ملامح الفلسفة الوجودية في شعر محمود درويش قراءة في ضوء النقد الثقافي Existentialist Aesthetics in Poetry: A Cultural Critical Reading of Mahmoud Darwish

This paper examines certain manifestations of existentialism in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, offering a
reading guided by cultural criticism. Probably, no one specific universal definition would be sufficient to define
what existentialism is. For it encompasses a wide array of trends, each of which offers definitions different from
others’. However, existentialism might, as agreed upon by various existentialists, be identified as a philosophical
doctrine based upon the principle that what a human being ‘is’ is what he or she ‘does’—that is, one’s existence is
based upon one’s acts. Hence, it is concerned with existence as an actual beingness, far from abstraction. Besides,
it is a way of philosophising closely related to literature. Several existentialists sought in literature a means by
which to convey their thoughts. Even more, many scholars have regarded existentialism as a kind of philosophy of
literature. In their viewpoints, literature is a reflection of existentialism. This could, also, hold true to Arabic
literature, particularly the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, in view of the experiences he had been through since his
early childhood. As a child, he was displaced from his homeland; as a boy, he was a refugee; and as a young man,
he was with no identity, imprisoned both in his own country and in the occupier’s prisons.
Made up of an introduction, three sections and a conclusion, this paper focuses upon the existential
aspects of such experiences as manifested in his poetry. In the introduction, it outlines the major characteristics of
existential literature and sets out the reason for choosing Darwish in particular. Then, the first section entitled
“Darwish Creating His own World” shows how Darwish, similar to existentialists, expresses existence as preceding
the essence, whereby his consciousness is an essence extended throughout all of his writings. The second section
entitled “Self-Other Dialectic in Darwish” examines the conflict between the ‘self’ and the ‘total’ in his poetry. After
that, the third section entitled “Being-Nothingness Dialectic in Darwish” is centred on three major themes:
uncertainty, believing in life, and fighting against nothingness. Throughout these sections, this paper relies upon a
comparative cultural critical reading, by means of which it regards existentialism as, so to speak, a philosophy of
rebellion, thereby tracing its manifestations in Western and Arabic literatures. In so doing, it demonstrates the
related configurations embodied particularly in Darwish’s poetry, the extent to which he is influenced by and
different from other poets, in this respect.