AWEJ. Special Issue on Literature No.2 October, 2014 Pp.158-166
Resistance from a Distance: Mahmoud Darwish’s Selected Poems of Exile in English
Hamoud Yahya Ahmed
School of Language Studies and Linguistics
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Ruzy Suliza Hashim
School of Language Studies and Linguistics
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore Mahmoud Darwish’s resistance to the occupation of his homeland in selected poems written during his exile. Though Darwish was exiled from Palestine, his poetic voice of resistance gained momentum even from a distance. The discussion in this paper will focus on how Darwish utilizes Palestinian nature as a form of resistance to the occupiers of his homeland in his selected poems of exile. The theoretical framework employed in this study was derived from both the postcolonial and the ecocritical theories of reading literature and named in this study as an ecoresistance framework. By explicating the aspects of ecoresistance in Darwish’s selected poems of exile, we hope to provide new insights into man’s connection to land as a strategy to defy colonial rule.
Keywords: ecoresistance, Mahmoud Darwish, poems of exile, poetry, resistance.