This article analyzes how national identity is constructed through discursive mechanisms in Arab literature, using Mahmoud Darwish’s 1964 poem “Bitaqat Huwiyya” as a case study. The central argument is that national identity in the poem appears not merely as a “cultural sentiment,” but as a political claim formed under conditions of administrative control (documents, registration, and restrictions).

The study examines the performative commands of the text, the rhetorical use of enumeration and counting, the symbolic representations of land and memory, and the interconnections and tensions between the categories of “Arabness” and “Palestinianness.” At the same time, the article evaluates competing interpretations of the poem: an essentialist reading that treats the nation as an “unchanging essence,” and an aesthetic–universalist reading that emphasizes human dignity and the demand for justice grounded in social experience.

Mahmoud Darwish; Palestinian literature; national identity; administrative control; discourse analysis; postcolonial criticism; resistance literature.

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