Running head: THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 1 The Specters of Nation and Narration in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence Sanaa Abusamra Dr. Bilal Hamamra An-Najah National University Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of English Language and Literature May, 2017 THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 2 Abstract Since 1948, the Israeli occupation has strived to push Palestinians to the sphere of absence to legitimize their presence and claim over Palestine. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a conflict of narratives over a nation (Palestine), revealing that the nation is discursively constructed and power structures are created and controlled through discourse. Thus, in response to the Zionist narrative that legitimizes the presence (establishment) of Israel and obliterates and negates Palestinians and Palestine, many Palestinian authors charged their literary works with themes of exile, war trauma, nostalgia and return; among these authors were Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994), Fadwa Touqan (1917-2003), Sahar Khalifeh (1941- present), and Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). These prolific writers have devoted their lives for the purpose of reclaiming the lost paradise via the power of words. In this paper, I will explain the ghostliness of the self, land and language in Mahmoud Darwish’s self-eulogy, Absent Presence (2006/2010), drawing on Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993/1994) and Barthes’ post- structural seminal (ghostly) text, “The Death of The Author” (1967). THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 3 The Specters of Nation and Narration in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence We became the ghost of a murdered man who pursues his killer asleep or awake or on the borderline between the two so that he is depressed and complains of sleeplessness, and cries out, ‘Are they not dead yet?’ No, the ghost has reached the age of weaning, has come to the age of maturity, the age of resistance, the age of return. Aeroplanes chase the ghost in the air; tanks chase the ghost on the ground; submarines chase the ghost in the sea, but the ghost expands, occupies the consciousness of the killer till it drives him mad. (Darwish, 2006, p. 47) In his self-eulogy Absent Presence, Mahmoud Darwish draws on themes of resistance, exile, and alienation, among many others, yet throughout his work there is a recurrent specter1 of absent presence that haunts the text. Although his masterpiece designates a paradoxical amalgamation of two antithetical concepts of absence and presence as the title indcates, he brilliantly demonstrates how the two orchestrate together to reflect this synthetic state which eventually serves to textualize him as well as his homeland Palestine. This paper is a Derridean, Barthesian reading of Mahmoud Darwish's Absent Presence which is a notable rendition of Edward Said’s famous statement ,in Culture and Imperialism (1994), “nations themselves are narrations” (p. xiii). This autobiographical text demonstrates how narration functions as a spectral medium for resurrecting the absent author and absent land into the realms of presence. Selecting Absent Presence in particular stems from the ghostly nature of the text as it is a 1 The terms specter, ghost, revenant, apparition, and reapparrition will be used interchangeably regardless of the specific connotations carried in each word. THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 4 presence of an absence per se; it is a self-eulogy, which Darwish wrote in 2006 expecting his death very soon. Darwish tackles unconventional themes not only in his Absent Presence but in almost all of his literary works, which “break the conventionality of composition” (Sanakūn, 2005, p. 131) especially when it comes to Palestinian resistance literature as Ghassan Kanafani coined the term. Darwish opines that: It is a duty that the Palestinian poetry should be employed to resist what hinders its progress […] but it should never be a pretext to limit our poetical creativity for the sole purpose of resistance because literary idiosyncrasy is also a form of emancipation. (Sanakūn, 2005, p. 31; my translation) Therefore, the occupier does not only strive to eradicate the land but the language and the authorial identities from the landscape of the text as well. For this reason, there are fears for the loss of the idiosyncratic writing self of the author whose works can become imbued with overloaded notions of resistance and anger to the extent this causes the absence of the author and ultimately his land. Darwish’s literary works can be read as a reclaiming of the lost self and land. This interpretation is illuminated in his poem “A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allaqat)” (1995) which demonstrates how language revives his lost self I am my language, I am words' writ: Be! Be my body! And I became an embodiment of their timbre. I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where My body joins the eternity of the desert. Be, so that I may become my words. (2013, p. 91) THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 5 Analogously, in his Absent Presence, Darwish brilliantly manipulates his text via an unfamiliar combination of verse and prose, and an alternation between “I” and “you” that refer to the same antecedent. He even manipulates the