Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword In the Realm of Memory
- Acknowledgements
- PART I NOSTALGIA: POLITICS OF THE PAST
- PART II MADNESS: IN THE RUINS OF DREAM AND MEMORY
- 3 Semiology of Madness
- 4 Semiotics of Tyranny
- PART III NARRATING THE NATION: TIME, HISTORY, STORY
- Epilogue Post-national Impulses
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Semiology of Madness
from PART II - MADNESS: IN THE RUINS OF DREAM AND MEMORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword In the Realm of Memory
- Acknowledgements
- PART I NOSTALGIA: POLITICS OF THE PAST
- PART II MADNESS: IN THE RUINS OF DREAM AND MEMORY
- 3 Semiology of Madness
- 4 Semiotics of Tyranny
- PART III NARRATING THE NATION: TIME, HISTORY, STORY
- Epilogue Post-national Impulses
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
IMPOSSIBILITY OF IDENTITY
Your eyes are a thorn in the heart;
It pains me, yet I adore it
And shelter it from the wind.
I plunge it into my flesh
Hiding it from night and sorrow
And its wound ignites the lights of stars.
My present makes its future
Dearer to me than my soul
When our eyes meet, I soon forget
That once, behind bolted doors,
We were two.
Her eyes are Palestinian;
Her name is Palestinian;
Her dreams and sorrows;
Her veil, her feet and body;
Her words and silence are Palestinian;
Her birth … her death.
I carried you in my old notebooks;
You were fire for my verses,
Provisions for my excursions.
In your name I shouted to the valleys:
‘I know the Romans’ horses
Though the battlefield has changed.
Beware of the lightning
My song engraved on granite.
I am the fire of youth and the knight of knights.
I am the iconoclast.
My poems are eagles
Hovering over the Levantine borders.'
Maḥmūd Darwīsh, ‘A Lover from Palestine’, 19661There has been all too much investment in the nation-state ideologically and emotionally, and, more importantly, epistemologically and ontologically. Since the end of the first half of the twentieth century, all hopes for the future have been pinned on the nation-state. Decolonisation and modernisation, two of the main projects of twentieth-century Arab nationalism, have been invested in the ‘imagined political community’ that was to rise out of the ashes of ‘religious community’ and ‘dynastic realm’ and take ‘proper’ shape as nation-state in the shadows of empire.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic NovelNation-State, Modernity and Tradition, pp. 77 - 110Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013