Salīm Barakāt’s Intermediary Existence: His Poem Maḥmūd Darwīsh

Abstract

In January this year, with my first article on Salīm Barakāt, Empire, Split Ethnicities, and an Explosion of Poetry, I introduced Barakāt’s early writings saying that guidelines to understanding the poetry of the Kurdish poet Salīm Barakāt (b. 1951, Qamishli, Syria) are to be found in a poem by his friend, Palestinian poet Mahmūd Darwīsh (b. 1941, al-Birweh, Palestine – d. 2008). I now present guidelines to understanding the mature output of both these poets guided by Barakāt’s poem “Mahmūd Darwīsh” (1984 – 2002). Barakāt’s multi-layered substantially surrealistic poem also serves as an ‘index to the acts of the wind.’ In the same period, Syrian Alevi poet Adūnīs (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, b. 1930) published his book al-Sūfiyya wal Surriyāliyya (Sufism and Surrealism) (Dar al-Saqi, 1995), and then his poem Fihris li-A‘māl al-Rīh (Index to the Acts of the Wind) (1998) exemplifying the theories of the book. I have included translations of salient whole poems.