The Poetics of Dispossession in Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Exile’

This paper examines Mahmoud Darwish’s exploration of the political, geographical, existential, and metaphysical dimensions of displacement, banishment, and statelessness in his 2005 lyrical epic “Exile.” The paper offers an analysis of Darwish’s treatment of dialectic, heteroglossia, the juxtaposition of the national and the existential, and conflicting temporalities, as well as political uncertainty and metaphysical fear. With particular reference to the paradoxical portrayal of space in “Exile”—the juxtaposition of the near and far, real and illusory, localized and dispersed—I also examine the ways in which Palestinian identity, as narrated in this poem, is destabilized and dispersed by what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopic space.”