Mechanisms of Coherence in Light of Discourse Rhetoric (Mahmoud Darwish as a Case Study)

Abstract

Abstract:

This poem is one of the masterpieces of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who is considered one of the most significant poets belonging to the poetry of revolution, freedom, homeland, and commitment. He transformed the songs of Palestinian wandering into stunning epics of deferred return. He wrote this poem one year after the Madrid Conference for Peace. It is a long and exceptional, tragic poem, filled with revolution, allegory, and the dualities of presence and absence, past and present. Andalusia appears with a different temporal and spatial presence, reflecting the themes of displacement, exile, and the theft of land.

Darwish divides his poem into 11 sections, reflecting the eleven planets mentioned in the Quran in the vision of Prophet Joseph (peace be upon him). This poem oscillates between history and imagination, and Darwish takes us on a fleeting journey through the corruption of the present towards a more significant expansion of the journey. As Syrian critic Sabri Hadeed says, it represents “a detailed and surgical panoramic exploration of the fields where the past engulfs the future, or in the possibilities of such an encounter and its implications.”

In this poem, Darwish transitions from the present to the past, overlaying the experience of the past onto the present. The poem is replete with meanings that require deep intellectual engagement and study, with the presence of absent relationships, considering that the scenes from the Quranic story and the last scenes of Andalusia are two experiences that have influenced each other. If these scenes have formed the beginning of the vision, then the haunted vision lies in finding the present/absent relationship, which appears shrouded in the fog of the political stage, the elegy of decay, and a crowded tableau of images. In this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine and Andalusia become unified and parallel. Granada transforms into a place of longing, akin to Palestinian Jerusalem. The present becomes a mirror reflecting the distant Andalusian past on one side and the Palestinian future on the other.