To be Back, Not to be Black: The Sense of Losing Land and Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Selected Poems: An Eco Postcolonial Reading

Abstract

The search for the sense of losing land and identity seem to be vital aspects in Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry of resistance. His poetry is populated with a continuous but unique cry for the loss of Palestinian identity and land. His poems such as “Identity Card”, “To My Mother ”, “To My Father”, “The Passport”, “On Perseverance” and “A Lover from Palestine” are highly praised in Arabic poetry because they embody emblems of the interconnectedness between land and identity. This paper aims at analyzing how Darwish links between land and identity in these poems from a postcolonial perspective and the extent to which they share a common ground as both entail a mode of resistance to the occupiers of the poet’s homeland. By explicating the link between land and identity in Darwish’s selected poems, we can insert a new awareness of man’s connection to land.