Dispossession, Soil, and Identity in Palestinian and Native American Literature
The parallels between the historical experiences of dispossession and colonization of the Palestinian and Native American peoples, and the similarities in the discourses of land and belonging of the two peoples, proved strong enough to once move Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to write the poem “Speech of the Red Indian.” Darwish, assuming the voice of a Native American faced with the brutal reality of violent conquest, yokes the Native Americans and Palestinians together, with the poem’s narrator urging a Columbus-type figure, “Then go back, stranger/Search for India once more!”1 The plea is a plaintive and hopeless desire for the return of an irrecoverable past, indicative of much of the post-dispossession literature of both Palestinians and Native Americans. Darwish’s eloquent rendition of the Native American voice, as a comparison to the Palestinian narrative, is just one example of contemporary Palestinian literature reaching for an understanding of the exile’s relationship with the land through metaphor or analogy. Read more
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