Mahmoud Darwish was a young Palestinian poet living in Haifa, effectively in exile, when he published these words: “I do not hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper’s flesh will be my food.” It was 1964 when this poem, “Identity Card,” was published, the same year that the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed to reclaim the Palestinian state, even through armed struggle, and 15 years after the Arab-Israeli war uprooted him from his birthplace.
The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Summer 2009 offering, “Promised Land,” offers two recently translated Darwish poems, and, true to his spirit, explores the emotional and political climates in a region where lands are often promised—and rarely delivered—without bloodshed. The images of barbed wire that tear across its pages announce that this is a lesson not about the Promised Land itself, but about the walls that stand between people and their pursuit of those promises.
Indeed, Peter Lagerquist’s essay “Tracing Concrete” sketches the history of modern conflict in Palestine to poetic effect from the invention of barbed wire in America. As the gripping story unfolds, Palestinian armed resistance to the British mandate is met with the superimposition of barbed wire and concrete walls that render the Palestinians all but invisible in their own land. Elsewhere, Elliott D. Woods thoughtfully explores the emotional effect of near-total isolation on young people in Gaza, who are recent strangers to the trappings of modernity.
The year before Darwish’s death last year saw a surge of violence, between Hezbollah and Israel, Hamas and Fatah, that led to the total isolation of Gaza. This would have been another unfulfilled promise for Darwish, whose lines reveal his desire for people to approach the world with an empathy larger than walls. Such considerations are encouraged in “Relative Calm,” whose author, Christopher Merrill, narrowly escapes execution at the Israel-Lebanon border when a guard, with a gun to Merrill’s head, asks if he has children. Merrill replies that he has two girls, and the guard bids him go in peace.
In his editor’s note, Ted Genoways writes, “We must seek lasting solutions that can only be achieved by living shoulder to shoulder with those who do not share our religious or cultural values.” An active empathy may be the panacea in a region where newer and blinder forms of radicalism continually find eager disciples in the displaced and marginalized. But for now, “Promised Land” shows that the partitions that blind and separate peoples still hold.
“Fortifications tend to be built with a mind to the war that was,” Peter Lagerquist writes. “Rarely to the one that will be.” It makes sense, then, that the most wall-laced region in the world also happens to be the place where much of history began. But what kind of wall do you build through a land whose future is uncertain, and where history refuses to end?
