Dear Darwish by Morani Kornberg-Weiss

“It is a brave effort and feels so long overdue and at the same time perfectly natural—an Israeli poet grapples directly with the Palestinian history, land and literature through an engagement with one of Palestine’s most widely known literary voices. Mahmoud Darwish once warned, ‘This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past / and not remember tomorrow in the story.’ Morani Kornberg-Weiss addresses the other in perfect awareness of history—that there may be no answer, no personal reconciliation. She proceeds anyhow into the thicket of the past not for the sake of settling accounts but to understand the edges of a possible future. One hopes it is only the first of a series of poets making such engagements.”

—Kazim Ali

“The attempt at any kind of dialogue in a world in which people try to protect themselves with silence or/and blasts of self-righteousness is in itself a painful task. With the possibilities of actual communication remote yet imperative, anaphora is a last-ditch tactic. Listen to me and I will be able to understand myself, declares Morani Kornberg-Weiss. And in understanding who I am I will learn who you are to me, and who you are as an independent being. But how? ‘You are the place / where language fails’ says the poet to the poet, and struggles throughout this volume to go beyond this failure to a communication. Political poetry is so often categorized as being unpoetic, yet Kornberg-Weiss shows that it is only through poetry that a political discussion can begin.”

—Karen Alkalay-Gut

“When we hear about strife in other countries, we don’t always think a way into their circumstance. Morani Kornberg-Weiss initiates the hard work for us in Dear Darwish, capitalizing on our penchant for conflict. These poems are incisors, opening the layered challenges of the Israeli-Palestinian history, seeing through words the body marked and marred by blood, bombs, and inhabiting space not one’s own as insisted on by ‘outside’ force. Right and wrong never unveil where people are pushed as puppetry, ‘a hostage / confined to my own history.’ Kornberg-Weiss’s persona advances that, sans intention, a scary part of freedom is not choosing one’s purpose; that the stain of following orders must be examined; that responsibility, country, God and duty are not enough to go on blindly; that to commune through ‘a one-way correspondence’ is to ‘refuse to colonize;’ that engagement with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s words might be a way the Israeli soldier poet can interrogate peace as a process with a view through and into both sides; that Darwish’s poems remain suppressed today for giving voice – and ultimately how our own citizenry might be implicated by what is no longer easily dismissed as ‘outsider conflict.’”

—Amy King

Book Information:

· Paperback: 110 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-150-4

$16

DEAR DARWISH by Morani Korn… by Geoffrey Gatza