Mahmoud Darwish died in Houston. The Palestinian poet, as monumental to his nation’s literature as Gabriel García Márquez is to Colombia or Anna Akhmatova to Russia, had flown to the city to have open heart surgery for the third time in his life. The procedure took place on August 6, 2008; three days later, he passed away from complications at the age of 67.
When I think that Darwish’s life ended in Texas, I find myself wondering how he spent his final days. Did he see a cactus blooming, this poet who gave voice to the emotional landscape of exile perhaps more clearly than any other, and think of al-Birwa, the now-razed village where he was born? Feeling the torrid August humidity, did he think instead of the dry winds of Ramallah, where he lived for many years in later life? I daydream that he visited the Rothko Chapel, continuing the conversation with death that he began in his famous long poem, “Mural,” as he sat before the enormous, obsidian-colored canvases: “Death, have a seat and enmesh yourself / with the crystal of my days.”
Though Darwish lived in Palestine in the years leading up to his death, there is a devastating symmetry to his passing thousands of miles away, in a country not his own. Exile was, for him, a state of being, the liminal reality of Palestinian dispossession: “I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there,” he writes in “Another Road in the Road.” Yet I also find myself profoundly moved to think that Darwish shared, for however brief and tragic a period, some of the geography of his life with those of us in Texas. As the Israeli military has unleashed unutterable violence in the Gaza Strip, the 140-square-mile slice of Palestinian territory abutting Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, the coda to Darwish’s life seems a reminder of the relationship between our daily Texan lives and the lives of Palestine and its diaspora. About 9 percent of the United States’ entire Palestinian population lives in Texas; at statewide rallies, tens of thousands of community members and allies have shown up in recent months to pressure government officials to end the ongoing horror in Gaza.
Such protests have largely been ignored. Beyond the intersection of careers like Darwish’s, our state is often bound to Palestine through quite different channels—the purchase of $65 million in Israeli bonds on top of billions of dollars in business dealings, the stabbing and attempted drowning of Palestinian-American citizens, the police repression of student protestors at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, long before the war that began on October 7, 2023, Texas passed a law to prohibit governmental entities from working with contractors that “boycott Israel”—a measure that exposed Texas’ hypocritical notion of free speech. Israel and Palestine are never so far away when their names are etched into our very statutes.
I am a Jewish writer who moved to Texas to study poetry. I have also been active with Jewish Voice for Peace, a fast-growing movement of progressive American Jews—the largest of its kind around the world—working toward Palestinian freedom and a Judaism beyond Zionism. Each day, I join innumerable others in this network and beyond who wake to an aggrieved survey of what more has befallen Gaza. As I scroll through news and social media feeds so overwhelming as to become numbing, I ask: How can I hold myself near, how can I keep Palestine at the mantle of my heart?
Such a memorial practice steers me toward the work of liberation and peace, when the tendency of such an onslaught of news is toward alienation. Darwish’s life is one reminder, but so too is poetry itself—that strange art that allows us to receive, to step into, the interiority of another.
There is one encounter I don’t need to imagine: Two days before Darwish’s surgery, he met with Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet and doctor who lives in Houston and was planning a new translation of Darwish’s later works. Joudah was born in Austin, to Palestinian refugees, and spent part of his youth in the Middle East before returning to the United States for college and medical school. He now practices internal medicine and has published multiple volumes of award-winning poetry. I view Joudah and Darwish’s meeting as a key moment in diasporic literature: the national poet of Palestine, abroad, greeting the young first-generation poet who would go on to become an essential voice in contemporary American poetry. Two children of exile, a generation apart, in search of a shared language.
In an interview with BOMB, Joudah described his meeting with Darwish as a joyous encounter—“good lunch, good wine,” an hours-long conversation that allowed him to relish Darwish’s rich imagination. But as a physician, Joudah was especially aware that this meeting might be their last. “I think he knew all along that those were his last days,” Joudah recounted. “He said goodbye in such a beautiful way to almost all those who were part of his life.” By then, Joudah had already completed a draft of his translation, and he was surely acquainted with the grief, grace, and humor with which the great poet had long approached death. In his introduction to the translation, Joudah wrote that Darwish “demands a daring, unapologetic openness to life, humanity, and the world.”
Sixteen years later, how do we remain unapologetically open to life, humanity, the world? As of July, Israel’s military siege and bombing campaign has killed around 40,000 Gazans since Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 hostage on October 7. The true death toll in Gaza could ultimately be much higher, researchers have suggested. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced and face famine and disease, and, in the West Bank, armed Zionist settlers have killed hundreds more, often with total impunity. How to put such atrocity into words, and to what end? What obligation do we have to the language we use?
Midway through his latest collection of poems, strikingly titled […], Joudah recounts a tale from the Quran in which Moses, at God’s behest, meets al-Khidr, a saint meant to test the prophet’s faith. To join him on his journey, al-Khidr demands Moses’ unconditional silence. Yet, as the prophet witnesses al-Khidr sink a ship, destroy a crumbling wall that could have housed “a beleaguered people,” then kill a child, Moses finds himself “incapable of green silence.” In the scripture, Moses ultimately learns a lesson in patience: Each act has its own divine explanation. Such a denouement is absent in Joudah’s poem, in which the tale is instead an illustration of silence, of the failures of wisdom. “The dead are here to teach us what?” Joudah asks elsewhere. “What do the slain teach?” The collection is a searing meditation on such questions, with the title itself, […], suggesting the failure of language: The ellipsis is the symbol of silence and doubt.
[…]’s publication is something of a miraculous feat. Written in the first three months following October 7, it was fast-tracked by the independent press Milkweed Editions and published in March. I can think of almost no corollaries, other than wartime dispatches, for a literary work produced on such a timeline. The poems have a breathlessness to them; they are veined with the fury and grief of someone beholding the destruction of his people in real time. Yet they are hardly rushed. They are at once crystalline and unflinching, lush and attentive. Even several months after its publication, it is devastating to feel the poems’ prescience. “Ceasefire now,” Joudah pleads in an early poem. “Before Thanksgiving? / By Christmas or the New Year? / On MLK day or Easter?” I write now after the summer solstice, and the question echoes still.
Much of Joudah’s work is attuned to language itself, its regenerative and destructive power. In the opening of […], Joudah declares:
“I write for the future
because my past is demolished.
I fly to the future
to retrieve my demolished present
as a legible past.”
Poetry can salvage. Yet language is just as often a danger. “The passive voice / is your killer’s voice,” he writes, echoing one of the longstanding critiques of media coverage of Palestinians, who often appear as passive victims of unnamed perpetrators. And later: “Whoever gets to write it most / gets to erase it best.” Language and history are essential tools of empire and subjugation. After the 1948 war (which Palestinians remember as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”), when Israel established itself by dispossessing at least 700,000 Palestinians, villages were renamed from Arabic to Hebrew. Though Joudah’s poems do not say so explicitly, their acuity suggests that a poet’s attention to words can be a salve, a gateway to nuance and clarity in a narrative machine that thrives on reduction and obfuscation.
But the poems in […] are not merely technical or ideological exercises. They frequently wander from unaffected lucidity to the vibrant intimacy of the lyric. Plain declarations are undercut by immediate recursions and questions—“I know how it got to this. How did it?” or “Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you?”—capturing the instability of thought as a mind grapples with comprehending the incomprehensible. Elsewhere, Joudah moves from urgent responses to the war to poems about family, domesticity, and quotidian pleasures—the taste of an onion, the flowers in an arboretum, the flight of birds.
Love becomes a keystone of the collection, as both palliative and terror, from a lover’s jubilance to a mother’s dread at losing her children. In “Hummingbird,” the speaker wonders:
“Who here has not lived
the passing
of all thinking
through the language of love?”
As such poems emerge as the literal and figurative center of […], they remind that Palestinians are not bound to be the scribes of their suffering. In an essay in October for the New York Times, the Palestinian-American writer Hala Alyan, herself a poet and clinical psychologist, described the “demoralizing work” of having to “to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities.” Western audiences often place an egregious burden on subjects of imperial violence to earn solidarity by becoming emblems of their own suffering. It’s a sentiment echoed through postcolonial literature, which Joudah describes as the problem of the “Palestinian poet, as signifier and signified.” In his introduction to Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, another translation of Darwish by the poet Carolyn Forché and others, Joudah asks, “Can a defeated people write great poetry, without being part of political triumph, attainment of, or adoption by, power?” Or, as Darwish once put it: “Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?”
