The paradox underlying national movements based on ethnic-religious-cultural claims is that, short of a distinctly zero-sum outcome in which one group survives at the expense of the other, there is a need both for clear boundaries and for coexistence. At the level of geographic identity, concern for physical boundaries makes political sense: physically separating populations can enhance the reality of self-determination, as was the logic of the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. However, at the level of psychic and cultural identity, the drawing of clear boundaries – boundaries which distinguish us from them, and which promote group solidarity, giving it political momentum – also makes coexistence of such clearly delimited groups more difficult. Self and other become brittle constructs. It is of interest then, that a ‘national’ poet of the status of Mahmoud Darwish writes poetry that both galvanises Palestinians around the Palestinian national enterprise and provides a means by which the boundaries can be bridged, making coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis imaginable. As well, his is a poetry that reaches beyond the frontiers of Palestinian nationalism. It speaks not only to a broad literary audience, but in translation, to an audience of peace educators whose focus (in effecting peace) is on the possibilities resident within blurred boundaries.

Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, whose people ‘chant his odes in their fields, in their schools, on their marches, and in their miserable tin shanty-towns’ (Darwish 2000: 19), taps universal concerns with identity when he explores the paradox of being Palestinian.