LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

14Darwish’s ‘Indian Speech’ as DramaticPerformance: Sacred Space andTransformationJ. Kristen UrbanThe paradox underlying national movements based on ethnic-religious-culturalclaims is that, short of a distinctly zero-sum outcome in which one groupsurvives at the expense of the other, there is a need both for clear boundariesand for coexistence. At the level of geographic identity, concern for physicalboundaries makes political sense: physically separating populations can enhancethe reality of self-determination, as was the logic of the Dayton Accords inBosnia. However, at the level of psychic and cultural identity, the drawing ofclear boundaries – boundaries which distinguish us from them, and which promotegroup solidarity, giving it political momentum – also makes coexistence of suchclearly delimited groups more difficult. Self and other become brittle constructs.It is of interest then, that a ‘national’ poet of the status of Mahmoud Darwishwrites poetry that both galvanises Palestinians around the Palestinian nationalenterprise and provides a means by which the boundaries can be bridged,making coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis imaginable. As well, his isa poetry that reaches beyond the frontiers of Palestinian nationalism. It speaksnot only to a broad literary audience, but in translation, to an audience of peaceeducators whose focus (in effecting peace) is on the possibilities resident withinblurred boundaries.Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, whose people ‘chant hisodes in their fields, in their schools, on their marches, and in their miserable tinshanty-towns’ (Darwish 2000: 19), taps universal concerns with identity whenhe explores the paradox of being Palestinian. The Palestinian question itself isriddled with paradox, the paradox of being and not-being. The British of 1917officially defined Palestinians in negative terms when they issued the BalfourDeclaration affirming that Palestine (under a future British mandate) wouldbecome a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people among the existing ‘non-Jewishcommunities’ – despite the fact that such communities at the time comprised 90per cent of the population of Palestine. Negating the Palestinian presencecontinued with Israel’s early Zionists, whose slogan for the new state was ‘a landwithout a people for a people without a land’. More recently, the Peace Process,— 79 —www.taq.ir