"In the Presence of Absence": Mahmoud Darwish's Testament
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.4587Abstract
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is well known for his intertextual playfulness and inventiveness, and indeed, in one of his last books, Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb (In the Presence of Absence, 2006) he alludes to classical Arabic poetry, the Qurʾān, to and his own previous oeuvre. Drawing on a celebrated qaṣīda by the Umayyad poet Mālik Ibn al-Rayb as his model, Darwish composed this work as a funeral speech for himself. Essentially, it is an oration in prose, but snatches of poetry also appear in a stylistic pattern where rhetorical figures abound. Speaking from the barzakh between life and death, the poet reflects on his wordly existence from cradle to grave. Published less than two years before Darwish’s death in August 2008, the text has the double character of prediction and testament. The thesis of this article is that the death of the author adds meaning to it not by his absence, but paradoxically, by his increased presence as an unavoidable point of reference and source of identification for the reader.
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