Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet (best known in parts of western academia through having been championed by his friend Edward Said) died in August 2008 writes Patrick Williams.
The University of York organised a conference in his memory earlier this year, with a keynote by Barbara Harlow from the University of Texas, (another long-time friend of Said) and contributions from academics from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, as well as the UK. I gave the final paper, on Darwish and ‘Late Style’, the Adorno-derived concept which Said had been thinking about in his final years and which is the subject of his posthumous book of the same name. The papers were interspersed with bi-lingual readings of Darwish’s poems by students and academics – and there was a very impressive (unscripted) performance of a long poem entirely from memory by one of the Egyptian contributors. Papers from the conference will form a special issue of the Routledge postcolonial journal Interventions.
(Photo credit: Yemisi Blake. Permissions.)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment