mahmud darwis kemarin meninggal. palestina kehilangan seorang penyair besar yang ikut memberi bentuk pada identitas negeri.
At 06:55 AM 8/8/2008 +0000, sautsitumorang wrote: >Nota Bene: >Mahmoud Darwish adalah penyair kontemporer terbesar Palestina. Mantan >anggota PLO. >======== > >Homage to Edward Said > >Counterpoint > >By Mahmoud Darwish > >NEW YORK. NOVEMBER. 5TH AVENUE. > >Shards of light in a leaden sky. > >In the shadows, I asked my foreign soul: is this city Babylon or >Sodom? > >There, at the edge of an electric chasm sky high, I met Edward thirty >years ago. > >The times were less impetuous. > >Each said to the other: > >If your past is your experience, make the future sense and vision! > >Let us move forward, towards our future, confident in imagination's >sincerity and the miracle of the grass. > >I no longer remember whether we went to the cinema that evening, but >I heard old Indian braves call out to me: trust neither the horse nor >modernity. > >No. No victim asks his executioner: if I were you and my sword >greater than my rose . . . would I have acted as you have done? > >That kind of question arouses the curiosity of the novelist who sits >behind the glass walls of his study overlooking the lily garden . . . >Here the hypothesis is lily-white, clear as the author's conscience >if he closes his accounts with human nature . . . No future behind >us, so let us move forward! > >Progress could be the bridge back to barbarity . . . > >New York. Edward awakes while dawn slumbers on. He plays an air by >Mozart. Tennis on the university court. He reflects on thought's >ability to transcend borders and barriers. Thumbs through the New >York Times. Writes his spirited column. Curses an orientalist who >guides a general to the weak spot in an eastern woman's heart. >Showers. Drinks his white coffee. Picks out a suit with a dandy's >elegance and calls on the dawn to stop dawdling! > >He walks on the wind. And, in the wind, he knows himself. No four >walls hem in the wind. And the wind is a compass for the north in a >foreign land. > >He says: I come from that place. I come from here, and I am neither >here nor there. I have two names that come together but pull apart. I >have two languages, but I have forgotten which is the language of my >dreams. I have the English language with its accommodating vocabulary >to write in. And another tongue drawn from celestial conversations >with Jerusalem. It has a silvery resonance, but rebels against my >imagination. > >And your identity? Said I. > >His response: Self-defence . . . Conferred on us at birth, in the end >it is we who fashion our identity, it is not hereditary. I am >manifold . . . Within me, my outer self renewed. But I belong to the >victim's interrogation. > >Were I not from that place, I would have trained my heart to raise >metonymy's gazelle there . . . > >So take your birthplace along wherever you go and be a narcissist if >need be. > >Exile, the outside world. Exile, the hidden world. Who then are you >between them? > >I do not introduce myself lest I lose myself. I am what I am. > >I am my other in harmonious duality between word and geste. > >Were I a poet, I should have written: > >I am two in one, like the swallow's wings. > >And if spring is late coming, I am content to be its harbinger! > >He loves countries and leaves them. (Is the impossible remote?) He >loves to migrate towards everything. Travelling freely between >cultures, there is room for all who seek the essence of man. > >A margin moves forward and a centre retreats. The East is not >completely the East, nor the West, the West. Identity is multifaceted. > >It is neither a citadel nor is it absolute. > >The metaphor slumbered on one bank of the river. Had it not been for >the pollution, > >It would have embraced the other. > >Have you written your novel? > >I have tried . . . sought to find my image reflected in distant >women. But they have retreated into their fortified night. And they >have said: our universe does not depend on words. No man will capture >in words the woman, an enigma and a dream. No woman will capture the >man, symbol and star. No love is like another; no night like another. >Let us list men's virtues and laugh! > >And what did you do? > >I laughed at my own absurdity and threw my novel away. > >The thinker restrains the novelist's tale, while the philosopher >deconstructs the singer's roses. > >He loves countries and leaves them: I am who I shall be and become. I >shall construct myself and choose my exile. My exile is the >background of the epic landscape. I defend the need for poets of >glory and reminiscence; I defend trees that clothe the birds of home >and exile, a