Recently a friend sent me a link to a poem by Mahmound Darwish. I had not previously heard of Darwish, despite the fact that he is considered by many to be the "Palestinian Poet Laureate." I was intrigued by the poem, although I was not sure how much of it I really understood. I did some research into his background, but even with that information, I found "I Didn't Apologize to the Well" a hard poem to pin down.
Part of that had to do with the translation that was sent to me, which was by Fady Joudah, himself a Palestinian poet. I was able eventually to locate another translation online in a book translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, which falls much more smoothly on my ear. I felt their phrasings snapped some of the imagery into focus for me as well. I have no idea what images and connotations and connections would be clearer to someone reading the original Arabic.
Part of it is also, I think, actually thematic: the introduction by Amin and London makes note of his strategic deployment of "lyrical instability" as he tries to create a "map of absence." It is, in their reading, a poem of dislocation, and the way Darwish frames it is probably intended to give the reader a parallel experience of dislocation within the poem itself. Here's the translation I like:
I Didn’t Apologize To The Well
I didn’t apologize to the well as I passed by it.
I borrowed a cloud from an ancient pine and squeezed it
like an orange. I waited for a mythical white deer.
I instructed my heart in patience: Be neutral, as though
you were not a part of me. Here, good shepherds
stood on air and invented the flute and enticed
mountain partridges into their traps. Here, I saddled
a horse for flight to my personal planets, and flew.
And here, a fortuneteller told me: Beware of asphalt roads
and automobiles, ride on your sigh. Here, I loosened
my shadow and waited. I selected the smallest stone
and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth
and got broken myself. I circled the well until
I flew out of myself to what I’m not. And a voice
from deep in the well spoke to me: This grave
is not yours. And so I apologized. I read verses
from the wise Qur’an and said to the anonymous presence
in the well: Peace be with you and the day
you were killed in the land of peace and with the day
you’ll rise from the well’s darkness
and live…
– Mahmoud Darwish
Tr. Omnia Amin and Rick London
It's a poem that had political ramifications when it was written twenty years ago which are now even more relevant and more intense than they were at that time, which means that any attempt to interpret it puts the interpreter under some pressure whether to address that political context or instead to ignore it. There are of course competing interpretive orthodoxies about this dilemma. Biographical Critics argue that you should not and indeed cannot interpret a poem without taking into consideration the circumstances under which it was written, including the lived experience of the author. The New Critics, at least during the era in which they could be said to be "new" argued that all of that supplementary data ought to be irrelevant: the poem must stand on its own; one can only "interpret" based on what you the words that you see in front of you. "Reader response" critics argue that the poem is just a stimulus, a locus of attention, and that the "real" poem, such as it is, is constructed in the mind of the individual reader. Marxist critics, psychological critics, feminist critics, deconstructionists, each have their own orthodoxies. Suffice it to say that there are lots of lenses to use, individually or sequentially or simultaneously.
That much said, here are a couple of my observations, inferences, and hunches:
"The well" is an inanimate object, so right off the bat Darwish seems to be nudging me to wonder how the speaker could apologize TO the well even if he wanted to. But I can infer that it is an inanimate object with certain defining qualities: it's an oasis, a gathering place, the focus of the community of people who go it for nourishment and, presumably, the company of others.
The speaker, electing to pass all of that by, turns inward: he enters into imagination and myth, music and magic. I love listing of the activities he claims to have engaged in: borrowing the cloud, waiting for the white deer, saddling the flying horse, consulting the fortuneteller. The images, one after another, are surprising and delightful. And of course somewhat cryptic. "I selected the smallest stone and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth and got broken myself... I flew out of myself to what I'm not." I see these, I FEEL these, as compelling emblems of, well, instability and dislocation, among perhaps many other possibilities. Attention and beauty and pleasure among them.
At that point an astonishing thing happens: the well speaks to HIM, saying "This grave is not yours." The implication being that it's "not yours" because it is mine, which is to say it is the grave of the person whose spirit resides within the well. And so THEN the speaker decides to apologize after all, and turning to the Qu'ran, wishes the spirit in the well peace, and suggests the promise—or at least the hope—of resurrection, of a new day arriving when the spirit will "rise from the well's darkness and live."
It would not be a huge interpretive leap to read all of this as a gloss on the tribal conflicts in the middle east. But I'm not really inclined to go there. For one thing, that whole situation is colossally messed up in a million different directions and has been for centuries. It seems to be even worse today than it ever has been. But I have so little lived or learned experience with it that I don't feel entitled or qualified or inclined to speculate on the poem's political and social themes. But I love the poem for other reasons. It seems to me to be a very eloquent testimony to the power of poetry itself to help us process and cope with the distress and dissonance in the world. We are at the present moment a bewildering array of existential threats, including among others religious and ethnic rivalries, ongoing wars, climate change and its impacts, disinformation via social media, huge economic disparities among and within countries, the failure of our educational and health care systems.
But at this late date in my sojourn on this planet I feel like I am often hearing the voice that says "This grave is not yours." I'm getting closer to mine every day, that I know. And I do share the wish that those many millions and millions of others, and their descendants and mine, will eventually rise from the darkness of whatever well they do inhabit, and live. Wishful thinking, yes. But as the old saying goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." So why not go ahead and ride? As Darwish does in this poem, and as I do when I read it.
