had taken
You were a dead man the voyage had taken
And all we did—in surprise at your return—
was run through our country
torn apart by fences, hijacked
by the settlers' grim buildings

We don't know the nature of this canal that brought us to the sea
nor which buildings or sidewalks or doleful dawn we suffered
I could not believe it:
You were a voyager death brought back
You were a dead man the voyage brought back
while I was polishing a jewel in the mind….

I cannot believe that death and the voyage
took you, then brought you back
...

To draw back the blinds and look at the sky
to see the treetops relishing the play of the breeze
to think you're a visitor here in a novel
or a melody wasted by the choir . . .

A soft bed is worth the sky
waking up free is worth a year of life

Then, from your room in a high-rise hotel
you look down upon the roofs
the satellite dishes and the treetops
and ask yourself, What's the meaning
of trees swaying amid concrete buildings?
though the treetops are your sole consolation
and the only joy still left to you

Pass onto midday
which you call morning, you daytime sleeper:
Life awaits you
...

Awake for longer than forever
and since before eternity
my waking is the wave that froths and foams

Awake in hymns and the mailmen's passion
Awake in a house that will be destroyed
in a grave that machines will dig up:
my country is the wave that froths and foams

Awake so that the colonizers might leave
Awake so that people can sleep
"Everyone has to sleep sometime," they say
I am awake
and ready to die
...

I need a strict manager
and an energetic secretary
and a correspondent to make my coffee
and my tea
I need an intellectual
and a poet
and a mafia godfather
to divide my life among them

And I'll announce, after a while
my bankruptcy
like the companies do

I need a servant
and a traitor
a lover to have me murdered
beaten to death
by sandals in the bath:
I need a queen
to betray me with the king
...

My mother is obsessed with reading about Jesus these days.

I see books piled by her bed, most of them borrowed from my library: novels, handbooks, sectarian polemics, writers coming to blows. Sometimes when I'm passing by her room she calls on me to step between them and resolve their disputes. (A little while ago I came to the aid of a historian called Kamal Salibi, whose forehead had been split open by a Catholic stone.)

What a diligent reader she is when she's searching for Jesus, this woman I never failed to disappoint: I was not martyred in the first intifada, nor in the second, nor in the third. And just between you and me, I won't be martyred in any future intifada either, nor will 
I be killed by some booby-trapped stork.

As she reads, her orthodox imagination crucifies me with every page.... while I do nothing but supply it with more books and nails.
...

And what did the Armenians say?

An Umayyad monk
spins wheat and wool above us

Time is a scarecrow


•


That's what the Armenians said
...