We Are the Ones Hanging
A Review of Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross
Written by Shada Shahin (Bethlehem University)
Exhausted on the Cross is the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s second full-length English translated collection of poems. Darwish, born in Jerusalem, and currently living between Jerusalem and Haifa, is described by The New York Review of Books as “one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets.” Darwish’s writing career took off in 2000 with the publication of his first Arabic collection Kān yaduqq al-bāb al-‘akhīr (He Was Knocking at the Last Door). He has since gained international recognition with the translation of a volume of selected poems, Nothing More to Lose, by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by NYRB Poets in 2014. What has mainly contributed to Darwish’s international readership (he is now translated into over twenty languages) is his ability to show, on the one hand, a versatile literary and linguistic knowledge, and on the other, a deep sensitivity to human suffering (Abu Zaid, “Translator’s Afterword”) giving his writing a universal identity that cuts across countries, nationalities and affiliations.
In his new collection, Exhausted (First published in Arabic as Ta’iba al-mu’allaqun) which is also expertly translated from Arabic by Abu-Zeid, Darwish writes with the same intensity he is known for, but this time delivers a ‘tired’ tone of resignation which reflects, as Abu Zeid writes in the translator’s afterword, “a certain weariness of spirit — the tedium of an endless occupation, but also the suffering inherent in the human condition itself” (122). What is distinct about this unflinching collection is Darwish’s ability to exhibit an expansive knowledge of classical Arabic literary traditions which he brilliantly and smoothly integrates in the new collection. We see him conversing with poets and major figures from the past creating a link between their lived experiences and his harsh present reality.
This new collection links the particularity of the Palestinian experience with that of the universal to create a true portrait of what it means to be human today in an era of instability, persecution, displacement, and injustices. The earth has become, as Darwish writes in one of the poems with the same title, “a defeated banner” filled with erected crosses of infinite human suffering. We are doomed to “drag histories behind us” unable yet to admit to the existential fact that we are born, as Darwish puts it in “This Paradise,” “already broken by loss.” Tapping into loss can enable us, as it does with the speaker in “This Start”, to see that a utopic vision of “life/behind the curtains, / behind the pain and travesty” is an ontological fallacy. The speaker learns that in order “to make this start,” he must renounce the desire for an irretrievable wholeness once enjoyed before the trauma of loss. This recognition, however, Darwish admits becomes torturous (“All This Recognition”), especially for a poet who, as he writes in “Obituary” is expected to fulfill “his poetic obligations” and be like “a man mourning the entire world” (“The appearance of Taha Mohammad Ali”).
Darwish is burdened with an urgency to “abbreviate this suffering” in “dawn’s small notebook” (“Your Sentence”) while his “lips are liberated from meaning” and his “words remain captives.” He, however, implores God to relieve him of the burdens of “all this recognition” that he “never wanted” (“All This Recognition”). The poet’s struggle crystalizes in “A Poem by a Soldier in Disguise,” as the poet-soldier tries, after the war ended, to be “a seed bursting”, “a bud unfurling on the branch.” Yet, he is soon struck by a painful awareness that he is unable to write again in “a land/ only death inhabits.” In that land, the truth becomes, as Zurita writes, “the most dangerous lie because one kills and dies for it.” Darwish, therefore, decides to escape from this lie and from his powerlessness in the face of a reality that weighs him down. In “On the Third Day” he chooses an exile of “equivocation and doubt.” He resorts to the world of fantasies and wishes, imagining “man was a river/ sweeping himself away” (“As for Me”). The wish materializes when we see him turn into a malleable force expanding inwards and outwards, between the past and the present, bringing back memories of dead poets and different historical epochs.
Darwish’s ability to become the voice of the multitudes comes from the position of that “Without” which he chooses to occupy. He chooses to be a rootless stranger living “without a mother or a father, / without siblings, /without peers, / I lived without kin or companion, /without allies. / I lived without” (“Without). The universality of Darwish’s poetry manifests in renouncing all essentialist and exclusionist identities in favor of an emancipatory position that stems from “the void.” The void, or the gap, as he writes in “In Constantinople,” is that shared human element that is difficult to access because it is masked “with ivory that corroded/ in the hearts…”, with historical claims and identity battles. “People are simply people”, he writes, “Peel off the languages, and all you’ll find/ is women and men”.
