Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
On 9 December 2025 the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France, hosted a study day devoted to the poetic experience of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. At this event, attended by researchers from France, Italy and the United States, participants focused on different threads in the poetry and writings of a poet who has published eleven collections over a quarter of a century. Taking part from Turkey, I tried to outline the main lines of Najwan Darwish’s poetry on the basis of the selection I compiled and translated into Turkish, Kudüs’ün Kapısında Kelimeler (Words at the Gate of Jerusalem; Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2023), and here I would like to share some of the conclusions of that reading.
Najwan Darwish’s selection Kudüs’ün Kapısında Kelimeler (2023) represents one of the significant ruptures in contemporary Arabic poetry, not only thematically but also at the epistemic and formal levels. In Najwan Darwish’s poetry, Palestine goes beyond a political narrative or a social tragedy and becomes an existential threshold that constantly oscillates between being and non-being, time and catastrophe, language and silence. The texts examined show that the poet is not merely a witness who represents the Palestinian experience, but a poetic subject who rebuilds the linguistic, rhythmic and intellectual structures shaped by that experience.
As seen in the poems “Sleep in Gaza” and “The Bombardment Is Over”, Najwan Darwish’s conception of time is not linear. Beginning and end, sleep and death, wakefulness and trauma merge on the same plane. For the poet who says in “Sleep in Gaza”, “Ben de uyuyacağım Fado, nasıl uyuyorsa herkes/ Uçaklar vururken/ Ve hava taze et gibi yırtılıyorken,” (I too will sleep, Fado, as everyone sleeps / while the planes strike / and the air is torn like fresh flesh), sleep is not a state of rest but a temporary shutting-down of consciousness amid the sound of bombs. Even the dream is no refuge: “Rüyamda ihanetleri göreceğim öyleyse ben de/ Nasıl rüya görüyorsa herkes/ Uçaklar vururken” (So I too will see betrayals in my dream / as everyone dreams / while the planes strike). Consciousness is occupied both inside and out; not even sleep has a neutral space.
This sleeplessness does not belong to human beings alone. As in “The Bombardment Is Over”, in Najwan Darwish’s cosmology massacre leaves the whole of existence sleepless: “Katledilenler uykuda mışıl mışıl/ Ama uyumayacaksın sen/ Uyanık kalacaksın sonsuza kadar/ İstifa etmiş tanrıların gözyaşları sanılan/ Kayalar da uyumayacak.” (The slain sleep soundly / but you will not sleep / you will stay awake forever / and the rocks taken for the tears of gods who resigned / will not sleep either.) In these lines the poet implies that every layer of being, from mortal consciousness to stones, the horizon and the sky, is condemned to the rhythm of trauma. In “The Bombardment Is Over” it is no longer only people but nature, architecture, even the divine that are drawn into this uninterrupted catastrophe. Najwan’s Gaza thus becomes a cosmos sealed by sleeplessness. The boundary between life and death collapses entirely. Catastrophe ceases to be an event that begins and ends on a particular date and takes on the form of a continuity that invades every layer of consciousness.
A similar transformation appears in Najwan Darwish’s understanding of place. In poems such as “The Suspended Earth”, “The Crucified Are Tired” and “We Never Stopped”, Palestine ceases to be a fixed geography and becomes a suspended spiritual and ontological space, one neither reached nor returned to: “Yeryüzünü boğazlanmış bir hayvan gibi asılı gördüm (…)/ Ne indirebilirim yeryüzünü/ Ne de bilebilirim onu kimin astığını.” (I saw the earth hanging like a slaughtered animal (…) / I can neither take the earth down / nor know who hung it.)
Cities turn people to stone or dissolve them. The homeland becomes a ghost-body that both abandons and is abandoned. Najwan Darwish’s poetics of place understands exile not only as physical displacement but as being’s severance from its own ground. Place thus becomes, directly, the stage of the poet’s ontological rupture.
