'Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am': Stuttering and writer's block in Mahmoud Darwish's works.

This article argues that writer's block in Mahmoud Darwish's works is a reflection of the poet's experience of a creative block, a clinical condition that emerged after his surgery in 1998, and is also a metaphor for the ongoing block or impasse in the Palestinian political situation. The central thesis of this article is that writer's block in Darwish is akin to experiences like Heideggerian anxiety, the Sartrean attraction of the abyss, the Lacanian eruption of the Real, and Freud's neuroticism. In all these cases, the poet, through a momentary awareness of his impending death, experiences an ecstatic intensification of Being and an expansion of life possibilities, in the Nietzschean sense. This article further demonstrates that Darwish turns into a successful neurotic writer who utilises stuttering and his potential mental illness as a creative means to overcome the abject reality and invent a new reality, wherein unsatisfied wishes could be fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]