Najwan Darwish's "On the Third Day" (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)

Thoughts on exile and solidarity.

On the Third Day

On the third day of creation,
as the Lord was putting the first touches on dry land,
I picked out an apartment filled with books.
I acted before all the tyrants could
and did their work for them:
I sent myself into exile.


from Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021)

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I wrote about Najwan Darwish’s work not long ago, and I have been thinking about it and reading it lately, in the midst of the ongoing violence endured by the people of Gaza. Months ago, I wrote about a Darwish poem that ended:

It’s all earth.
It’s all death.
All of it.

Such lines feel so sorrowfully true at this moment. Maybe they have always been true. But the way in which they feel true today feels painful. I think of Darwish, writing this years ago, with the knowledge of life in the open-air prison of Gaza, and I think of the suffering at the heart of such lines, and the way such suffering has intensified now. And I think I’ve turned to Darwish because of what his work has taught me — the way, for example, that he makes out of suffering a kind of radical humor and insight. Consider, for example, this poem — “To This Very Moment”:

I can hear them pounding in the nails,
their joy boundless.
I can hear them—a distant echo—
pounding in the nails, their desperation
even greater than their joy.
I can hear it, and I pity them:
I'm sleeping in the shade
while they,
in the swelter of the midday sun,
continue to crucify me.

Here, in this poem, is everything. A sense of awareness that recognizes that the speaker’s oppressors exhibit a “desperation / even greater than their joy.” A sense of pity for such a person. And a wry, perhaps almost-smile, that colors the final image — an image of oppression that is also, at the same time, an image of criticality and perspective. Darwish — at least, for me — recognizes, as so many of the authors I turn to do, that sense of limitedness that is created by a society or a politics that projects its own version of unlimitedness — whether through conquest, or dominion, or capital, or more. It’s there in that line: “desperation / even greater than their joy.”

I think often of James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” and how 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.

In other words: because whiteness — in its unlimited sense of itself — imagines other people and cultures as limited, people from such oppressed and marginalized places and viewpoints are able to see exactly what whiteness is, through the lens of how it presupposes others to be. And again, I hear Darwish’s words: their desperation / even greater than their joy.

And so, I am thinking of and writing about this poem by Darwish today because of the way it, with that little bit of spunk that feels characteristic of Darwish’s work, places poetry — and all literature — into the realm of not just the political, but the radical. It allows poetry an opportunity, from its limited perspective, to critique the unlimited claims the powerful make on those without power. In a world of gods and those who play at being god, the speaker of today’s poem picked out an apartment filled with books. Just an apartment, limited thing it is.

I love these final three lines:

I acted before all the tyrants could
and did their work for them:
I sent myself into exile.

The specific ambiguity of these final lines allows for so much. Darwish never specifies what the “work” is — at least on his speaker’s end. Certainly, for tyrants, the “work” is the work of oppression, subjugation, separation, and more. But for Darwish’s speaker, I wonder: is the “work” the work of reading? Is it the work of writing? Is it the work of witness that is a deeper kind of reading? And, even further: a deeper kind of writing? Regardless of the answer, there is no question where such work leads; it leads to exile.

Such themes of exile are present everywhere in literature. They’re present in Baldwin (from “The New Lost Generation”):

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

And, too, in this sentence from Baldwin’s perfect (yes, I said it) novel, Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Such themes are present, too, in the work of Charles Simic (from Letters of Transit):

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink or a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opened our mouths and they heard the accent?

And also in the work of Toni Morrison (from The Source of Self-Regard):

African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs.

And, finally, in the work of Edward Said (from the beginning of “Reflections on Exile”):

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.

So much of literature is the stuff of exile. It is the stuff of not having a home, or being forced from one, or being told to move from wherever you thought was home. And this is why I think reading must be — has to be — part of the “work” that Darwish names in today’s poem. To read — especially from a place one might call home, a place that feels, in many ways, different from exile — is to be curious about that place that is no place, that home that is no home. When we read from a place of relative safety about a place that is safety’s opposite, there is the potential for a kind of radical and imaginative possibility to emerge — an emergence that might lead to recognition and solidarity and all that such feelings might help acknowledge.

