Mapping Palestinian/Israeli Poetics: From Australia to North America

This article compares two twentieth-century poems—one by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and another by Israeli writer Dahlia Ravikovitch, both works alluding to settler colonial histories and transnational Indigenous landscapes and experiences. The article proposes a way of reading these poets in conversation, charting how they juxtapose the Palestinian/Israeli context with colonial projects in North America and Australia. Even though the authors composed their works almost three decades apart, in the 1960s and the 1990s, this article locates the generative theoretical overlaps between their poems, demonstrating the ways in which they invoke moments from the past and employ intertexts as a means of political imagination and forewarning. That is, the writers speculate about how the colonizers in these various sites will be haunted by their exploits in the future. By delineating transnational connections between Palestine/Israel and Australia and North America, the poets use comparison for critique, destabilizing colonial discourses, more broadly. I argue that Darwish and Ravikovitch engage in a mapping project across national boundaries, deploying poetic language and conjuring other settler colonial sites to subvert imperial ideologies and utilize an anticolonial lens through poetry.