Exhausted on the Cross
NAJWAN DARWISH, TRANSLATED BY KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID
Reviewed by Sam Campbell
Critically acclaimed Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s second book, Exhausted on the Cross, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is an engaging collection that examines the idea of history and strips it bare.
Darwish explores countless places in his poetry—from Gaza to Shiraz, from Shatila to Baghdad—and crosses paths with a variety of voices, including the Prophet Mohammad. Nothing is off-limits in this hard-hitting collection. Darwish doesn’t shy away from history, religion, war, love, hate, or anything in between. This collection has something to offer every reader, whether in the mood for something political, something historical, or something that meditates on the simplicity of moment, such as in "The Beating Rain:" "You wake to rain / beating on the sea, / …waterfalls / creep over the mountain's back, / the sky is a piece of gray."
Darwish’s collection blurs genre boundaries between poetry, prose, and nonfiction. An early piece of the collection, “A Story from Shiraz” is a prose poem delineating the story of Persian poet Hafez. Alternatively, later in the collection, “This Paradise” is a mere three lines long.
Exhausted at the Cross challenges preconceptions and opens readers’ eyes to alternate ways of viewing the world. So long as you’re human, you are welcome to this verse. After all, as Darwish puts it in “In Constantinople,” “People are simply people / Peel off the languages, and all you’ll find / is women and men.”