typography of words as he alludes to his own name in Arabic “add one letter to another and you find your name formed like a stairway with few steps” (p. 16). All of these linguistic aspects harmonize together not only to denote the idiosyncrasy of Darwish as an author but also to signify his mastery over language. Going through Absent Presence, the reader can sense a collective autobiography that documents and narrates not only the story of Darwish but also the story of a people’s nation disrupted by the specter of absence. Yet, out of absence, presence is conceived. This literary conception is referred to in Roland Barthes’ spectral text “The Death of the Author” (1967). Barthes argues that as “action is recounted…[a]disjunction occurs” (p. 2); he adds that after “the voice loses its origin [and] the author enters his own death” (p. 2), the process of “writing begins” (p. 2) hence marking the beginning of absence (of the author) and the advent of presence (of the text). Within the context of the absent people’s homeland, the loss of voice runs parallel with the absentees’ deprivation of the means of self expression, which can be read as a type of metaphysical death of the nation. Despite the multiple stages of absence presented in Barthes’ text, he sets forth the specter of presence, namely, the beginning of writing. Hence, it can be said that absence sets a preliminary stage for the presence or more properly the rebirth of the absent homeland. The rebirth of homeland that Absent Presence depicts resonates with Derrida’s definition of a ghost which “begins by coming back” (Specters of Marx, p. 11); the ghost is also a “revenant [that] is going to come” (p. 2). The two notions denote a state of absent presence; the former indicates a present state while the latter signals to THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 6 a state of absence. Absent Presence hence is a ghostly text, which is in a dialogue with the ghosts that open the gates of the this paper. Although this is the first encounter with an apparition, one must recall Derrida’s words commenting on the apparition in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (p. 2). The first encounter, as a reader, with the ghost entails change, action, or performativity because “everything begins [emphasis added]” (p. 2) with that encounter. This explains why Derrida perceives a literary work as “a masterpiece [that] always moves [emphasis added],by definition, in the manner of a ghost” (pp. 20-21). Furthermore, Derrida deconstructs the conventional perception of a ghost as a “disembodied soul” (Merriam Webster Dictionary, 2017) and renders a more comprehensive meaning of it as a “living-dead” (p. 169). This present/absent dichotomy exists even in the word “ghost” which is ghostly per se. Although it contains the letter “h”, the very phonemic absence of the “h” predicates a semantic presence of the word “ghost”. These deconstructive procedures that define a ghost attain further spectrality as they cross the literary margins of the text to the marbled margins of the tombstone. A ghostly hymn serenades, “On this land/ the lady of lands/ is what is worth living for”. The first reading of this eulogy conjures Darwish’s poem “On this Land” (1986) that still haunts our memory even after Darwish’s death; however, memory this time is illusive as these words are Darwish’s epitaph bidding farewell to his homeland. This instance, in particular, is a paragon deconstructing ghosts as it abounds in paradoxical notions: It celebrates life while announcing death; it is a congratulatory commemoration of absence. It is the presence of an absence, it is a ghost. The epitaph is further spectralized as it comes back as a revenant that anachronistically resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebration of his land in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2010): THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 7 “It is worthwhile living on the earth: one day, one festival with Zarathustra, has taught me to love the earth” (p. 247). This literary telepathy reveals an ephemeral feature of ghosts, namely, timelessness. They are a disturbance of the present, they are in Hamletian words “out of joint” (1.5.188). They are the presence of absence. “To make an end is to make a beginning” : Beginnings Coming Back Derrida’s instantiation of the ghost as a revenant that “begins by coming back [emphasis added]” (p. 11) reveals that a ghost once existed before and that its beginning is in fact a continuation of a previous beginning. Darwish’s rhetorical question on a beginning “there is no end which joins up with the beginning. How many times have we started?” (p. 46) spills out his first words “line by line, I scatter [emphasis added] you before me with a capacity which I am only given at beginnings” (p. 3). These introductory words clearly illustrate how beginnings begin with a “scatter”; beginnings are themselves scattered, and they are scattered in the sense that there is no real beginning. Absent Presence opens and closes with the same aesthetic transformation of a self-scattering scene. This disturbs the traditional notion of beginnings that become the amalgam of scattered works. Edward Said elucidates this idea on “beginnings” in his book Beginnings: Intension and Method (1975), proposing that: We can regard a beginning as the point at which, in a given work, the writer departs from all other works; a beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both. (p. 3) THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 8 Accordingly, the opening lines of the text cannot be said to be the ultimate beginning of Absent Presence; there is possibly another entry beginning the book, namely, Malik ibn al-Rayb's self-elegy that opens Darwish's very first lines: Do not go far! They say as they bury me Where, if not far away, is my place? ( Antoon, 2011, p. 11) This intertexual reference to a seventh century poem further supports Said's own definition of a beginning that is rather a nested beginning. