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Abstract

In June 2025 the Washington D.C. Arab Center held a conference at the National Press Club titled, “A Historic Juncture: Israel’s Destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian Future.”  The discussion sparked an incisive question: Would such a future follow a Palestinian-owned trajectory?  Incisive, because Palestinians have not owned their trajectory since the 1915 Sykes-Picot Agreement, have consistently been defined in negative terms, and have lived with the ambiguity of existing while remaining unrecognized.  Growing up within Israel, Palestine’s national poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), experienced this paradox firsthand, and explored it directly in “Speech of the Red Indian,” a poem written in response to the 1992 quincentennial commemoration of Columbus’ voyage to the New World.  “Speech of the Red Indian” reflects the Native American encounter with the West and serves as a metaphor for the Palestinian experience of its encounters with the “West,” which, in the aftermath of October 2023, now threatens the historic reality of the Palestinian people.  This paper argues that in re-casting the tribal history within the sacred space of ritualized performance reserved for the Arab poet within a culture of orality, Darwish challenges his audience to complete the story for themselves: to define their own trajectory.

 

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