The literary and personal controversy has not ceased from Arab cultural platforms and social networking sites since the Syrian writer Salim Barakat detonated his bomb a week ago, attributing the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish his admission, "I have a child. I am a father. But nothing in me leads to fatherhood."
And for a whole week since Barakat published his article - which he said he wrote in July 2012 and has not published since - the critical and skeptical articles, or the advocacy and support for Barakat who said that he knew at the age of twenty-two did not stop at the late Palestinian poet in the house of the Syrian poet Adonis, in a meeting that was the beginning of an acquaintance between them, spanned between Beirut, Damascus, Cyprus, and Sweden, where Darwish wrote his famous poem "Trace of the Butterfly."
Away from the Barakat bomb, which was followed by a controversy in which the struggle was mixed with historical, political, literary, and personal years; This report attempts to explore the forms of the relationship between the poet and his text, and explores some of Darwish's words about himself, and reviews some of the opinions expressed by their owners.
Darwish's life and poetry
"The private is private. The public is private."
until a further notice,
Far from the present and the intention of the poem ..
I'm here. Other than that it is common and gossip!
Thus Mahmoud Darwish spoke of himself in his poem "You are from now you" which he wrote about Haifa, to draw features of the relationship between the private and the public in the biography of the poet and his literary victory, and Darwish also continued in the same poem:
"I made mistakes that motivate me to fix it,
To work overtime in the draft faith
In the future. Whoever did not make mistakes in the past no
He needs this faith. "
In the context of exploring the relationship between the writer's life and his poetic text, Al-Jazeera Net polled the opinion of the Palestinian literary and academic critic Adel Al-Osta who said that he mixes textual and non-textual approaches in the study of the late poet, and explained this by saying that “Mahmoud Darwish began his life under the banner of the Israeli Communist Party, The literary product in the eyes of the Marxists is not separated from its owner, that is, it is necessary to study the poems of Mahmoud Darwish in the light of his life, his experience and his biography.
Al-Osta wondered: What if you wrote a biography of Mahmoud Darwish as Westerners do, and continued, "In this case it is necessary to read everything that was written, and to listen to the interviews that were conducted to him, and to read what was written by his free-woman, the organization is as I wrote - Mrs. Rana Qabbani. "
"Mahmoud Darwish is a human being, and a person suffers and passes through difficult and harsh conditions, and he may adore and may make mistakes and may establish feminist relations as well and he may have a daughter and it may not be. We are studying and analyzing and we may reach a result and we may not reach."
However, the professor of arts at An-Najah National University added, "A poet committed to a national, social and third human issue is a study project for students and not only for his family ... We are all wrong. Whoever was without sin let me stone me, and the aggravation of the topic came because we are a society that suffers from many diseases."
In his poem “I saw the last goodbye,” Darwish says:
"A girl will come and claim that I married her twenty years ago ... and more.
Myths will be told about me, and about the seashells I used to collect from faraway seas.
In his article, "Mahmoud Darwish and I", Barakat spoke about the relationship that he had brought together with the late Palestinian poet, recalling a story he got to know and his memories with him, and he said that he wrote the first quadruples of Darwish on the backs of his schoolbook covers, considering that the poem "The Kurds have nothing but the wind" was from Salim He last met in 2007 in Paris.
Barakat published his article in the "Weekly Arab Jerusalem" supplement, which is supervised by the Syrian literary critic Subhi Al-Hadidi (the common friend of Barakat and Darwish), and raised wide reactions on the pages of Arab cultural annexes, social networking sites, and electronic spaces.
Controversy and argument
Commenting on the controversy, the Algerian writer Wassini Al-Aaraj said, “Darwish is a person like all human beings, loves and hates, right and wrong. Likewise, Selim, who I absolutely do not think intended to offend his father. In the end, does all of this affect Darwish’s being a great poet? Never.”
Al-Aaraj continued, "Leave the people alone and care about their literature, as he is the most beautiful and the most beautiful. Darwish will remain like all the great greats of the age, great, and whenever we read it, we will be given a new amazement.
On the other hand, the Syrian poet residing in Britain, Nouri Al-Jarrah, wrote on his Facebook page, "Why, Salim Barakat, my friend who loved? What is your need for a story like this? I have always loved your friendship with Mahmoud Darwish, and in my view I was a wonderful match in his neighborhood, and I never considered you A son of him, as you began to introduce yourself! He entrusted you while he was secretly alive, so why did the friend's secret be revealed, and the friend was absent and had no tongue? "
Former Palestinian Minister of Culture Ihab Bseisu wrote that rereading Mahmoud Darwish may be the most eloquent response to the article written by Salim Barakat.
And the Iraqi novelist and writer Ali Badr, and the Lebanese artist Nabil Al-Baqaili recalled their memories with Salim Barakat and Mahmoud Darwish, and Al-Buqaili attacked the critics of Barakat, considering that he was "a poet belonging to a deep lineage rooted in nobility and history." On the other hand, Badr defended the Palestinian poet, saying that after his death he turned into an icon Especially for the new generation. "He raised the sensitivity of many poets. He who knows Mahmoud Darwish knows very well that he is good at inventing stories of this kind for entertainment, I do not think that Salim Barakat believed him at the time."
Literary criticism
Far from commenting on the characters and close to the methods of literary criticism, Palestinian critic Adel Al-Osta says that “old and non-textual curricula - including the positive, social, and psychological approaches - do not separate the author and his text,” and he continues, “These approaches have spread and flourished for a hundred years and more and have not ended And if the critic applied the psychological approach, and specifically from him (the American critic Edmund Wilson), it is necessary to read what Salim Barakat wrote in the light of the study of Mahmoud Darwish's biography, which is available in some of his prose books and in the interviews that were conducted with him and in the exchanges between him and Samih Al-Qasim ".