As disasters deprive us of our peace
The work of Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, and Ritsos is abundant with similar sensibilities expressed in poetic form. Both men knew political suffering, both suffered prison and exile and both found and affirmed beauty from within suffering.
Darwish gave us a brilliantly kaleidoscopic poetry of pomegranates, doves, gazelles, olives, salt, blood, love, lust, Jerusalem, Damascus, Andalusia, trees, butterflies, rivers, coffee, memories, dreams, home, rifles, tanks and mourning.
In the midst of the siege of Ramallah in 2002 he wrote:
Our coffee cups. And birds. And the green trees
With blue shadows. And the sun leaping from one wall to another like a gazelle . . . and the water in clouds with endless shapes in what is left to us of sky, and other things of postponed memory indicate this morning is strong and beautiful,
and that we are eternity’s guests.
Ritsos could simultaneously write that “Flayed rams hang above our sleep”, that “High above the galaxy is fragrant with burnt fat and salt”, declare that “The wound speaks of life” and invoke “The root creeping in the stone”.
Both men offered profound visions of peace:
Darwish:
When a day gone is not a day lost but a root that raises the leaves of joy this is peace
Ritsos:
The dreams of a child are peace Peace is the smell of food in the evening
Words of love under the evening trees are peace
There is a certain kind of directly stated international among some of these poets. Darwish and Ritsos were close. In Like a Mysterious Incident — composed before the knowledge of Neruda’s rape — Darwish writes:
“In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos at his house”
In Neruda’s lavish home he recalls a conversation in Ritsos’s austere home in Athens and a conversation where Ritsos says:
It is the mysterious incident, poetry, my friend, is that inexplicable longing that makes a thing into a spectre, and makes a spectre into a thing. Yet it might also explain our need to share public beauty ...
For many of these communist poets the pomegranate, a symbol of beauty hidden behind an unremarkable exterior, is a powerful metaphor.
Darwish:
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed up gardens
Ritsos: we shall sow seed where they slept and a pomegranate bud shall burst like a baby’s first laughter at the sunlight’s breast
Hikmet: the pomegranate that fruits one in one year can fruit one thousand; and the world is so large so beautiful
Césaire:
Christmas arrived, announcing itself first with a tingling of desires, a thirst for new tendernesses, a burgeoning of vague dreams, then with a purple rustle of its great joyous wings it had suddenly flown away, and after that its abrupt fall out over the village making shack life burst like an overripe pomegranate.
Neruda’s life and Badiou’s masculinism mean there can be no absolute peace with the idea of the international of communist poets. We have to be unsettled, even when we need sleep to come on. But the opening to the universal, the abundant apprehension of beauty in times of suffering and the profound vision of peace in the work of people like Darwish, Ritsos and others does connect us to a humane way of being in the world in times of systemic organised cruelty funded and legitimated by the most powerful forces on the Earth.