From Homeland to Wordscape: Diasporic Testimonio in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish

Abstract

Darwish’s literary output encompasses all shades of these themes, including alienation, marginalisation, despair, nostalgia, readjustment, assimilation, adaptation, and adoption. As a writer of  Diasporic Testimonio, his writings are autobiographical. In his poems, he portrays a kind of cultural in-betweenness. The power structures marginalise these people. They are the natives of their own homeland, which is found in every protest literature where cross-fertilisation takes place. Mahmoud  Darwish’s poems are often preoccupied with the elements of nostalgia as he seeks to locate himself in a new culture. His poems depict the culture of his homeland, which was once beautiful, and at the same time, he also registers the painful agony of adapting to a new space that had become terrible. The Ghettoisation and discrimination of the displaced communities result in a sense of dismemberment and marginalisation in the host country. In the displacement, discontinuity, and fragmentation, the writers experience various cultural processes and ethnic mixtures within a multicultural setup, to which they are inevitably drawn. Through Mahmoud Darwish’s works, it can be inferred that there is a hectic search for securing and establishing a new home in the country where they lived, and in this new home, they create an identity that is deeply rooted in the past, where power structures had silenced them.