Friday, August 1, 2008

A Rose from Jericho

Posted by Zubin at 3:18 PM
This collection is named after its final image, at the end of Mahmoud Darwish’s sprawling poem, “With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge.” A female soldier on patrol pleads to her lover across the night sky, “Promise me nothing, / do not send me a rose from Jericho!” The Jericho Rose, also known as the Resurrection Plant, is renowned for its ability to survive as a lifeless, dehydrated tumbleweed, drifting across the desert for years until it eventually reaches a water source and blossoms into the green and flowering plant it once was.

Who is this woman soldier appearing so abruptly, inexplicably for two stanzas after a dozen pages of oblique dialogue between two men? To what side does she belong? In the fractured world of this poem, where even identity and location are ambiguous, the possibility of resolution, like the flowering of the Jericho Rose, is too uncertain, too painful to bear. Darwish’s poem captures the mood of many in the collection—an endless and confusing wait for something that is implicit but unspoken, a hope that cannot be directly expressed but only hinted at in symbols.

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