This knowledge enables Darwish to relink the Palestinian struggle with the struggle for freedom of other communities deemed disposable in their fight against the unjust global system. It is that “single downpour, /a single song” which binds together the exhausted, the displaced, the persecuted and the dead, in Haifa, besieged Gaza, modern Shatila camp, medieval Baghdad, and in places that are three millennia old. That single song, also, becomes our own, the readers, “as survivors of an unfinished war” (Zurita, “Foreword”). Darwish presents a cosmopolitan collection that travels through the history of different people, nations, cities, and countries inviting us to weave together the melancholic story of a chaotic eternity. Here, we experience a “Hope devoted to despair/despair delivered from hope” (“The Sea”). We live in an era where the song of hope never ceases to find an echo against a backdrop of “a darkness that never ends/of a dawn that never comes” (L.1–2).
In an interview with Abu-Zeid, Darwish describes the collection, as a product of “a dark experience in a dark era, which is the era we’re living through now in the world, and in Palestine, and in the region.” His exhausted souls are seen aimlessly roaming in search of love, compassion, and solidarity that no one seems to be willing to offer. The woman’s piercing words in “In Shatila” about the refugees’ dire situation in the camp and the degradation of life “where’s no dignity” are heard by the unnamed visitor, most probably Darwish himself, who does nothing but smile at that “lovesick child.” Then, he turns his back to return to where he comes from leaving those who dwell in the camp to the monstrosity of memories, and the unspeakable pain. Towards the end of the poem, we sense a tremendous rage, and self-reproach, at the way this unnamed presence receives the woman’s imploration to end their intolerable suffering, her “Rivers of regret/ years of agony”; This “son of a bitch” responds with a cold smile, “indifferent/to the brackish water of the sea”. This mercilessness in the world leads Darwish to address Adam in “A Single Sentence” praying that God may forgive him for his grandchildren “can’t even find/a mulberry leaf” to hide the shame of humanity.
This is the “wretched world” Darwish beautifully, yet painfully, paints in his new collection inviting the reader “to share the lack of air” and “the hope that slinks off beyond the borders,/ never to return” (“To Abdel Amir Jaras”). We are invited to share the struggle of Darwish and his characters in their relentless pursuit to find a sense of their humanity against those “thieves” who “had never honored any god but cruelty” (“A Story from Shiraz”). Images of loss, despair, confusion and death dominate these poems whose characters implore to be saved. Yet, all the while, Darwish offers an intriguing reconfiguration of the traditional meaning pinned to death. Death, throughout the collection, is portrayed as a force that is not feared but wished for, as being humanity’s ultimate truth. “We came here to collapse. /we’re no better/ than the ancient castles.” Our final narrative does not need “choruses/ no historians/ no hired women to mourn us” (“Personal Matter”). Death is that universal binding force, fair and nondiscriminatory, where diversity and difference, the oppressor and the oppressed, the displaced and the occupier become one and unidentifiable. Death is “this pit of earth/ from which the singing of a hopeless people rises”. As the poet Taha Mohammad Ali tells Darwish, poetry liberates us “from the greatest jailer — time” while death liberates “from the shackles of our small jailers.”
The Cross: A Symbol of Humanity’s Endless Suffering
Salvation in Darwish’s book is not obtained through a blind belief in “wings in paradise,” in any divine sacrifice, or some deific intervention. Darwish’s paradise is “eternity at the breakfast table,” “the bread and oil,” The Gazan child’s “two eyes gleaming with all the world’s promises” (“The Closing of the Sea”).
The cross as the ultimate symbol of sacrifice and love for humanity is subtly interrogated as appears in many lashing poems including the title poem “Exahusted”. Darwish uses the Christian symbol to account for the endless suffering, for “Rivers of regret/years of agony” of women in Shatila refugee camp, of a slaughtered child, of Palestinian detainees in the Mascovia jail, and of a corpse of a refugee floating aimlessly in “the Sea of Darkness” finding no one to shroud, nor to bury.
