Exile’s Bed: Memory, Displacement, and Identity in Mahmoud Darwish’s A Bed for the Stranger

Abstract

This study critically examines three poems “We Were Without a Present,” “The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger,” and “The Land of the Stranger, the Serene Land” from Mahmoud Darwish’s 1999 collection A Bed for the Stranger. Through close reading and thematic analysis, the paper explores how Darwish reframes alienation, temporal dislocation, and exile as sources of identity rather than loss. Each poem is shown to reimagine solitude and displacement as spaces of poetic resilience transforming memory into refuge, self-alienation into collective echo, and absence into a lyrical site of belonging. By integrating vivid quotations and situating the poems within Darwish’s broader late style and political-poetic context, the article argues that A Bed for the Stranger marks a crucial evolution in Darwish’s approach to exile where grief, nostalgia, and language converge to claim presence within absence. The findings contribute to scholarship by foregrounding how poetic labor builds diasporic identity through metaphor, time, and remembered geography.