Najat Rahman. In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish.

Boullata, Issa J.

Najat Rahman.In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish. Syracuse University Press. 2015.190 pages.

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This book is not about the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) but is, in many ways, a tribute to him and his poetry, which engaged Arabs everywhere and especially Palestinian poets and artists and resonated further on the international scene (see page 00). Najat Rahman examines here the works of a select number of Palestinian spokenword poets, performance artists, visual artists, and musicians who are contemporaries of Darwish in the two decades since the Oslo Accords (1993 and 1995). In rigorous detail, she analyzes their aesthetic founded on loss, dispersion, dispossession, and transformation engendered by the politics of Palestinian cultural expression.

Like Darwish, they are shown to assert a common legacy: historic Palestine, the national poets, the Nakba of 1948, and the memory of the 1982 Beirut war--this legacy being considered as the basis of a new belonging. Despite inimical forces intending their effacement, Palestinians are shown, through modalities of art and poetry, to persist in belonging to the land

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