It is true, I believe, that books make us feel less alone. This is certainly why I began to read. I remember the first book I felt proud of finishing — Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — and how I kept it under my pillow each night, in a house that felt lonely because my mother was not there, my mother — who read to me for hours when I was so small. I loved that book because I felt alone. I loved that book because, in the work of reading it, I felt a sense of purpose that helped me cope with feeling alone. I loved it because I thought the title was about me, and I loved it — as I read it — because the story, one of strangeness and tragedy, made my own sense of strangeness and tragedy feel like things in communion with the strangeness and tragedy of other lives. There has always been and — I hope — will always be a haunting feeling I get at the heart of me, like someone turning a knob into the windowless door of my soul, when I read a book that feels not just spoken to me, but spoken out of me. A book that makes me feel like the way that the light shines in my world is the same as the way it shines in yours.

That is a beautiful thing, that kind of book. It will always be. But there is also the beauty and sorrow and radical anger-rage-grief-hope of a book that jars you out of your own sensibilities. A book where the line that connects you to it isn’t always as clear. A book written from a place of oppression that you read from a place of privilege. A book of a history you understood — for so long — to be different. A book of sacrilege that bites away at your sense of the holy. A book that removes you, a little or a lot, from comfort or security, even as it exists without such things. We can be taught about something — about so much — from a place of so much less, and certainly so much different. Exile and solidarity, I think, must be the twin forces of literature.

Certainly violence has, in the last month, jarred much of the comfortable world out of its own sensibilities, sensibilities that are, I know and imagine, comfortable to return to. But what happens when we turn back into those sensibilities are extended moments of inattention, inattention that takes no notice of, for example, the continued oppression of those in Gaza. I think of this introduction by Claire Schwartz to a poem by Dionne Brand published in Jewish Currents:

If you looked at the headlines in Western media on October 7th, you might think history began with Hamas militants storming the fence enclosing Gaza. You wouldn’t be encouraged to consider the fence itself, which Israel constructed in 1994 to restrict the movement of goods and people; or the blockade of the strip that Israel has maintained since 2006, hemming in over two million Palestinians as they are subject to Israel’s massive bombing campaigns, underwritten by US funding.

When we do the work of reading well, which is witness-work, we do the work of considering the fence itself. That is hard work, because a fence, or a border, can function less as a sight for our eyes to see and more as a myopic guide, a peripheral wall that turns our attention elsewhere. But, as today’s poem reminds me, the work of writing can — if we choose to read such writing — direct our attention back toward that border, that fence, that area that separates exile from home. I just read a wrenching piece in Al Jazeera by Ghada Ageel. In it, she writes:

On Thursday morning, October 26, I woke up to the news of yet another massacre in Gaza…The crime scene was Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern part of the Gaza Strip – note, not in the north, but the south, where people were supposed to be safe, according to the Israeli army…People there experienced it as an earthquake. A brutal, man-made earthquake. It ended the journey on earth for 47 souls who have now returned to God. Of them, 36 were direct family and the remainder were people taking shelter in their homes, seeking illusory safety.

Here, the sorrow of such death is doubly sorrowful because of the fact that those killed were killed in a refugee camp, in a place of exile, in the midst of homelessness.

I think it is our work as readers to not simply consume the work of those writing from a place of exile. It happens so often, doesn’t it? Reading becomes consumption — a form of work that is no work. In today’s poem, the speaker chooses exile. I think this is because he understands that the difficult work of witness will place him in the midst of it. He must stand in solidarity.

I am reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with my AP Literature class right now. And, re-reading it for the umpteenth time, I was reminded that it, too, is a work of exile. Listen to the creature:

I am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever…

I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless and in some degree beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster.

I would be a fool to read and teach such a passage, and then forget it. In that space between what is home and what is homelessness is so much: a fence, a border, an oppressive idea, an assumption, a fatal prejudice. To reach across that gap is a form of solidarity. That reaching is not just reaching, but also reading, and acknowledging, and witnessing. This is daily work. It is good work.

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Some Notes:

1. As mentioned in my last two newsletters, I have found this website to be profoundly helpful in contextualizing the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Al Jazeera maintains live updates of the conflict. I also recently signed this letter expressing solidarity with authors whose work was sidelined by the Poetry Foundation.

2. 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.