'Sand is like sand, but you are of the blue'

"Sand is like sand, but you are of the blue"

Nasiri Hajjaj’s movie “As The Poet Said” about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish starts with this line and wanders across half the world before coming home. On the last day of The London Palestine Film Festival at The Barbican Centre, we were granted a languorous film filled with the powerful poetry of Darwish read by people he knew, filmed in places that he had visited.... Tunis, Paris, Ramallah, Spain, Haifa – all illuminated brilliantly with only the starkness of his words.

The Director In the discussion after the movie, Hajjaj called this film his letter of love to Darwish; he spoke about how he had met the poet when he was young and wanted to make a movie about one of his Darwish’s epic poems (much to the consternation of the poet, apparently!) but never had the money to get it started.

The Title The title of the movie “As The Poet Said”, is supposed to be a phrase that’s culturally loaded with meaning in Arabic. Explaining the origin of this phrase, the director spoke about how Darwish would often use this particular phrase with reference to the 9th century poet Al-Muttanabbi, someone he considered THE most famous poet of all time in the Arab world. Hajjaj explained that “Al-Muttanabbi : Darwish, Darwish : Hajjaj” and voila, the title.

The Poet of The World The director also spoke about how he went out of his way to cast Darwish as a poet of the world rather than a poet of Palestine. He deliberately ignored the poet’s early nationalistic works and did not use the usual Palestinian collaborators of Darwish in the movie at all (“there are still people in Ramallah who are very angry with me”, he says, “Darwish was Palestine’s gift to the world and I want him to be remembered like that”). He also spoke about how he forced himself to use emptiness throughout the movie, saying that only the poetry should speak about Darwish and nothing else should detract from the experience.

The Readers Wole Soyinka and Jose Saramago, who read in the movie, had actually visited Darwish in Ramallah during the 2nd Intifada; Dominique De Villepin, the former French Prime Minister and poet, who also reads in the movie, had attended the poet’s funeral and wrote a moving elegy in the French press for him. Other readers include American, Israeli and several Middle –Eastern poets as also a dumb boy who shares in sign language, a Darwish poem that he knew.

The Democratic Flourish In explaining how the poems were selected (especially the ones read out by other poets), the director spoke about his democratic approach – he asked the reading poet to choose a Darwish poem and Najjaj himself would choose another one. The poet would read both poems for the filming but in his film, Najjaj finally used only the poems he chose. “Perfectly democratic”, he informed us.

The Poetry As an old, steady voice read the poem below, the frame panned across the landscape with old men, women, poets, Palestinian school-kids... reciting, reading, remembering these lines... I thought to myself, how better can a man be remembered, than for the force of his words and the fires that they light.

WE HAVE ON THIS EARTH WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING

Mahmoud Darwish, 1986

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s
hesitation, the aroma of bread
at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of
Aeschylus, the beginning
of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and
the invaders’ fear of memories.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the
final days of September, a woman
keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in
prison, a cloud reflecting a swarm
of creatures, the peoples’ applause for those who face death
with a smile, a tyrant’s fear of songs.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this
earth, the Lady of Earth,
mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called
Palestine. Her name later became
Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

(Image used was sourced from here)