“Dialogue in Monologue”: Addressing Darwish in Hebrew

Abstract

Abstract: Mahmoud Darwish is considered the national Palestinian poet, a symbol of the national struggle against the Israeli occupation. Sami Shalom Chetrit and Almog Behar, two prominent Israeli poets of Arab decent (Chetrit was born in Morocco; Behar’s family is from Iraq), have both written poems directed to Darwish in which they address both his vast poetic corpus and his public and political figure. Close reading these poetic addresses, I discuss Darwish’s own poetry as an intertext in these Hebrew poems, as well as the significance of writing about him and to him in Hebrew and in Israel, specifically by poets of Arab descent. Moreover, this discussion serves as an opportunity to read Hebrew and Arabic together, challenging the clear-cut national distinctions while still acknowledging their pervasiveness and the inevitable questions of power, as the poems do themselves.