we are not numbers
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My personal reading of the poem, ‘To A Young Poet,’ is shaped by exile, media habituation, and emotional numbness.
The author reading Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in Cairo. Photo: Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb
When I left Gaza, I packed a small backpack — a new one, printed with Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, that I had bought for the new academic semester I never got to start. Between clothes, documents, and the small necessities of survival, I slipped in a book by Mahmoud Darwish. It was my favorite book, the first thing my eyes fell on when I was deciding what to take.
A year after I arrived in Egypt, alone, in the new place I was still learning to call home, I opened the book and found “To a Young Poet.” Darwish addressed this poem to novice writers, but I understood it as someone carrying an entire city in her absence. Reading his words, I felt as though I were back on my bed in Gaza — except this time I had a different kind of awareness, one shaped by everything that had happened since.
I had never stopped reading during the displacement; it was the one thing that kept me alive, the only thing that could mute the sound of the planes over my head. What once felt like a poem about writing became, for me, a poem about how to survive.
Darwish’s poem is meant as a reflection on the craft of writing — on discipline and the ethical weight of language. But reading it from exile shifts its center completely. It is no longer only about poetry as technique, but about perception itself: how one continues to see and feel in a world where every sense of stability collapses again and again.
He writes:
شُدَّ، شُدَّ بكل قواك عن القاعدة
Diverge, diverge with all your strength from the norm.
I used to understand this as a poetic instruction. But the “norm” now feels less like literary convention, and more like something far more dangerous: emotional numbness. A way of seeing that no longer reacts. A condition in which images of destroyed homes pass between advertisements, hunger becomes a headline, and death dissolves into repetition.
In this sense, the poem is not only about writing; it is about resisting habituation — the slow disappearance of shock. It is about refusing to become someone who no longer feels.
Darwish does not offer certainty. He unsettles it. He resists closure and final meaning:
لا تصدّق خلاصاتنا، وانسها
وابتدئ من كلامك أنت.
Do not believe our conclusions, forget them
and begin from your own words.
Read today, this feels less like advice to a young poet, and more like a warning to an entire age. We live in an economy of quick conclusions — quick positions, quick outrage, quick solidarity, and quicker forgetting. Even grief has become quick, repetitive, and language no longer carries the true weight of experience.
Darwish’s call to begin again is, in this sense, an attempt to restore that weight to language. Words lose their moral force when they are repeated without reflection. They begin to circulate without genuinely expressing what they name.
This becomes clearer when he writes:
الحقيقة بيضاء. فاكتب عليها
بحبر الغراب
والحقيقة سوداء، فاكتب عليها
بضوء السراب
Truth is white. Write on it
with the ink of the crow.
Truth is black. Write on it
with the light of mirage.
Here, truth is no longer stable. It is already contaminated by narration and political justification that soften violence until it becomes almost invisible.
Words like “casualties” turn the dead into statistics rather than names. “Security operations” recast destruction as necessity rather than choice. “Evacuate” makes forced displacement sound voluntary, as though people are leaving rather than being expelled.
These words are not neutral. They reorganize perception. They decide what can be seen as violence and what can be accepted as necessity. Language does not merely describe reality; it participates in its construction.
What I fear most is that poetry itself might become another form of consumption — an elegant way of passing over pain.
Darwish writes:
القصيدةُ في الزمن الصعب
زهرٌ جميلٌ على مقبرة
A poem in difficult times
is a beautiful flower on a grave.
My first reading of this was as a judgment on poetry itself. But now I read it as judgment on a world that makes such poetry necessary. Poetry does not stop violence. It does not claim to. Yet it resists final erasure. It insists that what is lost is not lost without witness.
The danger remains, however, that witnessing itself becomes aestheticized — that pain becomes something to observe rather than something to confront.
At a certain point in the poem, Darwish turns toward a more unsettling warning:
لا أخاف عليك من الواجبات
أخاف عليك من الراقصات على قبر أولادهنّ
أخاف عليك من الكاميرات الخفيّات
I do not fear for you from duty.
I fear for you from those who dance on the graves of their sons.
I fear for you from hidden cameras.
Here, poetry becomes a warning against spectacle — against the transformation of suffering into image.
I read these lines in Egypt, watching Gaza from a distance. I open a newspaper, or scroll through an article online, and the same words surface again and again — “security zone,” “collateral damage” — language engineered to soften what it describes. Sometimes I find myself afraid of my own gaze, of what it means to keep seeing violence through screens. The camera does not only reveal; it distances. It makes what is unbearable increasingly consumable.
Darwish is not addressing only a young poet here. He is addressing anyone who produces, circulates, or consumes images: Do not lose your inner tremor.
Mahmoud Darwish at the University of Betlehem. Photo: Amer Shomali. Creative Commons 3.0
As I read Darwish now, I hear not only a call to resist poetic norms, but a call to resist habituation.
Habituation, I have come to understand, is even more dangerous than enduring repression by war or authority. It teaches us how to survive by not feeling. The world does not collapse only through violence, but through repetition — through exposure until nothing feels unbearable anymore. When everyone is habituated, the violence goes unopposed.
To “diverge” is therefore not a stylistic choice. It is an ethical stance. It is the refusal to become someone for whom suffering has become background noise. It is the insistence on seeing a human being where systems have already reduced them to an image, the insistence that feeling is still possible.
Perhaps this is the most fragile form of survival: not to become inured.
Author’s Note: This essay is not an academic reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry but a subjective response — an attempt to remain in conversation with language under conditions of loss and displacement. The translations are my own and not intended as authoritative renderings, but as attempts to carry the emotional weight of the original Arabic into English.
