In the Presence of Absence: Mahmoud Darwish’s “Living on Border Lines”
Abstract
The present paper is an attempt to analyze the autobiographical elegizing volume of Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence (2006), in light of the main lines of Derrida’s article “Living On: Border Lines” (1978). As known almost all the oeuvre of Darwish is a reflection of his main issue, Palestine. Considering his life in the chosen exile outside his motherland without any approaching final solution along with realizing the approach of his death due to heart disease, Darwish decides to write his elegy portraying the spiral enigma (double invagination) of the story “récit” of his survival on the margins of life. He keeps wo/andering, in his discourse with his “other,” who triumphs “me, you, or death?” The endless multilayered worlds in which the narrator lives serve several goals. It is the dialectic between the fictional and the real, especially that the whole volume is autobiographical. It grants the author, Darwish, eternal life through the words, letters, and the poetry, he bequeaths his readers; and this supports the tendency that Darwish’s identity is a call for postnational identity. Finally, the whole multilayered volume corresponds with the paradoxical connotations of “triumph of/over life/death.”
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Abusamra, S., & Hamamrah, B. (2017). The specters of nation and narration in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence. An-Najah National University. Retrieved from https://repository.najah.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.11888/12871/The_Specters_of_Nation_and_Narration_in_Mahmoud_Darwish%E2%80%99s__Absent_Presence-Sanaa_Abusamra.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Antoon. S. (2011). Preface. In the presence of absence. New York: Archipelago Books. Retrieved from https://www.pdfdrive.com/in-the-presence-of-absence-e194512298.html
Assadi, J. (Ed.). (2012). The Story of a People: An Anthology of Palestinian Poets within the Green-Lines. Peter Lang Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-story-of-a-people-an-anthology-of-palestinian-poets-within-the-green-lines-e188485557.html
Calhoun, C. (2007). Nations matter: Culture, history and the cosmopolitan dream. London and New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.my
Culler, J. (1981). On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. London and New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://epdf.pub/on-deconstruction-theory-and-criticism-after-structuralism.html
Darwish, M. (2006). In the Presence of Absence. (S. Antoon, Trans.). New York: Archipelago Books. Retrieved from https://www.pdfdrive.com/in-the-presence-of-absence-e194512298.html
Derrida, J. (1979). Living on : Border lines (J. Hulbert, Trans.). In B. Harold, p.De Man, J. Derrida, G. Hartman, G. & J. H. Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism. (pp.75-176). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Retrieved from https://www.pdfdrive.com/deconstruction-and-criticism-e162136738.html
Mena, E. (2009). The geography of poetry: Mahmoud Darwish and postnational identity. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 7(5). Retrieved from http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol7/iss5/27
Mukattash, E. (2016). The Politics of Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s Absent Presence: A Textual Act of Resistance. Studies in Literature and Language, 12(2), 17-27. Retrieved from http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/view/7916
Qbilat, N. & Alshrosh, A. (2011). Binaries: A Study of Darwish’s Poetry. Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(3), 988-1005. Retrieved from https://journals.ju.edu.jo/DirasatHum/article/view/5918/3576
Rahahleh, A. (2014). The poetry of contrast in the last divan of Mahmoud Darwish titled “I don’t want this poem to finish. Dirasat: Human & Social Sciences, 2(41), 483-496. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287880496
Rooke, T. (2008). In the Presence of Absence: Mahmoud Darwish’s Testament. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 8, 11-25. doi: https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.4587
Videre Spectare. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.jtriley.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-on-borderlines.html.
Wesserstein, D. J. (2012). Prince of poets. The American Scholar. Retrieved from https://theamericanscholar.org/prince-of-poets/#.Xl3fsKgzbI.U.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12108
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2021 Rasha Saeed Badurais
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard
Reminder
How to do online submission to another Journal?
If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:
1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author
Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.
2. Submission
Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org
Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture