“The right of return has to be both complex and effective, which means that it has to be grounded in the rights of refugees, the illegitimacy of dispossession, and a new conception of the redistribution of lands.” This necessary step, Judith Butler argues, is nearly impossible when the very history of this dispossession is constantly being effaced, preventing its actualisation as a historical truth.
Butler encourages us not to work within the structure of colonial power but to undo the edifice of colonialism. Through Darwish’s poem, entitled ” Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading”, she highlights the self and identity. “Identity is the child of birth, but/ At the end, it’s self-invention, and not/ An inheritance of the past,” Said tells Darwish in the poem. There is probably no one who gave voice more clearly to the condition of unwilled proximity, the modes of being bound together in antagonism and without contract, than Mahmoud Darwish. He did not precisely imagine a solution to this problem, Butler explained, but he made clear that this terrible embrace had to become something else, and that exile forms something of a signpost for the future.
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