In Najwan Darwish’s universe, identity is never a singular or closed category. In texts such as “Identity Card”, “A Kurdish War Song” and “Rumours”, the poet constructs the self not as a biological or national constant but as a fluidity moving among the suppressed memories of history. Oscillating among Kurdish, Armenian, Amazigh/Tuareg, Aramaic and Andalusian Jewish identities, the voice redefines identity less as belonging to a community than as a space of ethical kinship set in circulation by suffering.
The poem “One Day I Will Rise” is one of the strongest forward-looking declarations of this poetics of identity. It reads: “Bir gün kalkacağım ve o sözü söyleyeceğim/ Ben ki Kürdüm, bir gün kalkacağım/ Ve o sözü söyleyeceğim/ Ben ki Amazigim, senin sesin/ Bir gün kalkacağım ve şöyle diyeceğim:/ İşte, gittiler ey Selâhaddin!” (One day I will rise and say that word / I, who am a Kurd, one day I will rise / and say that word / I, who am an Amazigh, your voice / one day I will rise and say: / Here, they are gone, O Saladin!) Najwan Darwish thus associates Palestinianness not only with an experience belonging to Palestinians but with the shared memory of all peoples who have suffered oppression. By dissolving the boundaries between self and other at the poetic level, he rethinks identity within a radical plurality.
Song emerges in Najwan Darwish’s poetry as both an aesthetic and an existential centre. The unshaken voice of Umm Kulthum, the lost melody of the Sufi of Meknes Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari, the songs that are almost the only trace left of al-Andalus, and the voice of Warda al-Jazairia ringing in the eyes of a prisoner walking to execution make song a space of memory that takes the place of lost homelands. As long as the song lasts the poet is “native”; when it ends he becomes a refugee again: “Bir şarkıdır benim ülkem/ Ve ben mülteci oluyorum şarkı bitince yeniden.” (My country is a song / and I become a refugee again when the song ends.)
The place of language in this poetic universe is perhaps the most critical dimension of Najwan Darwish’s poetry. For the poet, language is not only a field of expression but the last homeland of Palestine left standing in the face of destruction. The nightmare of Muʿjam al-Buldan being “cleansed” of Arabic shows that the destruction of language also means the destruction of history, geography and holiness. His question is therefore sharp: “Ne anlamı var Mekke’nin ve Kudüs’ün Arap dili olmadan?” (What meaning do Mecca and Jerusalem have without the Arabic language?) In Najwan Darwish’s poetry the word is thus both a burden obliged to carry the weight and the only foothold that keeps the poet standing. If language is erased, the city vanishes; if the word breaks, memory collapses. In this respect Najwan Darwish’s poetics is the poetic record of the word’s struggle to survive.
Irony is one of the sharpest poetic tools in Najwan Darwish’s poetry for breaking political and theological discourses. The crucifixion turned inside out, God becoming an agent who strikes together with the planes, the updating of the Nazi metaphor, truth and identity being declared “fabricated” – all these show that Najwan Darwish has developed a poetic strategy that both diminishes the absoluteness of violence and exposes ideological myths. This irony works less as a mocking distance than as a subversive form of consciousness that unravels the language of catastrophe from within.
Finally, form (short lines, ellipses, a poetics of the three dots, broken rhythm, transitions between prose and poetry, and so on) is not merely an aesthetic choice in Najwan Darwish’s poetics. Palestine’s interrupted time becomes broken rhythm in the poem; displaced space becomes fragmented lines; the unspeakable surface of trauma becomes zones of silence.
Taken together, these findings show that Kudüs’ün Kapısında Kelimeler (2023) is not merely a book of poems recounting the violence in Palestine, but an original poetic world that rebuilds the effects of violence on time, place, language, selfhood and memory. Najwan Darwish narrates the tragedy of Palestine without turning it into slogans, without politicising it, without confining it to rhetoric. He builds his poetry as violence turned into form. For this reason Najwan Darwish is not only a Palestinian poet but an original voice who has made rupture, silence, ellipsis, suspension and plurality into poetic categories in modern Arabic poetry.
Bibliography
Derviş, Necvan. 2023. Kudüs’ün Kapısında Kelimeler – Seçilmiş Şiirler. Istanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları.
First published in: Karnaval Dergi
Translated from the Turkish for this site.