As a Palestinian exile due to a technicality, Mahmoud Darwish lends his poems a sort of quiet desperation. He struggles through themes of identity, either lost or asserted, of indulgences of the unconscious, and of abandonment. Location plays a central role in his poems. He writes about people lost and people just finding themselves. In all of his various narrative voices, Darwish always adds a strong element of the personal, as pertains to this struggle for identity.
One profoundly significant poem is "No More and No Less" in which Darwish tries his hand at a female perspective. The narrator sets her intention to explain how she self-identifies. To her, all of these ideas that people place upon her are inconsistent with the simple facts. Yes, she is subject to most of the stereotypes of a woman, but she does them for no particular reason. She is a woman, which is sometimes a benefit and sometimes a hindrance, depending on the circumstance. Her one plea is to not be reduced to her physical image, like an obsession with a photograph. Interestingly enough Darwish also writes a poem titled "In Her Absence I Created Her Image" in which he confesses to obsessing over an ex and fabricating an entire reality with her.
With such a profoundly complicated relationship to identity, Darwish's poems have a potential for reaching people on a rather intimate level. Additionally, he takes an active political stance as relates to Palestine. At one point he was placed under house arrest after rebels appropriated his poem "Identity Card" for their movement. Unsurprisingly, Darwish refrains from becoming heavily involved in politics, writing instead about his personal experience of alienation and conflicting loyalties.
