In search of the “voice of the people”: Mahmoud Darwish’s third-worldist genres

Abstract

In the years following the Bandung Conference of 1955, poetry that captured the “voice of the people” became a strategy of the project of Third-Worldism. Mahmoud Darwish (b. 1941, Birwah, d. 2008, Houston) was one of the poet-intellectuals who identified his poetry with this strategy, and with the importance of putting the Palestinian “voice” in conversation with other struggles. Though understood as a national poet of Palestine, reading his 1964 Awrāq al-Zaytūn (Olive Leaves) in the parallel context of Third-Worldism helps to understand the role of poetic genre in this era’s debates about popular language, and sheds light on the transnational commonalities of post-Bandung anticolonial poetry. Analysis focuses on two poetic genres that Darwish adopted in the early 1960s—genres designed to capture this voice of the people. Reading his work in this light gives insight into hitherto unexplored facets of modern Arabic metapoetry, and why the dramatization of speech became the primary mode through which the “voice” of the Palestinian people could be captured.