Among the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the poem “Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene” belongs to a special tragic category full of tension, projections, dualities of presence and absence, past and present, as if Andalusia was for the poet another temporal and spatial presence of the diaspora, Palestinian asylum and loss of land.

In this poem in which the poet evokes the scene of the exodus from Andalusia, Darwish says on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Granada:

And a little while we'll look for what

Our history was about your history in a distant country.

And we will ask ourselves in the end: Was Al-Andalus

Is it here or there?

On the ground... or in the poem?

Darwish (1941-2008), who lived through the Palestinian Nakba, the revolution and the diaspora, compares the Andalusian and Palestinian ordeals, and wrote his poem in 1992, one year after the Madrid Peace Conference.

Professor of Arabic at An-Najah National University, Adel Al-Osta, believes that Darwish did not only write a poem about Andalusia, but also wrote about Andalusia and Palestine together.

Al-Osta adds to Al-Jazeera Net that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat objected to two phrases in the poem, namely, "This peace will leave us a handful of dust", and "Everything is prepared for us, so why do you wait so long?"

The Palestinian literary critic continues that it is clear that there are two times in the poem, which makes it a “mask poem,” adding, “It is true that the poet wrote about the exodus of the Arabs from Andalusia, but the spirit of the present - as noted by the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said - crept into the poem, and it was revealed in it. pessimism and despair."

Darwish divided his poem into 11 stanzas representing the eleven planets that were inspired by the Holy Qur’an in the vision of the Prophet Yusuf, peace and blessings be upon him, and he said in sharp words in the folds of the poem, “You did not fight because you were afraid of martyrdom, but your throne is like your nest.”

In his article "The Cohesion of Poetry", Edward Said considers that Darwish predicted the event of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signing the September 1993 Declaration of Principles, which later developed for the Oslo Peace Agreement.

Darwish says in his poem:

No love can intercede for me

since I accepted (the peace treaty) there is no more present for me

To pass tomorrow near evening.

you will raise a Castilian

Its crown is above the minaret of God.

I hear the rustle of keys in

The golden door of our history, farewell to our history, am I

Who will close the last door of heaven?

I am the Arab's last sigh

Between the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, Darwish wrote his poem that simulates the famous historical account of the standing of Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Ahmar, the last king of Granada, and tears of sorrow shed as he turned for the last time to Granada, whose keys were handed over to the two Catholic kings Isabella and Fernando, before he left for Granada. Irreversible.

Attendance

Darwish’s poem revolves between history and imagination, as he accompanies the reader on a fleeting journey into the corruption of the present, in order to lead him after that towards the most important expansion of the journey: “a detailed and surgical panoramic answer in the fields of the past’s onslaught on the future, or in the possibilities of that encounter and its complications,” as the Syrian critic puts it. Sobhi Hadidi.

Hadidi believes in a research published by the Center for Palestinian Studies (winter 1993) that the repetition of possession of the elements (space and time) creates a sense of continuity within absence, and in an uninterrupted format, which is the opposite of annihilation or extinction that is associated with absence.

In one of the poem's passages, Darwish says:

Bitter the stranger

Carrying seven hundred years of horses.

Bitter the stranger

Here, so that the stranger may pass there.

I'll be out in a little while

From the wrinkles of my time, a stranger to the Levant and Andalusia

This land is not my sky, but this evening is my evening

The keys are mine, the minarets are mine, the lamps are mine, and I

for me too.

I am the Adam of the two gardens, I lost them twice

and expelled me slowly,

and kill me in a hurry,

under my olives..

The poem celebrates a variety of lyrical music with multiple rhythms played by Darwish, and the Lebanese academic Maher Jarrar points out that Darwish's poem did not rely on any piece of the muwashshah formula, like many of the Andalusian rhythms in his later collections.

Jarrar notes the unification between Palestine and Andalusia in Darwish’s poem, as “Granada” becomes the place of longing in a similarity with Palestinian Jerusalem, meaning that the present is a double mirror that sees the Andalusian past on the one hand and the Palestinian future on the other, according to Jarrar’s study published in English by the American University in Beirut.

Abu Abdullah bin Al-Ahmar

Darwish exemplifies the position of Abu Abdullah al-Ahmar, who signed the Granada extradition treaty, and the drama of his departure simulates enormous human feelings around the time of the signing of the Madrid Agreement. / Who will raise their banners above our walls?

Although the Palestinian poet deliberately left a distance between “I am the poet” and the character of Abu Abdullah in his poem, the bitter questions before the fall, the departure, the loss, and the long absence almost combine the Palestinian and Andalusian ordeals, and he says with sadness, “I will fall from a star in the sky to a tent on the way.. Where? Where is the road?

In his interview with the Lebanese magazine Al-Adab (July 1974), Darwish considers that peoples’ relationship with their “lost paradise” is a connection to the past that is bounded by fate. .

Darwish avoids falling into pure nostalgia, as he says, “Do not write history as poetry, for the weapon is the historian.” “History has no emotion for us to feel nostalgia for our beginning, and there is no intention to know what is ahead and what is back.”

Perhaps for this reason, Darwish, in the dialogue conducted by the magazine of similar literatures, rejected the idea of ​​Paradise Lost, because it is “a presumption of an existential state that has reached the limit of the end.” Palestinian paradise is possible, according to Darwish.

Darwish continues, "Palestine is not a memory", it is a future existence or "Andalus the Possible", referring to the relationship of the past, present and future that is still open to the possibilities of the past and the future in light of the inflamed conflict.

Darwish says in the poem, "O stranger? Five hundred years have passed, and the estrangement between us was not completed, right here, and the messages did not break through.

Adel Al-Osta believes that the poet appeared in this poem pessimistic, and Edward Said also noted the spirit of refraction and the tendency to despair.

Although the poet has always linked Andalusia with Palestine, he was not as pessimistic as in this poem. Nevertheless, the author notes that "the tendency of pessimism began to recede. In his poem in the elegy of Majid Abu Sharar, Darwish linked Andalusia and Palestine and was not hopeless."

Darwish says in that poem, "Do you think it is Al-Andalus? But it is a bird in the hand that was torn by spears and did not unfold."