Charting Cultural Territory: Imagined Geographies and Water Politics in the Works of Mahmoud Darwish

This article reads water imagery in Mahmoud Darwish's poetry as an example of cultural and geographical reclamation that refuses the orientalist discourse that writes Palestinians out of their land. It posits that this Western discourse functions through Zionist environmental apartheid, a system of injustice meant to further dispossess Palestinians of their lands and land-based identities. Situating this analysis within the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the rise in accusations of antisemitism against Palestine advocates, the author argues that the riverscapes and seascapes imagined within Darwish's hydropoetry humanize and personify Palestine's Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Read this way, the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" encompasses the rediscovery and recharting of these water bodies as sites and beings of active resistance, thus enabling the creation of alternative Palestinian futures.