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Darwish: Athar al-farasha: Yawmiyyat [The Butterfly Effect: A Diary]
Reviewed by Noha Radwan
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 38, no. 1 (Autumn 2008), p. 84
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Athar al-farasha: Yawmiyyat [The Butterfly Effect: A Diary], by Mahmud Darwish. Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2008. 286 pages. n.p.

The butterfly effect cannot be seen

The butterfly effect endures

It is the lure of the mysterious

It seduces meaning, and leaves

When the path becomes clear

It is the lightness of the eternal in the quotidian

Mahmud Darwish's last book was not a book of poetry, at least not in the conventional sense. Subtitled "A Diary," The Butterfly Effect contains 126 entries, most lacking meter and rhyme, but none lacking the poetic. In one entry, Darwish writes: "Poetry . . . What is it? It is the words that upon hearing or reading them we say: This is poetry! And we need no proof."

Was writing this book-the subtitle of which insists that it is not poetry-his final challenge as the master of the poetic that "needs no proof"? Or was it a desire to put forth some final thoughts better left uncrafted rather than unsaid? "All prose here is primal poetry, denied the craft of the skillful," he adds in another entry. The nature and essence of poetry occupy him throughout this work.

In these entries, Darwish revisits many of his familiar haunts: identity, nostalgia, love, desire, even death. Here he ponders the nature of identity and the process of individuation, which he has repeatedly interrogated and de-simplified:

You live in halves

You are not you

Or another

Where is the "I" in the darkness of resemblance?

Elsewhere, he recalls the beloved, who is at once elusive and omnipresent:

Is all of this you?

Mysterious and clear

At once present and absent

Your eyes are a deeply black night, and they fill me with light

Your hands are cold and shivering, and they set my body on fire.

Those in search of the poetic, reflective, original, and the disarmingly imaginative will not be disappointed. In an entry called "I envy everything around you," he tells his beloved that around her, "the air has the color of gardenia" and the "bookshelf is flustered and depressed for its lack of an erotic volume in praise of two ivory mounds that are uncovered by the excitement of the guitars and covered by a wave of sighing silk." He muses over his own death. In "He sees himself absent," he writes: "In the play's final act, everything will remain the same . . . But I, I will not be in my room or in the yard. This is how the script would have it: Some absentee is needed to lighten the load of the place."

Darwish's experience as a Palestinian was an integral element of his poetic career, and it peers through the majority of his poems. Some among his audience, however, have often criticized him for moving away from the more directly political poetry of resistance with which he began his career. Here, he responds to their criticism:

Sometimes the critics assassinate me

They want the same poem

And the same metaphor . . .

If I stray down a side path

They say: he has betrayed the path

If I find the eloquence of a grass blade

They say he abandoned the obstinacy of the oak

If I see the yellow flowers of spring

They wonder: Where is the national blood among his papers?

If I write: The butterfly is my younger sister

At the entrance to the garden

They stir the meaning with a soupspoon.

If I whisper: A mother is a mother. When she loses her child,

She wilts and dries like a stick

They say she ululates at his funeral and dances

For the funeral is his wedding

And if I occasionally look at the sky

To see the invisible

They say that poetry has outstripped its purposes

Sometimes the critics assassinate me

I survive their readings

And thank them for the misunderstanding

Then I look for my new poem

Perhaps one can also construe "all beautiful poetry . . . is resistance" as another response. Poets are beckoned to a unique experience of the universe and are bound to search human language for the means to transform this experience into poetry. Darwish was a poet to the core. We can only trace a poet's experience in his words;we do not have the vision to judge it. Darwish alone was privy to his experience as a Palestinian poet.

This is not the case with politics. Last summer, Darwish chose to take sides in the brutal conflict that was devastating Gaza. He wrote a poem, "You, from now on, are not you," that was a scathing criticism of Hamas. In this poem, Darwish passed in silence over the enemies that Hamas was fighting, which included not only the other Palestinian contenders for political authority, but the U.S. government and Israel as well. He venomously denigrated Hamas, calling its members "infidels," accusing them of ignorance, of "not knowing the difference between a mosque and a university because both words share a common root in Arabic." The poem earned him ample criticism not only from Islamic activists but also from secular intellectuals angered by his political stance. Darwish chose to forego the amnesty of poets, and his poem came as a stab to a movement that did not lack powerful enemies. "You, from now on, are not you," is the penultimate poem in The Butterfly Effect.

There is no doubt that the Palestinian struggle for true and complete liberation will continue. There is a similar certainty that Darwish will live on not only for Palestinians and other Arabs but as an iconic poet of resistance to many others worldwide. And it is true that usurped rights are not regained by poetry alone. But when Palestinians can return to their homeland, one hopes they will cherish Darwish, the poet whose words may have been the butterfly effect in a long and multifaceted struggle.