Jesus in Darwish’s “They Woke You at Dawn” appears as another Palestinian fedayee (a Palestinian guerilla) “condemned and crucified/in the sea of a single day,” for like any Palestinian “His name was on their blacklist.” Yet, in the title poem “Exhausted,” Darwish sets an existential difference between Jesus, the fedayee, and Darwish’s people, and those deemed the disposable surplus of humanity. The oppressed of the world, in general, and the Palestinians have been dragging the long history of suffering behind them with no foreseeable possibility of salvation. In the poem, humanity’s pain surpasses that of Jesus because his was quick and happened within a day, while the oppressed’s “cross is raised with every dawn.” The lord of redemption has long died on the cross and left the poor, the weak, the marginalized, and the weary permanently “exhausted on the cross”:
The ones hanging
are tired,
so, bring us down
and give us some rest
We drag histories behind us
here
where there’s neither land
nor sky.
Lord,
sharpen your knife
and give your sacrifice its rest.
The symbol of the cross complements the collection’s dark images of death and nightmarish visions of a God who is either absent or returns a gaze of indifference. Darwish’s earth is represented as the theatre of a puppeteer God who seems to take pleasure in “the singing of a hopeless people […] hoarding up fatigue/as they travel from one end of themselves/to the other” desperate for a death “in which gathering clouds can sleep” (“Pass It”). His disappointment in God is nowhere clearer than in “To Abdel Amir Jaras,” a poem about the exiled Iraqi poet who fled Saddam Hussein’s regime to die in a bicycle accident in Canada. Darwish writes: “The workers are washing their faces with cold/water, / with the darkness and the dawn,/ while we go on believing, Lord, that suffering/ is your gift to us.” Then he continues to warn God of the day when all the tired, those who were beaten by life’s cruel fist, will demand the Lord to give them back “the years of misery” and “the lies we told ourselves.”
God, in the collection, is portrayed as a God who has distanced himself from the suffering of his creation. He ceases to be the God of the lowly and the oppressed for he “cannot know our pain”. Driven by a sense of abandonment and despair, Darwish and “Those who receive the loaf as a miracle” as he writes in “A Prayer”, refuse to “sit at the gate of regret” and sing to God “psalms of lamentation” (“Exhausted”). Instead, they choose to be reborn into another faith that directly speaks to their suffering in their language. Goddess Justice replaces God in “A Prayer”, for she is not foreign to those who know her; she “isn’t from the world beyond” but dwells upon the earth with mankind, “sweats and bleeds with them, / she breaks her bread with them each day.” Blindfolded to all human differences, she is, therefore, capable of reinstating justice and restoring the stolen rights of the weak and the oppressed.
Finally, Darwish’s collection is not devoid of all hope; suggesting it would do his poetry a true disservice. Darwish’s people — the poets, the Palestinians, and the marginalized — exhibit an inherited madness, “this madness is common among my people,” he writes. It is a stubbornness that never wavers in the face of trauma and exile; they are “mountains — /mountains unmoved by the wind” (“To Lament a Mountain”). They persist and insist on surviving, “like a seed bursting, /like a bud unfurling on the branch” (“A poem by a Soldier”). They are wrecked by fate but “Still emerge from the rubble” (“From the Rubble”) forcing those in power to wonder how they go on resisting, despite their “wretched state” (“A Story from Shiraz”) — how they neither succumb to the imposed reality nor normalize their suffering. The story of the poet’s young friend Tayseer, trapped in a camp in Gaza, best exemplifies what it means to be ferocious in the face of forced amnesia, stolen memories and “the threshold of silence”. Despite the unpredictability of life in the camp with its “cement houses, /the memories of tin sheets” of a stolen country, nothing “has taken the slightest spark from his eyes. / He saw the sea once, and nothing can convince him/ he won’t see it again.” The ocean does not discriminate; “it never asks for addresses or names” (“While Spring Falls”). Tayseer, and Darwish alike, know that one day Gaza Sea will be opened if we are able “to see two eyes gleaming with all the world’s promises.”
Exhausted on the Cross stands as a testimony of victory and defeat, war and love, compassion and indifference. But, most importantly, it is a collection about the urgency of writing trauma and loss. Real resistance and the enemy’s final defeat, materialize, not in the fabrications of historians and history books, but in the ability of the weak to write and re-write oppression, to keep their song on repeat. “Write it,” Darwish beseeches those who have been silenced and wrecked by fate. “Write it, your word” so it becomes a testament against “their poisoned words” before the journey of immortality ends. Write it, “All of it” for the word will always carry the seeds of potential freedom. Write that,
We’re still able to respond
And we’re still smiling
And laughing
And taking you unawares,
You —
The defeated entourage.
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