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, two poststructuralist professors, define intertextuality as “[the] displacement of origins to other texts, which are in turn displacements of other texts and so on- in other words an undoing of the very idea of pure or straightforward origins” (p. 6). I believe that this text is imbued with intertextualities which epitomizes the state of the “displacement of [Darwish’s Palestinian] origins” (p. 6). Intertextuality is in fact a key feature in Darwish’s works. Sinan Antoon, a distinguished Iraqi scholar, poet and novelist, traces the poetical progress of Mahmoud Darwish in his tribute “In the Presence of Darwish” (2008), stating that “he moved from the lyrical style of his early “resistance period” to a fusion of lyricism and longer epic poems employing biblical and Canaanite mythology and symbols” (para. 7). This tendency towards employing mythology and symbolism clearly mirrors his experience as an exile displaced from his homeland causing him to be a “scatter[ed]” self. Moreover, intertextuality in this sense implies spectrality as it is the intervention of the past into the present and more possibly into the future. Julia Kristeva, who coined the term “intertextuality”, defines it as “a mosaic of quotations” (p.37), and Absent Presence is a “mosaic” of texts and memories that abounds in ghostly reapparitions that haunt the text. THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 9 Still, the text, which is a multilayered “tissue” (p. 4) as Barthes argues, is also packed with multiple beginnings which qualify absence to be the ultimate beginning of all. Darwish offers an enigmatic chain reaction of temporal contemplations that illuminate this “uncanny” relation between “beginnings” and “absence”; he declares that “the past was born of absence” (p. 30). But, he states earlier in the text that “the future ever since is your past” (p. 13). These temporal declarations elucidate how the future as a beginning is also born from within the ghosts of absence. In this sense, re- examining Said's statement “nations themselves are narrations” (xiii) shows how Writing [is] potentially a means of demonstrating absence […] in Derrida’s terms […] an act of mourning for that which lies already in the past. But the very signs employed to represent that lost presence announce the absence of the presence they signify. Presence is again postponed, pushed into the future. (Holderness, p. 8) Accordingly, we find Darwish wondering in his rhetorical question “Is it true that he who writes his story [emphasis added] before the other wins the land of the story?” (p. 46). It is true that narrating a story is a form of exercising power as Ross Chambers suggests in his book Story and Situation (as cited in Bennett and Royle, 2004). To narrate is to produce oneself as Edward Said accentuates in his book After the Last Sky (as cited in Inez Hedges, 2015). Although “the nation was born, far from the nation’s land” (p. 95), the nation “seek[s] warmth in the story” (p. 29) and that is what sustains a nation. The etymology of a narrative substantiates the notion that nation is narration: To narrate is to “narrare” which literally translates into “to make known” (The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, p. 301); it is also derived from “gnarus” meaning “knowing, acquainted with” (p. 301). Narration hence deconstructs the traditional meaning of THE SPECTERS OF NATION AND NARRATION 10 death. This explains Darwish’s serenades to remembrance that keep recurrently reminding him to Remember, so that you grow before dissolution. Remember, remember Your ten fingers and forget the shoe Remember the features of your face, And forget the flies of winter. Remember, with your own name, your mother, And forget the letters of the alphabet. Remember your country and forget the sky. Remember, remember! (p. 31) Darwish conjures remembrance in these lines so that his deceased land may not really become dead. For him “Galilee has poems, written in mystic delirium, and dead men who are training to return [emphasis added] to a childhood which butterflies have delivered from encroaching oblivion” (p. 107). Remembrance hence is the elixir of perpetuity and return delivered via the “mystic delirium” of the poem. Darwish’s reiterative style that conjures “remembrance” in almost every line of the poem echoes the ghost of Hamlet’s father’s words “Adieu, adieu. Remember me” (1.5.62). This harmonious conversation between death and remembrance converts the presumed influence of absence that dismembers the land into what actually re-members and remembers it. ‘Are they not dead yet?’: Ghosts as Emblems of Agency The uncanny ghost of Absent Presence that appears and reappears 16 times throughout the text is an illuminating example of the agency of the ghost which becomes “the thing made [that] overpowers its maker” (p. 45). The opening lines of