from “Mural”
translated by John Berger
The clock in the port ticks on No one notices its time at night The fishermen of the generous sea cast their nets and plait the waves the lovers are in the discotheque Dreamers caress sleeping larks and dream I said: If I died I would wake up I have more than enough of the past but not enough of tomorrow... from Mural (Verso, 2009)
The poem this excerpt is from, Mahmoud Darwish’s “Mural,” is a pages-long meditation on death and life and poetry and time and all that exists between and among these words that barely scratch the surface of Darwish’s work, which is a work that begins and returns and stays rooted — even as it universally touches so much — in Darwish’s homeland of Palestine.
Here are some lines of Darwish’s — from his poem, “To a Young Poet” — that express, to me, his sense of rootedness and expansiveness and hope and care as a poet, while living in a home consistently wrecked by violence:
One thousand birds in the hand don’t equal one bird that wears a tree. A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.
Yeah. It’s not about the bird trapped in the violence of a fisted hand. It’s about the tree, and it’s about the bird in the tree. It’s about belonging. And home. It’s about the land. And it’s about possibility, too, isn’t it? Flowers in a cemetery.
Today’s poem is a short excerpt from “Mural” — these nine lines that stand alone in their own stanza. I was struck, especially, by the final three lines of today’s poem:
I said: If I died I would wake up I have more than enough of the past but not enough of tomorrow...
I had to chew on these final three lines for awhile. They stunned me. To die is to wake up. They invert those famous lines from Hamlet:
To die, to sleep— To sleep—perchance to dream.
And so I wondered about these lines. About what it means to wake up as a kind of death. About what it means to have more than enough of the past. About what it means to have not enough of tomorrow.
For context, this is one of the final poems written in Darwish’s life, written at a time when, as John Berger (whose work is so morally clear and astute — a model, to me, for how to approach the work of writing and witnessing with real care) writes in his introduction:
Gaza, the largest prison in the world, is being transformed into an abattoir.
That was in 2008, over fifteen years ago. Berger continues:
Day and night bombs, shells, phosphorous arms, mortars, machine-gun rounds are being fired by the Israeli army from air, sea and land against a civilian population of 1.5 million. The estimated number of mutilated and dead increases with each news report from international journalists, all of whom are forbidden by Israel to enter the Strip. Yet the crucial constant figure is that for a single Israeli casualty there are one hundred Palestinian casualties, of whom almost half are women and children. This is what constitutes a massacre. Most lodgings have neither water nor electricity; the hospitals lack doctors, medicines and generators. The massacre follows a blockage and siege.
And so, in Darwish’s homeland as he composes this poem is a scene so similar to one that is being enacted in Gaza today — a scene of violence and mass death and cruelty.
And so I thought, as I read Darwish’s poem, once again about what this line might mean:
If I died I would wake up
I thought about how this line touches on a tragic notion — the idea that death involves the inability to dream, which is part of what it means to wake up. I thought of how death, as illustrated here, means waking up from your dream. And I thought of how, when your life is consumed by grief, you lose the possibility to dream. A life of grief is a life, as Darwish suggests, where someone has more than enough of the past, but not enough of tomorrow. A life of grief is a life, too, where one can only live in nightmares.
One of the great tragedies of living in the face of constant violence is the way such violence ransacks the possibility of hope. When violence and death are constant forces in one’s life, then hope becomes a rare thing. And when hope becomes a rare thing, and when even dreaming feels purposeless, then one feels, as Darwish notes, dead already. Alive in a nightmare. If I died I would wake up. In a world of violence, to be alive and awake is to see death every day. What senseless tragedy, so experienced by every waking sense.
This notion of dreaming echoes throughout Darwish’s long poem. Here’s one moment:
I say to my two friends: If there has to be a dream let it be like us and simple
Here’s a recurring series of moments, rooted in hope and desire and want:
One day I'll become what I want One day I'll become a bird
One day I'll become what I want One day I'll become a poet
One day I'll become what I want One day I'll become a vine
And so I am thinking of dreams today. And desire. And hope. And I am thinking of the tragedy that comes when not just one person — but an entire people — are forced into those three lines of Darwish’s poem today, those three lines of grief and future-less-ness and fear and absence, as a result of daily massacre.
I think about that, too, as I begin another school year of teaching. Just the other day, as part of a silly activity with a group of the students for whom I serve as one of the faculty advisors, I had kids fill out these kindergarten-themed pages about their “First Week of 10th Grade.” They were cute pages, covered in little graphics — you know, like silly shapes and stuff. And each page asked a bunch of questions about favorite colors and favorite animals and favorite foods. The silliness was part of the point, how silliness, especially in moments of stress, can disarm all those painful things our minds create for us, those small anxieties and worries we create out of the unknown. I filled out one of the pages, too, and I pinned it on the cork board next to the others. We yelled out our favorite animals: pandas and red foxes and Icelandic horses and dogs, all dogs.
One question on the page asked kids what they wanted out of the future. And I think now, as I read Darwish’s poem, about how there is such a joy in asking a kid such a question and getting them to believe that whatever they want can be real. I don’t mean about work and dream jobs and all those questions that corner kids into thinking in between these giant, immovable brackets we sometimes place out there, in that space we call the future. I just mean that there is joy, simply, in asking someone what do you want and knowing that there is a space called the future that you are helping cultivate with them. A little dream garden of sorts. And I think that there is such joy in hearing these big answers, full of possibility, and hearing answers, too, that are so ordinary and rooted and true. There is joy in the very fact of the question. What do you want? What do you long for? There is joy in the very fact of possibility.
