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

Abstract

The article examines how Mahmoud Darwish employs nature as a strategy of resistance to the occupation of Palestine. Drawing on ecocriticism and postcolonial criticism, it analyses natural images across Darwish’s poetic career, including land, trees, valleys, rivers, animals, fruits, the sun, the moon, mountains, and cultivated landscapes. These elements are presented not merely as decorative imagery but as witnesses to Palestinian suffering, symbols of rootedness, and sources of persistence and renewal. The study traces different phases of Darwish’s writing and shows how his connection to the homeland developed from early resistance poems into a broader poetic vision linking human survival with the endurance of nature. It argues that this ecopostcolonial reading clarifies the relationship between land, identity, memory, and anti-colonial resistance, while opening a productive pathway for applying ecocriticism to modern Arabic resistance poetry (*).