Mahmoud Darwish: The Politics of Mourning and Catastrophe

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Mahmoud Darwish's contrapuntal notion of memory, catastrophe, and mourning exhibit an aesthetic of freedom, intransigence and resistance. Darwish's intellectual and aesthetic project is primarily premised upon the pleasures and pitfalls of memory and catastrophe as a site of spatial and cultural resistance. For Darwish, memory and catastrophe are not only about the absence and presence of geography and home, but they are also metaphorical in every way. In The Presence of Absence (2011), Darwish argues that metaphors form a peculiar mode of geography and space. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of late style and Judith Butler's argument on the politics of mourning, this article sets out to examine the ways in which Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence embody a radical form of aesthetic and intellectual praxis, writing against the grain and the politics of mourning.