Mosab Abu Toha on Mahmoud Darwish and Thuận on Trần Dần

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with two authors in exile about the revolutionary writers who inspired them. Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha (Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Forest of Noise) discusses the transcendent poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. Vietnamese novelist Thuận (Elevator in Saigon, Chinatown) delves into the repressed career of Trần Dần.

Mosab Abu Toha on Mahmoud Darwish

What drew you to Darwish in the first place?

Mahmoud Darwish represents the different experiences that Palestinians have been living for 75 years. He was expelled from his village in Palestine in 1948 at the age of seven, and then he moved on to Lebanon before infiltrating to his own village to find it razed, so his family had to move to a different place. And he lived under occupation in his own land before being forced to flee Palestine because of the Israeli military rule, and the fact that he was not permitted to do what he wanted to do, to move where he wanted to move, to read and share his work. So then he moved to a life of exile and spent around 30 years moving from Lebanon to Egypt to Russia to Paris, and then he divided his time between Jordan and Palestine when the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994.

So he is the Palestinian in the sense that he represents not only what it means to be a Palestinian poet, but also what it means to be Palestinian.

What about his writing appeals to you?

Mahmoud Darwish started by writing about his land, his people, but over time, when he left Palestine, he started to grow as a universal poet. So he moved from [being a] local poet—the poet who's talking about his people, the oppression that they were facing—and then he starts to talk about the human experience, about illness, about death, about existence itself. Mahmoud Darwish didn’t fall into the trap of spending all his life, all his work, talking about the same thing. He didn't continue to write about his village, about occupation. He did talk about this when he was in Palestine, and when he left he grew from that to talk about the human tragedy, about the Native Americans, about the Armenians, about the Kurds. So he was not only a poet of Palestine, but a poet of the human tragedy.

He was incredible at making the personal feel political and universal.

If a poet succeeds in presenting something specific for other people to see as something that represents everything in the world, and when he talks about a big thing that invites people to think about the specific, I think that's where a poet, a true poet, emerges. If the poet succeeds in doing this kind of magic, when the poet succeeds in removing this thin line between the universal and the personal, the grand and the specific—that's when we are in front of a huge poet.

What do you think writers should learn from him?

Mahmoud committed himself to advocating on behalf of his people, but also on behalf of other oppressed people. He was not writing only about Palestine, not only writing about the Arab, but was talking about the human experience. So I think what writers can take from Mahmoud Darwish is that you can’t disconnect yourself from the human experience. You can be a Palestinian poet, but you still are a human being who can sympathize and empathize with other struggles. You can be Palestinian, you can be the poet of your people, but still you should not forget about your own self, your own life. Never forget about these three levels: the national level, the personal level, and the universal level. These cannot be separated.

Thuận on Trần Dần

Trần Dần’s life isn’t well documented in English. Can you talk a bit about him?

Born in 1926, Trần Dần benefited from a French education and discovered Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé very early on. Seduced by the liberating ideals of the Việt-Minh, he left his hometown for the forest where he joined the army and tirelessly engaged in creative works, but his stairway poems and Cubist-style drawings were considered by his colleagues to be dark and unfathomable.

After the Geneva Accords and the establishment of the Communist regime in North Vietnam, together with other writers and artists from the People's Army, Trần Dần put forward a "Proposal for a Cultural Policy" to proclaim creative freedom. In May 1955, he was imprisoned for three months and forced to undertake "self-criticism." In prison Trần Dần composed Nhất định thắng (Definite Victory), a poem about life in North Vietnam after the division of the country. To this day, the beautiful and sad verses of this poem are still imprinted in the minds of many Vietnamese:

Onward I walk

no neighborhood

no house

Only drizzling rain

on the red flags

Judged as reactionary and too pessimistic by the cultural commissars of that time, its publication was the cause of Trần Dần’s second stay in prison where he unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Released from prison in 1956 but sent to reeducation camps for many years, then placed under house arrest and banned from publishing, Trần Dần continued to write until his death in 1997, but only a tiny part of his works reached the readers during his lifetime.

What was the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm movement?

Founded in 1954, Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm was a protest movement that brought together many great figures of the time. These artists and intellectuals pushed for freedom of expression and individual creativity. They demanded the return of human rights and respect for the law, all the basic principles of a civil society. At the beginning of 1958, this movement was firmly suppressed, with around 300 writers and artists consigned to a reeducation camp. Considered one of the instigators of the movement, Trần Dần was imprisoned many times and sent to a reeducation camp where he had to do hard labor for many years. For 50 years until his death, he was deprived of the right to work, the right to publish, and the right to participate in any and all artistic and social activities.

What can writers learn from Trần Dần?

What people appreciate in Trần Dần's works is his love for innovation and his audacity in the search for formal representation. One can just look at the length of his poems, sometimes just a few sentences or a few lines, sometimes a few pages long, sometimes a few hundred pages, sometimes a novel in verse, sometimes visual poetry, and many times there is only one short sentence, which he called mini-poetry. I have been especially moved by the short poems he called “mini poems.” They are concise, full of images, sounds, and the sadness of a condemned man who must sit all his life behind bars:

I want to swallow Hanoi into my heart, then

vomit it out as a fake city.

I cry for horizons without people who fly,

and I cry for people who fly without horizons.

Everyday I eat a horizon.

Everyone has a trial,

Everyone buries a horizon.