The Power of the Title "Why Have you Left the Horse Alone" by Mahmud Darwish

This article deals with various functions of the title of Darwīsh’s collection Why Have You Left the Horse Alone in three different contexts: as an independent and separate text; in relation to the poem in which it originally appeared; and in relation to all the poems in the collection. Our case discussion shows that the interpretation of the title means in fact a discussion of the entire text, or rather of all these texts. It also shows that the question/title has equally informative, rhetorical, provocative, and communicative facets, and as such our discussion grants it great summarizing and representational power. When all this power is given to the title as pre-text, it in essence also makes the title a post-text.