There is no joy, I think, in the absence of that question. In a world of no tomorrows.
Darwish touches on that in his poem:
How can my tomorrow be saved? By the velocity of electronic time or by my desert caravan slowness? I have work til my end as if I won't see tomorrow and I have work for today who isn't here So I listen softly softly to the ant beat of my heart.
Notice how it is Darwish who, writing amidst murder and violence, is the one who makes himself smaller — the ant beat of my heart. And softer, too. He does that, too, in his poem, “To Our Land,” where he writes:
To our land, and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed
And he did such a thing earlier, in the excerpt from “Mural,” — If there has to be a dream, let it be like us and simple.
And so that is part of the cruelty, isn’t it? That, when you engage repeatedly in acts of mass violence, you eliminate for those who suffer as a result of such violence not just the capacity to dream of big things, things wild and massive and large. No. You eliminate, too, the smaller things — the dreams people have of ordinariness, of smallness, the one tree that holds the one bird, and all those ant beats of hearts that make up a people who are, simply, trying to live. We assume, sometimes, that dreaming is a luxury — perhaps because we are accustomed to luxuries being part of our dreams. But I think dreaming is a right, because most dreams are about all else that deserves, too, to be a right: health, and love, and care, and home.
In “Mural,” Darwish writes:
My imagination will give out before I finish the journey I don't have the energy to make my dream real
These lines enact a kind of death, where dying means waking up from the possibility of dreaming, where dying means having the light of one’s imagination be extinguished, where dying means a world of no tomorrows, not just because tomorrow is the place we live after today, but also because tomorrow is a land we dream of while we go about our day.
In this sense, the very idea of tomorrow is part of the present. When we have the capacity to hope, and to dream, and to desire, and to want, and to long for something, then our days are filled with tomorrows. They are — these tomorrows are — part of this minute, right now. If you can dream, then you live in tomorrow just as much as you live in today. But if you cannot dream, if you are hopeless, if you have lost — through no fault of your own — the capacity to long for something, then your life is today and yesterday. It is not tomorrow. And that is a tragedy.
I think of a moment from James Baldwin’s seminal essay, “A Stranger in the Village,” where he writes:
What one's imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the Master race laws of one's own personality and it’s one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.
When I have read Baldwin, I have been reminded, again and again, that one of the consequences of having privilege in a dominant culture is that such privilege limits the imagination. This is why there is a sadness at the heart of things like conservative law-making, which aims to limit the rights of women to control their bodies, or aims to extend the rights of everyone to own and operate and shoot guns. Such policies enact a limited imagination: a world where women need to be controlled, a world where one needs violence in their hands to control the apparent senseless violence somewhere out there, in one’s lawn or backyard or street. Such policies do not extend a more expansive imagination toward the people and things they hope to control. Such policies do not wonder. They do not ask. They do not seek to understand what a different world might look like.
And yet, even though such policies are limited in imagination, we are still governed by them. And so, living in this world of empire and power and privilege, we are governed by imaginations so reductive and limited in what they think of people and places and cultures. This happens every day. It is happening in Gaza, where the limited imagination of violence is enacted with an unlimited ruthlessness. It is happening here. People die as a result of such limited imaginations. People lose, as Darwish writes, their own ability to imagine.
And so I’m thinking of that today. How dreaming is not some fickle thing. How imagining, and being able to imagine, and being able to want, and being able to long for something, for anything, however small or soft or ordinary, is not some fickle thing, either. How such acts — dreaming and imagining and wanting — are acts of agency and belief. I take tomorrow for granted so often that I don’t even think about it as part of today. But it is part of today. I am thinking of tomorrow right now, and I am believing that its existence is possible. That belief — some might call it hope — needs to be a certainty for more people than it currently is.
Some notes:
I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.
I’ve been following the work of the Gaza Sunbirds, a Palestinian para-cyling team also doing work to share resources and support relief efforts in Gaza. You can support their efforts to compete in the Para-cycling World Championships here, and also support their ongoing work in Gaza here.
Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.
I really appreciate today’s offering and it is good to be made aware of the humanity of those who suffer. I follow a lot of first hand witnesses to the devastation in Gaza and it opens my eyes to the brutality and helps to keep awareness active in my mind. What often gets glazed over is these more subtle things, things that are taken for granted, like dreaming. Of thinking of the future. Darwish has a way of delivering that to the reader that always stuns me. Thank you for today’s reflection on his poetry.
On a side note, As a parent of a tenth grader, I appreciate teachers like yourself and the work you do to encourage and celebrate these kids. It is such a privilege and joy to have an engaging teacher. It is a gift that will be with those students for the rest of their lives.
First I want to thank you for bringing Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar to my attention last May, which is when I put it on hold at our public library, finding myself at the end of a long line of people waiting to read it. Finished Martyr! last night and am stunned by how much that great book relates to your post today. War. Life. Dreams. Death. Martyrs. Poetry.
Did not realize that John Berger was one of the translators of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry. John Berger's translation of Mahmoud Darwish's poetic voice reminds in some ways of Kaveh Akbar's voice.
Thank you so much for your Sunday posts.