LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

darwish’s ‘indian speech’ as dramatic performanceaware of its oral culture, echoing the drama of the pre-Islamic qasida. EdwardSaid writes:In Darwish, the personal and the public are always in an uneasy relationship, theforce and passion of the former ill-suited to the tests of political correctness andpolicy required by the latter. But careful writer and craftsman that he is, Darwish isalso very much a performing poet of a type with few equivalents in the West. He hasa fiery and yet also strangely intimate style that is designed for the immediateresponse of a live audience … Darwish is also a wonderful technician, using theincomparably rich Arabic prosodic tradition in innovative, constantly new ways.This allows him something quite rare in modern Arabic poetry: great stylisticvirtuosity combined with a chiseled and finally simple (because so refined) sense ofpoetic statement. (1995: 114)His audience, then, knows what he is about. 7 As the narrator of ‘IndianSpeech’ is telling a story – the history of the clash of two cultures – so theaudience of the poem understands this to be their story: the qasida was used torelate the history of the tribe, to recount its glories and triumphs, and it wasperformed with a momentum which built on the excesses of its imagery,repetitions and language. 8In ‘Indian Speech’, the images carry meaning that is understood in terms of acommunity that has also suffered injustice. The initial use of imagery organiseddenotationally around nature: ‘as the Mississippi flows’, ‘color of the sky’, ‘sacredpastures’, ‘our spirits’, ‘stars’, ‘water and fire’, works in conjunction with theconnotational imagery. The total sensory suggestion of the opening passage,therefore, is one of ‘essential’ spirituality – a quality transcending the trivialityof daily experience and which resists fragmentation. Set within this passage,however, are other nature images which carry a different connotational meaning:‘Lord of the horses’, ‘don’t slaughter the grass’, ‘horse-master’, and in jarring theaudience’s sensibilities, prepares them for the conflictual drama about to unfold.Other images draw on past meanings, common understandings and experiences.Columbus, in discovering the New World (like Prometheus deliveringthe gift of fire) also delivers destruction, as progress and change overtake cultureswhich once existed in balance with one another. For the Palestinian (and thelarger Arabic) audience, the beginning of the end was first the Crusades andsecondly Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt in 1798. Progress and technologyoffered by France and Great Britain (later Germany, Russia and others)led to economic exploitation and the displacement of Arabic/Islamic values andway of life (from the point of view of the colonised, here, the primary‘audience’). Further betrayals of trust rest with the Sykes-Picot Agreement andthe imposition of the Mandatory System following World War I; theimplementation of the Balfour Declaration; the creation of the state of Israel in1948 on Arab lands; Western acceptance of the outcome of the 1967 Israeli— 85 —www.taq.ir