More than a hundred years after Martí’s prophetic crónica on Egypt, where a bust of Martí adorns al-Ḥurriya Garden in Gezīra Island in Cairo (alongside monuments of Egyptian poets Ahmed Shawqi (Aḥmad Shawqī), ‘the Prince of Poets’, and Hafez Ibrahim (Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm), ‘the Poet of the Nile’), Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was in the home of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73). In ‘La revuelta en Egipto’, Martí parsed British and French imperial designs exactly right, and to read his crónica is to understand how it was prophetic of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. To read Martí on Egypt and Darwish in Neruda’s home is to note a largely overlooked horizontalism in both Martí’s crónica and Darwish’s poem.

In Neruda’s home, Darwish turned to Chile, which marked a central event (as far as Arab Latin American routes are concerned) in which an Arab poet had undertaken a trip to Latin America. In 2001, Darwish published a poem he had read in Jordan in 1997. Darwish’s poem ‘Fī Bayt Ritsus’ (literally ‘In Ritsos’s Home’; ‘Like a Mysterious Incident’) invokes the Chilean poet. The poem begins: ‘In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific / coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos / at his house’ (Fī dār Bāblū Nirūdā, ‘ala shāṭi’ / al-Bāsifik, tadhakkartu Yānnis Ritsus / fī baytihi) (306–7). When Darwish visited Neruda’s house in Isla Negra on the Pacific coast of Chile, he remembered his fellow poet Yannis Ritsos (1909–90) who had welcomed him in Athens. Neruda’s lavish house on the Pacific reminded him of his fellow poet’s ascetic home in Athens. The poem centres on the friendship of Darwish and Ritsos who suffered exile, displacement, imprisonment and poverty. The central event in the poem is Darwish’s exchange with Ritsos. To Darwish the speaker’s ‘What is poetry?’ Ritsos’s response that ‘It is the mysterious incident’ (huwa al-ḥadath al-ghāmiḍ) (306–7) is telling. The poem encloses two mysterious incidents: first, while Darwish was in Neruda’s home, he was overtaken by the memory of his friend, Ritsos, whose death he would go on to read about in the newspaper soon after.