Arabia: Mahmoud Darwish

“Isn’t exile one of the sources of literary creation throughout history? The man who is in harmony with his society, his culture, with himself, cannot be a creator.  And that would be true, even if our country were Eden itself.”

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish, Poet Laureat of Palestinians, is one of the greatest Arab poets of modern times.  Often times called a poet of resistance, Darwish gave voice to an exiled people and was considered by many to be a savior to the Arabic language.  Darwish’s legacy is timeless literary and political significance.

Encapsulating the Palestinian tragedy, Mahmoud Darwish lived in constant exile and continuous displacement.  Darwish, the son of a middle-class Muslim family, was born on March 13, 1942, in the village of Birwe, near Haifa in what is now Israel.  During the Arab Israeli war, the Israeli army occupied and destroyed Birwe and over 400 other villages.  In 1948,  Darwish and his family fled to Lebanon, returning illegally one year later to the nearby village of Dayr- al-Asad.  Darwish and his family lived as internal refugees under Israeli military rule and were classified as “present-absent aliens.”  Considering this time, Darwish said “We were defined, and rejected, as refugees.”  Darwish confessed to the New York Times a fear that a feeling of bitterness from this time in his life, might never leave him.

As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Darwish was prohibited from traveling outside his village without military permission.  At 19 Darwish became a member of the Israeli Communist Party.  He was jailed repeatedly for reciting his poetry and traveling from village to village without a permit.  He was subsequently and placed under house arrest from 1968 to 1971.  Youthfully defiant at age 22, Darwish electrified the Arab world with the poem “Identity Card”.   Darwish describes an encounter with an Israeli police officer who stopped him for his papers.  Darwish left the country in 1970, and lived in the Soviet Union, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and France.  He was eventually granted permission to visit his mother in 1996.  Politically active for much of his life, Darwish headed the research center of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1970.  Responsible for writing the 1988 Algiers declaration (which declared Palestinian Independence), Darwish was in favor of that which the Palestinian Liberation Organization announced: support of a two state solution.  In 1988 during the early days of the intifada, Darwish wrote the poem, “Those Who Pass between Fleeting Words”.  Addressing Israeli soldiers, he writes “It is time for you to be gone/ Live wherever you like, but do not live among us/ It is time for you to be gone/ Die wherever you like, but do not die among us”.  Darwish portrayed the feelings of any occupied nation: “I said what any human being living under occupation would say, ‘Get out of my land.’”  He did not consider it to be a good poem and never included it any of his anthologies.  This poem provoked discontent from a divided audience: “The poem sent shock waves among Israelis, particulary on the left, many of whom viewed Mahmoud Darwish as a poet expressing the afflictions of his people, but recognizing Israel’s existence and aspiring, despite everything, to a brotherhood of nations in this bleeding land”(Haim Gouri, Haaretz.com).  Darwish was not limited to poems of militant protest.  Much of his poetry gives tender renditions and human portraits of the ‘Israeli-Other’ – though his jailors were Jewish, so were his friends.  As Darwish said, “I have many views of the Israeli Other.” Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew, which he called a useful “window“ to understand the worlds of the Bible and foreign poetry.  He had a deeper connection with the “Israeli other“ than would be thought, being able to speak with those who jailed him as well as those who were Israeli friends and lovers.

In 1993, Darwish resigned from the Palestinian Liberation Organization Executive Committee in protest of the Oslo Peace Accords.  Though, this was not because he rejected peace with Israel, but rather that he found the Oslo Peace Accords without a clear committment to withdraw from the occupied territories.  Darwish then moved away from the political sphere, discontented with Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership and the rise of the Islamist group Hamas.

Darwish’s poetry was written in the classical Arabic and “employed a directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern literary Arabic” (Ethan Bronner, New York Times).  Darwish, connected to his language said, “I’ve built my homeland, I’ve even founded my state – in my language”.  While Darwish wrote burning verse on Palestinian exile and defiant militant poems, he was not a wholly politically influenced poet.  Darwish also wrote poems which sympathetically and tenderly examine the human condition.  Exile was much more than an observer could understand as Darwish said, “Exile is more than a geographical concept,” that “you can be in exile in your homeland, in your house, in a room”.  He made it known, that what he was writing of, exile, “It’s not simply a Palestinian question”.  It in many ways, exile was a necessary element of his writing process, asking “Isn’t exile one of the sources of literary creation throughout history? The man who is in harmony with his society, his culture, with himself, cannot be a creator.  And that would be true, even if our country were Eden itself”.

The poem Ummi, meaning Mother, has famously been set to music by Marcel Khalife.  The poem was written while Darwish was in an Israeli jail more than 40 years ago: “I long for my mother’s bread,/ And my mother’s coffee,/ And her touch./ Childhood memories grow up in me./ Day after day./ I must be worthy of my life/ At the hour of my death,/ Worthy of the tears of my mother“. It is most commonly used as a metaphor for his exiled home of Palestine though Darwish has spoken against such interpretations: “When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine.  But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother.  She’s not a symbol.“

Another eminent Palestinian poet is Mourid Barghouti.  He was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassanah, a village near Ramallah on the West Bank of the river Jordan in Palestine.  He similarly lived in exile for much of his life and was also only able to return to his home after the Olso Accords.  He believed similiarly to Darwish that “Writing is a displacement—a displacement from the normal social contract—a displacement from the common roads of love and enmity. The poet strives to escape from the dominant, used language—to a language that speaks for the first time. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free—he becomes a stranger at the same time. The poet is a stranger—in the same degree as he is free.”  Barghouti and Darwish both wrote on the effects of exile and displacement.

Adonis is a poet of comparable exile.  His original name is Ali Ahmed Said Esber and he was born in 1930.  He is recognized as one of the greatest living arab poets.  He was born in Syria and has since obtained both Lebanese and French citizenship.  After the Lebanese Civil War in 1982 he was forced to flee to Paris.  Adonis has said on exile that he fears that the arabic people are “a people that is becoming extinct”.  Barghouti, Adonis and Darwish are all poets of exile.

In August 2008, Mahmoud Darwish, a heavy smoker who suffered from heart problems, passed away during surgery.  Darwish’s death came as a shock to all who had heard or read him, as Yasir Abed Rabbo, secretary of the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, told the New York Times, “No one could have imagined that Mahmoud’s voice could disappear.”  Many also felt that in the western world, Darwish was not being presented as the great man that he was, Sinan Antoon a professor at New York University said, “most of the obituaries, especially in English, are reducing him just to the poet of the Palestinian people, and he was that, but he was much more, as well”.  Fady Joudah, as intereviewed on Democracy Now, described him and said, “He was a very shy man…who people flocked to, and also was a very gentle and generous man who knew a lot of wanted so much from him – a cup of coffee, a conversation, a signature”.  In his life Darwish wrote over thirty volumes of poetry and prose which has been translated into thirty five languages.  Of the many awards he received during his life he notably won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983 and the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001.  Darwish’s poetry has also been put to music by the world-renowned Lebanese composer, singer and Oud player Marcel Khalife.