Lorca's Ghost

Palestine, Granada, and the dream of Andalusia

Oct 16, 2023

Recently, I returned to my copy of Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, a collection of translated poems by Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish is broadly considered Palestine’s national poet, and probably one of the greatest Arabic-language poets of the last century. I’m not a poet myself, but I love to read poetry. Even in translation, I think poetry has an incredible capacity for conveying emotional truth. Certainly that has been my experience with Darwish’s poetry; even translated out of its original form, and even steeped as it is in a religious and social context I have never lived, some things are transcendent.

The dominant theme in Darwish’s body of work is place: the loss of home, exile, paradise, homeland. Darwish was born in the small Palestinian town of al-Birwa in 1941. During the 1948 Nakba (“Catastrophe”), his family, along with many others, fled to Lebanon; Israeli forces razed their village to the ground. Al-Birwa no longer exists. In the introduction of Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, translators Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché write that “In 1997, the Israeli-French filmmaker, Simone Bitton, went to what had been Birwe to film Darwish's childhood landscape, but found nothing but ruins and a desolate, weed-choked cemetery.”

Al-Birwa from a distance in 1928. From Walid Khalidi's *All That Remains.*

The first time I opened Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, I was surprised to see that the epigraph was a quote from Federico García Lorca, in Spanish and English.

Pero yo ya no soy yo
Ni mi casa es ya mi casa
But now I am no longer I
Nor is my house any longer my house

García Lorca was a Spanish poet and playwright of the early twentieth century, prior to the Spanish Civil War. He was gay; he was a socialist; he wrote beautifully. He was assassinated by fascist militiamen at the breakout of the Spanish Civil War, when he was thirty-eight years old. His body was never found, and his killers never identified. The epigraph is from his poem Romance Sonámbulo (‘Sleepwalking Ballad’), from what is still his best-known book of poetry, Romancero Gitano, a love letter to Andalusia, the region of Spain that was his home.

García Lorca was born, lived much of his life, and died in Granada, Andalusia. Andalusia was once the heart of al-Andalus, the name used for the series of Muslim states that existed on the Iberian Peninsula from the 700s until 1492. Granada’s name comes from Arabic: غرناطة (Ġarnāṭa). One of the city’s jewels is the Alhambra, a palace complex that is one of the best-preserved and most famous monuments of the ancient Islamic world. At its height, al-Andalus comprised almost all of what is now modern Spain and Portugal. It was ultimately conquered by the Christian kingdoms to its north in the campaign known as the Reconquista.

The Emirate of Grenada was the last to fall; its surrender to the crown of Castile marked the end of Muslim rule on the peninsula. Shortly after, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile issued the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from the peninsula; they would have to convert to Christianity or leave, the culmination of what had already been an oppressive campaign of terror and forced conversion against the Jewish population. A policy of forced conversion was also imposed on the Muslim population of the conquered al-Andalus. The goal was a wholly Christian state, policed by the Spanish Inquisition. Ultimately, even these forcibly converted Muslims were also expelled about a century later, in 1609, in the event known as the Expulsion of the Moriscos.

In his poetry, Darwish draws comparisons between the religious terror used in post-Reconquista Spain to establish a Christian state; the 1948 Nakba, in which Palestinians were killed and driven from their homes to clear the way for the establishment of a Jewish state; and the fascist takeover of Spain that killed García Lorca, which was, like the Reconquista, driven by forces of Catholic religious reaction.

Al-Andalus and its grand cities (Granada, Cordova, Seville) are a haunting and pervasive presence in Darwish’s poetry, which is saturated with a sense of place. It serves the same role as the Palestine of his youth does; it is a lost paradise, belonging now only to the past, no matter how he might try to return there. In his poem “Were It Up to Me To Begin Again”, from his 1986 collection Fewer Roses, Darwish writes (translated by Akash and Forché):

Share my bread, drink my mind, don’t leave me alone like a tired willow.
I love lands not trod over by songs of migration, or become subject to passions of blood and desire.
I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold.
If I return, I will return to the same rose and follow the same steps.
But never to Cordoba.

In his paper, “Other Barbarians Will Come: Intertextuality, Meta-Poetry, and Myth in Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry,” Israeli professor Reuven Snir states that Darwish is part of a broader tradition of Arab poets who invoke the image of al-Andalus, writing, “When poets recall the cultural achievements of the Arabs in al-Andalus—from the time Arabs and Berber troops crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia in 711 and overthrew the Visigoths, commencing nearly 800 years of Muslim rule on the peninsula—they do so to remind their audience that their bitter state in modern times is only a transitory period, a temporary clouding of the skies between a glorious past and a splendid future.”

Darwish’s collection Eleven Stars at the End of the Andalusian Scene, which is one long elaboration on the theme of Palestine as al-Andalus, and al-Andalus as paradise lost, was published in 1992, 500 years after the fall of Granada and the victory of the Reconquista that led to the religious purging of the peninsula. In the collection, he reflects at length about Granada, its ultimate surrender to the Reconquista, and the loss of al-Andalus. In the poem “I am one of the kings of the end,” he writes (translated by Mona Anis and Nigel Ryan):

Castile is raising her
Crown over Allah’s minaret. I hear the rattling of keys in
The door of our golden history.

In the third poem in the sequence, “There is a sky beyond the sky for me,” Darwish invokes García Lorca directly, placing them side by side, dying under the same tree.

I am Adam of the two Edens, I who lost paradise twice.
So expel me slowly,
and kill me slowly,
under my olive tree,
along with Lorca.

In referring to García Lorca’s 1936 death into this poem, Darwish makes it clear that his reflection on Andalusia is not confined solely to the medieval era. He draws a direct connection between the Catholic reaction of the Reconquista and the rise of Catholic fascism that killed García Lorca on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, and connects both to his own exile in the Nakba (“I who lost paradise twice”). García Lorca’s spiritual dispossession and alienation from his own country and homeland, leading to his death, is also Darwish’s own.

But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.

All of my writing here is and will remain free. Consider donating to the Baitulmaal mutual aid network for humanitarian aid to Gaza, or to Doctors Without Borders, which is providing crucial medical care in Gaza and the West Bank.

Dispatches from the Waste Land

Discussion about this post