Resisting Colonialism through Nature: An Ecopostcolonial Reading of Mahmoud Darwish's Selected Poems

Abstract

Resisting colonialism remains the main theme of the poetry of the Arab Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. This paper explores how Darwish employs nature as a new way for resisting the occupation of his homeland. His poems, throughout his writing life that spans fifty years, can be used to demonstrate how an ecopostcolonial perspective might contribute to an understanding of the poet's resistance through nature to the colonisers in his homeland. The theoretical framework used in this study is derived from both the ecocritical and postcolonial theories of reading literature. It is termed as ecoresistance as a new perspective of analysing resistance in the Arab literary studies, a non-western viewpoint and an original analytical lens for reading Darwish's work. The analysis reveals that Darwish uses the various forms of nature that range from the forms of the pure nature to the forms that have been cultivated. Through the ecopostcolonial perspective of the study, the employment of nature for resistance and the indication of Darwish as an ecopostcolonial poet of the Arab world are played out. The paper further proposes new insights into man's connection to land and is a step towards opening up the field of ecocriticism as a way of reading Arab poetry of resistance.