A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies

Friendship of Darwish and Sand Mahmoud Darwish and Shlomo Sand knew each other as activists in the Rakah communist party and were friends. At that time, Darwish was a well-known poet in Palestine, but not well-known beyond Palestine. The literary critics of Palestine and Raja'a an-Naqqash of Egypt differed in their views on the merit of Darwish's sympathetic portrayal of the Israeli soldier; al-Khatīb criticized the portrayal while an-Naqqash admired it. about a Jewish-Israeli boy in the kibbutz Maoz Haim. Revelation of soldier's identity Shlomo Sand discussed the poem in the introduction of his 2008 book When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (, published in English as The Invention of the Jewish People). According to Elias Khoury, Mahmoud Darwish told Leila Shahid the story of the poem, confirming that it was about Darwish's friend Sand. Elias Sanbar was also surprised to discover the soldier of the poem's identity when he participated with Sand in a conversation about peace on a French television channel. == Poem ==

Dialogue "A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies" demonstrates Darwish's "early mastery of dialogue," which he uses to go "past the aesthetic and into political and intellectual vision." The poem is a conversation over alcohol and cigarettes between an Israeli soldier and the speaker, whose name is Mahmoud, retold in first-person through quotations and reported speech. About half of the poem is the soldier's speech—59 out of 118 lines. Symbolism The poem begins: The white lilies are not a symbol Darwish had used before, and Khaled Mattawa suggests they are conjured perhaps as a flower that is not native to Palestine. The olive branch is evidence of the Israeli soldier's desire for peace. Portrayal of the Israeli soldier Darwish likens the soldier to himself, using the motif of a mother's coffee as homeland, which he used in his 1966 poem "Ila Ummī" ( 'To My Mother'), which became an unofficial Palestinian anthem after it first appeared in Ashiq min Filastin ( 'Lover from Palestine'). The phrase qāl lī ( 'he told me') is repeated throughout the poem, as if to affirm to audiences—Palestinian, Arab, Israeli—that the conversation is reported and that the portrait is not of his poetic creation. == Miscellaneous ==

It was performed by Vanessa Redgrave in the 2008 multimedia art project "Id - Identity of the soul." == Notes ==