Identity and Land in Mahmoud Darwish’s Selected Poems: An Ecopostcolonial Reading

Abstract

The search for identity and the sense of the loss of land seem to be vital aspects in Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry of resistance. His poetry is populated with a continuous but unique cry for the loss of Palestinian identity and land. His poems such as “Identity Card”, “the Passport”, “To My Mother”, “To My Father”, “A Lover from Palestine” and “On Perseverance” are highly praised in Arabic poetry because they embody emblems of the interconnectedness between identity and land. This paper aims at analyzing how Darwish links between identity and land in these poems from an ecopostcolonial perspective and the extent to which they share a common ground as both entail a mode of resistance to the occupiers of the poet’s homeland. By explicating the link between identity and land in Darwish’s selected poems, we can implant a new awareness of man’s connection to land.