LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

j. kristen urban(Palestinian and Arab) audience and a secondary (Western, principallyacademic) audience – and that meaning for the secondary audience will rest withits ability to understand and empathise with the meanings evoked among thepoet’s primary audience. This necessitates the reader’s willingness to view thenarration through alternate lenses and to begin to reflect upon new understandingsof both self and other, a feat which will ultimately require the reader toview self-as-other, if Clements’ call to ‘prophetic poem-making’ is taken seriously.It also necessitates an acknowledgement of the poet’s role in facilitating possibilitiesfor transformation within his audience. For the remainder of this analysisI will acknowledge (in the first person) that I belong to Darwish’s secondaryaudience (Western, academic), and that my comments reflect the way I woulduse ‘Indian Speech’ pedagogically. My students are generally American PoliticalScience/International Studies majors.In the manner of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism (and at the risk of fulfillingScarry’s objections that literature often further complicates our understandingof reality!), this poet presents his secondary audience with a nest of lenses thatcall up a number of others. First, he speaks with the voice of a Native American(albeit, a generalised, romanticised voice), providing us with his view of thatother, a view with which many in this (Western) audience will likely haveempathy from the outset of the narration. Second, in this voice he presents theother responsible for the demise of the Native American culture/identity, that‘other’ being Columbus, the West – indeed, ourselves. So the initial dialogue ofthis performance between the poet and his secondary audience (us) is one thatmakes us uncomfortable: viewing self-as-other is no less disturbing than beingasked to understand other-as-self. But this particular story is one we have heardbefore, and does not at this point qualify as engendering the ‘creative estrangement’called for by Clements, an estrangement necessary to provoke radicalchange. Besides, this story happened in the ‘past’, and therefore requires no realeffort from us now; moreover, the poet himself is – for us – an other talking abouta story alien to himself (in part, our story), so while we feel genuine sadness(even empathy) by this accounting of our past, we can afford to be somewhatdismissive as we read at this level. We realise there can be few – if any – overtpolicy implications for us here.But a second dialogue in this performance takes over when the reader becomesaware that the Native American-Columbus narrative is a metaphor for theplight of Palestinians, a people whose culture and identity have been challengedsince the turn of this century. In this dialogue, the secondary audience (again,ourselves) find themselves more culpable: in the first place, the Peace Process(the Oslo Accords) is occurring in the present, so there is the possibility ofacting meaningfully to write a new ending to the story; in the second place, theUnited States bears significant responsibility for its role as less-than-honest— 94 —www.taq.ir