Abstract
A great body of work has been done on Darwish: themes of the self, exile, homeland, and identity are common in both his works as well as those of his critics. However, there has been little work done on the theme of sleep in Darwish, despite its recurrence in his works – specifically, his final productions. These are particularly embellished with images and scenes of sleep, wakefulness, drowsiness, insomnia and dreams. This essay examines the representation of these liminal states in Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence (FīḤaḍrat al-Ghiyāb), a self-elegy published near the end of his life, which reflects the dialectical structure of the quasi-contradictory states of consciousness and unconsciousness, sleep and death, as well as presence and absence.
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