moon still fit for a love song, an idea shattered by its >proponents' fragility and a country borne off by legends. > >Is there anything you could return to? > >What awaits me draws me on and urges me . . . I have no time to draw >lines in the sand. But I can revisit the past like strangers >listening to the pastoral poem in the gloom of the evening: > >`At the fountain, a young girl fills her jar with clouds' tears. And >she weeps and laughs at a bee that stung her heart when it was time >to leave. > >Is love pain in the water or malady in the mist . . .' > >(And so on, till the song draws to a close.) > >So you could suffer from nostalgia? > >Nostalgia for times to come. More distant, more elevated, more >distant still. My dream guides my steps and my vision cradles my >dream, curled like a cat, on my lap. It is reality imagined, born of >the will: we can change the chasm's inevitability! > >And nostalgia for the past? > >That is only for the thinker who is anxious to understand the >fascination a foreigner feels for the medium of absence. My own >nostalgia is a struggle for a present that clings to the future. > >Did you penetrate the past the day you visited the house, your >house, in Jerusalem's Talibiya district? > >Like a child afraid of his father, I was ready to hide in my >mother's bed. I tried to relive my birth, to follow the trail of >childhood across the roof of my old home, to run my fingers over the >skin of absence, to smell the perfume of summer in the jasmine of the >garden. But truth's hyena drove me from a nostalgia that lurked, >behind me, like a thief in the shadows. > >Were you afraid, and of what? > >I cannot meet loss head on. Like the beggar, I stayed at the door. >Am I going to ask strangers who sleep in my bed for permission to >spend five minutes in my own home? Will I bow respectfully to the >people that occupy my dream of childhood? Will they ask: who is this >stranger who lacks discretion? Will I be able just to speak of peace >and war among victims and the victims of victims, avoiding >superfluous words and asides? Will they tell me that two dreams >cannot share a bed? > >Neither he nor I could have done that. > >But he is a reader who reflects on what poetry has to tell us in >times of disaster. > >Blood > >and blood > >and blood > >in your homeland > >In my name and in yours, in the almond blossom, in the banana skin, >in the baby's milk, in the light and in the shade, in the grain of >wheat, in the salt jar. Consummate snipers reach their targets. > >Blood > >blood > >blood > >This land is smaller than the blood of its children, offerings placed >on resurrection's doorstep. Is this land blessed or baptised > >In blood, > >blood, > >the blood > >That neither prayers nor the sand can assuage? There is not enough >justice in the pages of the Holy Book to give the martyrs the joy of >walking freely across the clouds. Blood, by day. Blood, by night. >Blood in the words! > >He says: the poem could embrace loss, a shaft of light glinting from >a guitar or a Christ mounted on a mare and blood- spattered with >elegant metaphors. What is beauty if not the presence of truth in the >form? > >In a skyless world, the earth becomes a chasm. And the poem is one of >consolation's gifts, a quality of the winds, from both south and >north. Do not describe your wounds as the camera sees them. > >Cry out to make yourself heard and to know that you are still alive >and living, that life on this earth is still possible. Invent hope >for words. Create a cardinal point or a mirage that prolongs hope and >sing, for beauty is freedom. > >I say: life defined by its antithesis, death . . . is no life at all! > >He replies: we shall live, even if life abandons us to our fate. Let >us be the wordsmiths whose words make their readers eternal, as your >extraordinary friend Ritsos might have said . . . > >He says: If I die before you, I shall leave you the impossible task! > >I ask: Is it a long way off? > >He replies: A generation away. > >I say: And if I die before you? > >He replies: I shall console the mounts of Galilee and I shall write: >`Beauty is merely the attainment of adequacy.' All right! But don't >forget that if I die before you, I shall leave you the impossible >task! > >When I visited the new Sodom in the year 2002, he was opposing the >war of Sodom against the people of Babylon and fighting cancer. The >last epic hero, he defended Troy's right to its share in the story. > >Eagle on high, > >Soaring, > >Taking leave of the mountain tops, > >For residing above Olympus > >And the summits, > >Brings ennui, > >Farewell > >Farewell, poetry of pain! > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
