The concept of identity haunted Darwish in his exile and later in the West Bank, especially because he lost a sense of real identity with the loss of his homeland to the Jews. He spent a long time in search of identity in exile and when he came back home, he found out that the Palestinian identity was fragile and undervalued. His ambition
was to have a respectable Palestinian identity based on mutual respect for others and coexistence with the Israelis. The poem below mirrors the vulnerable Palestinian identity after the internal fighting between the Fatah and Hamas factions.
4.6.1 From Now on You Are Somebody Else
This poem appeared in Arabic as كرﯾﻏنﻵا ذﻧﻣ تﻧأin the volume published asﺔﺷارﻔﻟارﺛأ The Trace of the Butterfly in 2008. The English version of this book was entitled differently as A River Dies of Thirst in 2009 to avoid confusion with another translation of Darwish’s earlier work,ﺔﺷارﻔﻟالﻘﺛtranslated by Fady Joudah in 2007 as The Butterfly’s Burden. The title A River Dies of Thirst was chosen after one of the short poemsتوﻣﯾ رﮭﻧ شطﻌﻟا نﻣin this volume, which has the same name. The use of the verb ‘dies’ for ‘a river’ is obviously metaphoric, and the reason of death, i.e., thirst, looks ironic, too.
This was Darwish’s last collection to be published in Arabic, a few months before his death in August 2008. Catherine Cobham translated this book.
During the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007, as Israel attacked Lebanon and the Gaza Strip respectively, Darwish was living in Ramallah in the West Bank. He recorded his observations and expressed his feelings in writing included in A River Dies of Thirst. In this collection, Darwish writes of “love, loss, and the pain of exile in bittersweet poems and diary entries leavened with hope and joy” (Ibid: front cover). In addition, there are a few poems on myth, dream, life and death.
This book has two different jacket designs. The first cover design as well as illustration are remarkable. A bare desert occupies the bulk of the cover, an imprint of the river that ‘died’ and left arid land behind. On the edges of the desert, a few green plants bear neither fruits nor blossoms. Beside each, there is a bloodspot, showing that these plants were killed rather than ‘died of thirst’.
The other design shows a number of black ravens, representing ill-omened people, a raven-haired minister, and a raven-haired sultan wearing a crown. The people and minister are hypocrites in their behaviour before the ruler, searching for wealth, power, and self-aggrandisement. The jacket design reminds us of Cain who killed his brother Abel in search of self-indulgence. According to the Quranic tradition, Cain did not know what to do with his brother’s body until he saw one raven burying another raven’s corpse. Cain then became full of regret for his wrongdoing.
Figure 4.3: First cover of: A River Dies of Thirst
Figure 4.4: Second cover of: A River Dies of Thirst
It is quite clear that the two designs above are about the fighting between Palestinian factions, specifically Fatah and Hamas, which had started in early 2007. Darwish condemned this inter-Palestinian fighting and criticised it strongly in a number of poems in this book, including the one under consideration, From Now on You Are
Somebody Else. In both ideas behind the designs, things change to the worse. The river turns into a desert and love between the Palestinians turns into hatred and even fighting and killing. The title of the poem also suggests that change - a change in intention, goal, and behaviour. In fact, all the suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is addressed in Darwish’s poetry with satire and gravity.
In this poem, Darwish addresses the Palestinians, especialiy those who held a weapon and took part in the internal conflict. From the content of the poem and the second cover design above, we can understand that Darwish is blaming the Palestinians for changing their ambition and dream from liberating their country to taking power over each other in search of personal objectives. Consequently, Darwish sees the Palestinian involved as no longer himself, but rather ‘somebody else’.
He starts the poem by disclosing the reality of the Palestinians as normal people rather than angels as they used to claim. They descended into fighting among themselves and got involved in bloodshed. He says: do not believe yourselves that you are an exception and that you do not make mistakes. He blames the Palestinians, particularly the statesmen, for being kind to those who hate them - probably the Israelis and the westerners – and being cruel to those who love them - their own native people from other factions.
In search of the Palestinian identity, he asks the past not to change them and their dream (of having an independent state) and the future not to ask them about their future identity as it is no longer clear or guaranteed. It is unknown to him whether the Palestinians will have their own sovereign state on their united national soil as they used to dream, or will keep Palestine, and consequently the Palestinian identity, divided between the so-called West Bank and Gaza Strip, or will even retain any of them. Identity for him is what people bequeath, not what they inherit. In other words, the future is more important than the past.
Killing one another in the one country is the work of armed gangs that take power over a weak prey. Darwish depicts the Palestinians as weak before the real enemy and strong before each other. They are divided into militias; they have gang leaders and they believe in their leaders as new prophets. This is a remark on the defection of the leaders of Hamas in Gaza and declaring the Gaza Strip as a separate part of Palestine.
Darwish satirises these fighters and says that in order for the Palestinians not to forget the last war against Gaza, they reignite war, but this time against themselves. He describes the Palestinian who kills his Palestinian brother as an unbeliever.