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Mahmoud Darwish: Palestinian Poems About Forgetting
A walk through the poem “Forgotten as if you never were” by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Introduction
March 13, 2021, marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, the most famous poet of the Palestinian cause, and thus it is an opportunity to talk about the poem “You are Forgotten as if you never were ”, and the problem of creativity and the dilemma of the creators.
The truth is that Darwish is not only famous for the children of his generation or those interested in the Palestinian cause, but even now excerpts of his poems are spread among young people on social media sites so that it is possible that they themselves do not know the source of the words, but they are certainly famous among them. This is due, first, to Darwish’s use of a simple and easy language in its vocabulary compared to the rest of the peer group, and secondly, the interest in meaning at the expense of the classical laws of poetry.
The problems of creativity and psychological alienation
Psychological alienation is defined as: “a group of symptoms or ideas with which the patient appears to be in a strange relationship with the society in which they lives, as the gap between the individual and their environment and society increases.”
Many schools of psychology have tried to explain the factors that lead to the individual feeling of alienation, especially the modern age, and among those schools the interpretation of the humanitarian school appears convincing and logical.
The summary of their opinion is that the image of the individual about themselves is the product of combining the self-image and their societal image. Consequently, feelings and beliefs are regulated based on that image, which in turn answers questions such as: (Who am I? What do I want from life? And how should I behave?).
We can lay out three stages of the psychological alienation process that an individual goes through as follows:
