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Considered one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic poetry, Najwan Darwish speaks to the lived realities of Palestine. Yet his poems reach beyond them, forming a universal mural of the tragic defeat of what we still insist on calling “humanity.”
Unbound by a particular time or place, Darwish’s poetry transforms the anger and despair of people surrounded by unjust, unequal, and overwhelming violence into a tangible struggle sustained by hope. Since his aptly titled We Once Awoke in Paradise, published in 2000, his poems have sought to recover a primal scene of love, passion, and just, lasting peace.
With their cinematic structure and abundance of images, these poems challenge the fragile, false divide between poetry and social and political reality. They are unsettling poems by a poet who is a citizen only of “that country whose name is song.” For, as he writes, “there is nothing left to lose.”