Homeland

I almost started this post with “home is where the heart is.”  Then I realized that phrase was trite enough to have lost all meaning, and that it was untrue.  We can talk about home in the abstract sense- talk about the people, the emotional connections that provide us all with a sense of place and family.  But the truth is we all have a home.  It may not be a place we remember with fondness, or place we ever want to go back to, or even a place that exist anymore, but for the majority of people on this earth, it is a place.   For Mahmoud Darwish that home was Palestine.  In his poem “Identity Card” the speaker expresses a longing for a home that is no longer his.

                       Darwish himself “spoke of his relationship to a land where he had no lived for three decades: ‘I have become addicted to exile .  My language is exile.  The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of realty’” (1607).  Darwish recognized that the idea of home, of a homeland can have a powerful effect on the psyche.  We are all connected to the land where we came from.  There is a connectedness to the place where we came from that is hard to shake.

                        The speaker of the poem explains “my roots/ took hold before the birth of time/ before the burgeoning of the ages” (1608).  The speaker cannot separate himself from his homeland even though he has moved on.  The emotional connection to the land is in his bones.  Although “you stole my fathers’ vineyards/ the land I used to till…I don’t hate people/ I trespass on no one’s property” (1608).  The speaker considers his land unlawfully taken, and Darwish’s use of you makes the allegation personal, immediate, accusatory.    The speaker has been separated from his homeland, and he has suffered all of the indignities that came with that loss with as much dignity as he could muster.  But that did not break his connection to the land.  And he warns those who believe he has forgotten the loss of his home.   

           

                 Darwish, Mahmoud.  Identity Card. The Norton Anthology of World Literature: New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013.  1606-1609. Print.