The Land as Witness Nature and Resistance in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish

الملخص

On the 17Thanniversary of his death, Mahmoud Darwish (1948-2008) remains a pulsingmindof Palestinian Resistancethat stands the core theme of his poetry. This article is an exploration of the ways in which Darwish employs the nature as a subversive strategy for resisting the occupation of his homeland of Palestine. His poems, throughout his writing life that spanned fifty years, can be used to demonstrate how an ecopostcolonial perspective might contribute to an understanding of the poet’s resistance to describe the suffering of Palestinian through his employment of nature.
Through the literary lenses of both ecocriticism and postcolonialism theories of reading literature, ecoresistance is a new perspective in the Arab literary studies, a non-western viewpoint that puts Darwish’s anti-colonial trajectory into sharp focus. The analysis reveals that Darwish uses the various forms of nature that range from the forms of the pure nature to the forms that have been cultivated. Darwish sows the seeds of resistance represented by productive use of the trees, valleys, rivers, animals, fruits, day, night, moon, sun, mountain, hill-just as nature relentlessly exists despite some of the worst human transgressions, so do the Palestinians remain ceaselessly understand in their fight for the return of their homeland as they shall piece the air and plant fertility in the dormant earth. This article proposes new insights into man’s connection to land, and is a step towards opening up the field of ecocriticism as a pathway for reading Arab poetry of resistance.