In such cases poetry risks becoming a reifying force, co-opted by bourgeois culture without enacting actual change. Seen in this light, Joudah’s poems about frogs, leaves, bees, lovers, and rivers become more radical than his poems about the war, turning from an identity riven by dispossession to a celebration of what Joudah describes as the “relatable and unrelatable, the translatable and untranslatable Palestinian flesh.” Indeed, in approaching language with a poet’s ear and the world with a poet’s eye, perhaps we might all begin the urgent work of breaking through dehumanizing narratives, of envisioning and entering the lives of others in all their mundane and indestructible beauty.
In one of the most powerful and devastating poems in […], Joudah writes:
“This is what the bomb-droppers
did not know they wanted:
to see if others will be like them
after unquantifiable suffering.”
When I first read these lines, I felt it was one of the most concise and unflinching articulations of the tragic dissonance underlying Israel’s existence that I’d ever heard. Long before the war began, I had begun trying to write poetry that interrogated my Jewish identity and the trauma-corrupted consciousness that could lead my people to be, in one generation, nearly annihilated from the face of the earth and, in the next, pursue the subjugation and expulsion of another people.
I came to Austin three years ago to work on such poems and to study literature at the Michener Center for Writers, a graduate program at the University of Texas. I spent two years working toward a metaphorical framework for what I wanted to say about Israel: how it was a product of Jewish forgetting. Then October 7 happened, and all that has followed in its wake. I dreaded Israel’s backlash after the initial violence; it became worse than anything I could have imagined. I took part in protests, including on my campus, and watched as professors, friends, and fellow students were brutalized and jailed. Unmoored, I found myself having to rethink my obligations to language when writing about Palestine, as an American and as a Jew.
I had the great fortune to be born into a Jewish family in Denver, Colorado, that was ambivalent about Israel, ranging from doubtful hope to utter disbelief. I have a sister whose anti-Zionist practice in particular has been my moral compass since I was a child, when she first visited the occupied territories as a teenager with a peace group. I’ve long felt that Israel’s treatment of Palestine is the central moral calamity of my lifetime.
All my childhood, I was raised to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, to never forget the mass elimination of my people and to be conscious of our place in the Jewish diaspora. How, then, could I look toward Palestinians and let such a frame fall from my eyes? How, as Israel carries on a monthslong campaign that can no longer be accurately described as anything but genocidal, must I write about it as a Jew? What do I owe to pain, and what to life? How to write about Palestine without submitting its people to the same linguistic strictures that have dominated for 75 years? How, in other words, not to let the onslaught of images coming out of Gaza efface the living image—the untranslatable flesh?
Maybe the only answer I have thus far is that, as a Jew, I have the opportunity to use poetry, that private art, to occupy and inscribe Jewish consciousness—its transformation from centuries of remembrance to a century of forgetting—and in doing so perhaps begin the work of unbinding our long memories from colonial violence. At the same time, I have the chance to reconceive what it can mean to be a Jew after Zionism, to steward memory and language in the face of atrocity—not unlike Jewish writers of the last century and those before it, who spent their careers interrogating the toll of history’s unlearned lessons.
I hold no illusions about the widespread utility of poetry; I tend to think one can achieve more by lying down before a bulldozer than writing a poem. Yet, in times of war, why is it that poetry always emerges as a sort of beacon of moral clarity? Beyond Joudah’s work, consider Mosab Abu Toha’s verse from within embattled Gaza or the elegiac and fateful “If I Must Die,” penned late last year by the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. Such poems circulate online like coins of understanding, offering solace and giving voice to grief; at protests, they have become fixtures of murals, signs, and banners.
I do believe, in spite of any cynicism about this art I love, that poetry can be a window into another consciousness, a way to enter a feeling suspended as in amber—to see the unknown as if it were reflected in your own eye. Is that not the starting place of understanding? Despite 75 years of occupation and interminable months of war, no future is precluded if this is possible. As the illustrious Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, herself a Texan who long served as this magazine’s poetry editor, wrote in her poem “Jerusalem” some 30 years ago: “It’s late but everything comes next.”
