Mahmoud Darwish as a Witness

The study examines how Mahmoud Darwish utilizes the poetic form to create an anthology that sheds light on the violence that the colonizers perpetrated against the Palestinians and provides a new reading of it. By positioning Darwish as the nation’s poet and investigating his representation throughout history as a cultural historian, the study aims to display the themes that he portrays as a poet that oppose the mainstream narratives of the nation. Furthermore, the article investigates the various poetic techniques employed by Darwish across selected works within his poetic oeuvre to challenge and resist the erasure of Palestinian history by the colonizers. The integration of postcolonial philosophy as articulated by intellectuals, such as Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, and Achille Mbembe into the analysis of Darwish’s poetry will allow for a deeper investigation into the impact of Darwish’s work as a poet. Through the aesthetic and political analysis of Darwish’s poetic work and the employment of theories of trauma and archives, this research investigates the function of Darwish’s language as a means of preserving the Palestinian people’s memory and resisting their oppression and statelessness. Overall, this research aims to demonstrate the existence of an anti-archive within Darwish’s poetry. Darwish’s work protects the Palestinian people from the violence of their colonization by cherishing their identity, heritage, and mode of resistance against the colonizers of their homeland through poetry. His lyrical style goes beyond documenting violence to explore philosophical ideas about living through loss and the boundaries of expression.