Paper Title
Conquering Nature: Reading Mahmoud Darwish from the Perspective of Postcolonial Ecocriticism

Abstract
In this paper, I am offering a postcolonial ecocritical reading (Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 2014) of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry (1941-2008) and argue that Darwish often alludes to nature through phrases that are reminiscent of imperialist ways of relating to occupied land, especially in those poems that involve justification of Palestinian entitlement to the land. By doing this, I demonstrate that Darwish uses nature in his poetry as if human beings could occupy nature, by which I challenge previous critics’ readings who consider Darwish as an ecocentric poet.The two poems I analyze, “Identity Card” (1964) and “To Describe an Almond Blossom” (2005), are both based on the uncritical acceptance of human intervention into nature which forms an ever-present ideology in human cultures. Specifically, I focus on two motifs used by Darwish that demonstrate the unquestioned acceptance of the conquest of nature. Firstly, the use of the concept of cultivating the land as a justification for owning the land by the Palestinians .Secondly, the equation of nature and Palestine. Both motifs clearly show the tension between emotional belonging and legal right of ownership, whichHuggan and Tiffinclaim is the fundamental tension inpastoral literature (82). Keywords - Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, Nature, Mahmoud Darwish, Entitlement