Nothing More to Lose

Published for the first time in English, this volume brings together a selection of poems by Najwan Darwish, from his earliest work written in the late 1990s to his most recent in 2013. Hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle, Darwish’s poetry walks the razor’s edge between despair and resistance, between dark humor and the harsh reality of death. Here, the psychological, social, and political are collapsed into dense coils of rhythm and image. Darwish’s obsessive rewritings of the life of Christ are particularly incisive and reveal the poet’s conflicted relationship with Jerusalem—a city that appears repeatedly as both beloved and crucifier.

Although they are strongly rooted in Darwish’s homeland, these poems repeatedly link the Palestinian cause to more global visions of equality and justice, and to historical moments from across the Arab world and beyond. This ability to transcend national boundaries—and to assimilate a vast array of literary and religious traditions—has made Darwish one of the very few Palestinian poets to garner a large readership outside his homeland.

While so many poets within Palestine are trying to follow in the footsteps of Mahmoud Darwish—whose influence on Palestinian poetry was enormous from the 1960s to his death in 2008—Najwan Darwish is widely respected for his refusal to take on the mantle of his famous namesake (to whom he bears no relation). This refusal is clearest in his own poetic rebuttal to Mahmoud Darwish’s best-known poem, “Identity Card”—a radical rewriting that espouses a more inclusive view of what it means to be both Arab and Palestinian.

Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation. He has gained widespread acclaim for a body of work that both embodies and transcends the Palestinian struggle. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, Darwish’s poetry has been translated into ten languages. In 2009, the Hay Festival’s Beirut39 selected him as one of the thirty-nine best Arab writers under the age of thirty-nine. He continues to make his home in Jerusalem.

Half American and half Egyptian, Kareem James Abu-Zeid is completing his PhD in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has translated novels and books of poetry by Rabee Jaber (Lebanon), Najwan Darwish (Palestine), Dunya Mikhail (Iraq), and Tarek Eltayeb (Sudan). He has also taught Arabic, French, German, and English literature and language courses at U.C. Berkeley and the universities of Mannheim and Heidelberg in Germany.