The Brooklyn Rail

On Tuesday, February 25, 2025, nearly three weeks after suggesting the United States take control of the Gaza Strip and relocate Palestinians, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social that depicted “Trump Gaza,” an exploitative paradise designed to satisfy the whims and desires of wealthy tourists whose money literally rains upon grasping Arab children—all within sight of a giant gilded statue of the Truth Social poster himself. The video was more than a mere provocation. In disseminating it, our POTUS invited the world to imagine a Gaza that buckles beneath imperialist politics for the sole purpose of colonization. Now more than ever, Americans who support democratic processes in every corner of the globe need to acknowledge and respect Palestinian perspectives. One powerful way to accomplish this is through mindful attention to their literature. Whether as the result of foresight or just plain good timing, we are fortunate, then, for the November 2024 release of Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s stellar translations of poems by Najwan Darwish, a forty-six-year-old Palestinian poet widely considered a leading voice in Arab-language literature.

In fact, one Darwish poem, “While Speaking About an Earthquake in Istanbul,” may provide a ready answer to Trump’s AI-generated fantasy. Once, when visiting Turkey, the poet learned his stay might coincide with an earthquake, a geological disaster he vowed to survive and respond to productively. In the poem’s seven concluding lines, he writes:

I’ll still clean up the rubble with the people
and build the new homes alongside them,
I’ll be a little less angry—
at least that destruction will be
from our Mother Earth,
and not from colonial planes
piloted by bastards.

Here, the poet draws a clear distinction between the kind of destruction that results from natural processes and the dehumanizing violence that coercive powers inflict upon vulnerable nations such as Palestine. In clear, unambiguous language, absent of any euphemistic veil, “While Speaking” holds a mirror to the West that challenges its political and cultural hegemonies.

“While Speaking,” along with dozens of other equally powerful poems can be found in No One Will Know You Tomorrow, comprised of works from Darwish’s most recent books. A front-to-back reading of the collection reveals the writer has focused these past ten years upon themes logically connected to one who writes to, from, and about a nation under siege. Abandonment, exile, destruction, and return all register as central concerns, sometimes individually but more often simultaneously, like a chorus of devastated voices intoning together as one voice. Consider these lines from “In the Beginning”:

I remember you in abandonment.
I lose you to exile in the morning and late afternoon,
I lose you to exile in the evenings of invisible people,
I lose you to exile and forget you,
a country that sent itself into exile,
a country
that’s abandoned itself.

And these lines from “Hardly Breathe”:

How heavy is the abandonment that fills your homes?
How heavy are the abandoned homes?
I enter their hollow hearts, and can hardly breathe.
No Arabs
or Persians
or Byzantines
know me now.
Didn’t I have a history?
And how did I lose, on the way, poems
that were the world itself,
the world unfurling in an instant?
And how were you lost?
How did you take my share of loss
and leave abandonment in its stead, a planet
without a ribcage?

For Darwish, the Palestinians’ “share of loss” connects present concerns with ancient sorrows. This connection is reflected not only in the poet’s numerous references to writers and thinkers of former generations, but in the very forms the poems take. One section of No One, called “From Discourses,” features poems modeled on the work of Al- Niffari, a tenth-century Sufi mystic who began his poems very simply with the words “He said to me.” Darwish follows this pattern in a series of untitled poems that furnish the collection with some of its most compelling moments.

Beyond Darwish’s ongoing conversation with literary and cultural histories, he believes the distant past can haunt current lives and inform the way they perceive the phenomenal world. In the opening couplets of “Little Malta,” Darwish observes: “The fog this morning is four thousand years old, / as is that woman passing beneath my window.” Recognition of their ever-present history ensures Palestinians share a common purpose and identity no alien power can destroy. It also suggests the life of any single Palestinian (and by extension, other Arabs) is weighted with responsibility. Poets in particular feel this burden more than most, as Darwish makes evident in “No One”:

No one’s said what I’ve said
and had the land let them go.

I’m trying, now, to go about my business,
but she keeps handing me
the rags of her dead father,
the picture of her lost son
and her kidnapped son
and the son who sold her…

Much like the young boy in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”—who hears Death’s whisper on the shores of Paumanok and is forever bound to thousands of songs of sorrow that have “started to life within” him—Darwish’s calling as a poet tethers him to the stories and sorrows of his people, a duty he feels even in exile, for exile is part of the Palestinian experience. “I lost the way to my country,” Darwish laments in “An Algerian Nuba,” “though the only thing I know / is the way to my country.” In fact, through loss of country, the exiled unexpectedly may find some sense of home: “I lost it, / I’m still losing it— / in loss / it becomes my country.”

Just as Whitman’s celebration of America acknowledged “the dark patches” of its citizens (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”), Darwish does not ignore the “sins” of his people. In “The Hell of My People” he writes:

You can’t say anything about my people that I don’t
          already know.
Just as I came down from their sky, their clouds,
          their mountains,
I also experienced their dark valleys and caves,
and I have a complete copy
of the book of their sins;
and even their hyenas and snakes—
I feel for them and love them.

This recognition is a form of radical acceptance, in which Darwish heads off potentially harmful claims outsiders might fling at his people; instead, he sees and embraces them as the varied and complex humans they are, even as some might lead him “to hell.”

Not all the poems in No One plunge sorrow’s depths while exploring the Palestinian diaspora. Darwish is attuned to everyday pleasures, too, usually in the form of brief, vivid observations that resist easy explication. In “A Forgotten Poem About Friendship,” one of the loveliest from the collection, he observes:

The path bounds joyfully before us
like mountain sheep
in the newborn spring,
while the bells ring
around the sheep’s necks.

This is the most a man can do.

In a scene as memorable as the best lines from, say, Italian hermetic poet Umberto Saba, or any number of ancient Japanese haiku writers, Darwish reminds us we belong to the earth first—and it is the earth’s rhythms we, like grazing animals on a hillside, should adhere to where and when we can. Humility and patience trump violence and greed. Setting ego aside, one has room for empathy and full immersion in the present. Put another way, the final lines of “In Response to a Poet Who Dreams of Glory” proclaim: “All glory lies in this: to die / as a human being.”