Opinion | Columnists
A tale of two literary giants
Both Solzhenitsyn and Darwish possessed the creative power to embody the sensibility and the spirit of an entire nation.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:58 August 15, 2008
- Image Credit: Photos: AP; Montage: Dwynn Trazo/Gulf News
Russia and Palestine may not have much in common, but both their people suffered tragically this month: the one buried Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of the oral history of the gulag, The Gulag Archipelago (1973), along with several acclaimed novels, and the other buried Mahmoud Darwish, its poet laureate.
Both wrote epically. Though an epic is the creation of an entire people, Solzhenitsyn and Darwish, respectively in their narrative style and poetic effusions, each possessed the creative power to embody not just the sensibility of one individual or even a whole generation, but the spirit of an entire nation. Solzhenitsyn's three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, for example, was both a towering literary masterpiece and a living memorial to the untold millions who perished in Stalin's labour camps, and Darwish's prolific poetry never ceased to speak to, about and from the suffering of his people and the moral optimism that imbued their vision of the future.
Both endured the agony of exile. And both left their mark on the world. Solzhenitsyn's musings on the gulag, where he had spent eight years, bearing witness to the bottomless degradation of the human soul, led to a not-insignificant intellectual revolution in European countries, converting a major segment of the European Left to an anti-Soviet position. And Darwish's own musings, in many diwans, resulted in no less than the creation of a poetry so new, so radical, so cerebral, that it required from us a complete reorientation of our consciousness and of the idiom around which we organised our sense of being deracinated Palestinians.
It is sad that these two literary giants had lived and worked in exile, but that is not unusual.
A totalitarian society, such as the Soviet Union was in its heyday, and a repressive world, such as ours had become - that would show scant respect for the life of the mind - will hound its litterateurs till it destroys their hold on reality. Intellectuals, journalists, writers, academics, theoreticians, ideologues and others who choose to live under an authoritarian regime have to equivocate in order to survive. They equivocate so much, so often and so adeptly that the day comes when they discover that they have lost the faculty to say anything clear and meaningful, even to themselves.
Others go into exile, knowing there's a privileged, free world out there, outside their tormentors' reach, where you can write in language no longer sullied by censorship, no longer flat and shoddy. For both Solzhenitsyn and Darwish knew that it is language, when it is free and exuberant, even flamboyant and irreverent, that has always been the expression of human grace and the prime vessel of civilisation.
In history, only those societies that had given their creative elite total freedom to speak up and speak out that have flourished, prospered and grown. Conversely, those others, such as ours, that suppressed dissent and monitored the public debate, continued to move around the treadmill of posited norms, were unable to thrust themselves beyond their fixed meaning.
Consider, if you wish, Greenwich Village in New York (leaving aside similar neighbourhoods, say, in Paris and London, Amsterdam and Dublin) where, left to their own devices, members of the adversarial current in society crafted a self-consciously modern life, a nexus of salons and magazines, through which they reconceived not only art and literature, music and politics, journalism and film, but also the lyrical hopes of the century - all to the enrichment of America as a whole.
Most significant square mile
Bohemia may be bohemian, and thus unattractive to establishmentarians, but the Village, in the early years, and then once again in the middle years, of the 20th century, became the most significant square mile in American cultural history, where intellectual and artistic bohemia gathered, lived, worked, goofed and came out with their subversive effusions, from Eugene O'Neil to Jackson Pollock, from Henry James to Marlon Brando, from Marcel Duchamp to Bob Dylan. Villagers at the time would tell you, somewhat cheekily, that everything started in the Village, except Prohibition. They were, one and all, outspoken, radical, hip, creative, exuberant and free, personality traits they finally foisted on America, to America's enrichment. Without their contribution, America would have been diminished as a nation, and less defined as the zestful culture that we know it to be.
In much of our Arab world today, a world benumbed by social failure, military defeat and political mismanagement, emasculated by abuse of civil liberties and unchecked executive power, people are experiencing a collective inferiority complex. Creative individuals who want to escape the wrath of the state have long since lifted anchor and put out to sea, to live in uncertain exile. For let's face it, a free soul and a repressive state cannot be joined at the hip.
A recollection, invoked in context: Back in 1981, I had occasion to visit Tunis, where I ran into Mahmoud Darwish at the Arab League headquarters there. And what on earth was Darwish doing working for that organisation? He had, after all, been close to his people in Beirut all those years.
Later that day, in his little villa overlooking the Mediterranean, it all came out. As editor of Shooun Falastinia (Palestine Perspectives), he had made the mistake of publishing an article by a Palestinian writer that was, at worst, mildly critical of PLO excesses in the Lebanese capital. The day after the piece appeared, he discovered, upon arriving at work, several thugs from the feared Squad 16 standing guard outside his office, with direct orders from Yasser Arafat not to let anyone in till Darwish contacted the Palestinian leader, presumably to express contrition for his bad editorial manners. Our national poet opted not to do that, and instead hopped on the first available flight to Tunis.
The story had an epilogue. Several years later, long after the PLO was expelled from Beirut and moved to the Tunisian capital, I was again privy to a demonstration of an engaged poet speaking truth to power. In Arafat's salon, the Palestinian leader and Darwish were confronting each other over policy, with tempers a hair short of exploding.
"Palestinians are a difficult people to lead", Arafat hollered. "Well, then, find yourself another people to lead", Darwish hollered back and stormed out.
Mahmoud Darwish was a dear friend. There's nothing else that I, along with other Palestinians, would wish him now than eternal rest in peace, as I'm sure Russian dissidents and idealists would equally wish for Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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