People
DARWISH, Mahmoud -- Writer
Described as the Arab world's poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish passed away in Houston, Texas on 9 August 2008 at the age of 67. His life and words reflect the experience of a generation of Palestinians, and upon his death, observers noted that his words will preserve the spirit of resistance that Israel failed to destroy as it wreaked destruction wherever Darwish and his people went.
Darwish's birthplace, al-Birweh village near Acre, was destroyed by invading Israeli forces during the Nakba -- the period that witnessed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the destruction of the Palestinian homeland. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestine refugees, Darwish's family fled to Lebanon, but later risked death by returning to what became Israel. There Darwish's family lived under military rule second-class citizens in a self-declared Jewish state.
The author Ahdaf Soueif, writing in The Guardian, recalls: "He was seven when -- in the Nakba of 1948 -- he fled from Birweh, his village in the Galilee. At the age of 12, living in Deir al-Asad, in what had become Israel, with a reputation as a precocious child poet, he was asked to compose a poem for a public reading. The occasion was the celebration of Israel's "Independence Day" and the poem he read described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed, tilling his father's lands. He was summoned to the military governor who told him that if he continued to write subversive material his father's work permit would be revoked." Decades later, Israeli officials continued their attempts to muffle Darwish's voice by preventing the Education Minister from including even Darwish's non-political poems in the Isareli education curriculum.
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| Mahmoud Darwish in Beirut, Lebanon (Haitham Moussawi) |
Darwish's poetry and political activism (he was a member of Israel's communist party) would cause him to be jailed by the Jewish state several more times, and in the early 1970s he left to study in the USSR and was stripped of his Israeli citizenship. He was banned from re-entering his homeland after joining the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon in 1973, where he would author one of his celebrated works, the memoir Memory for Forgetfulness.
Of his joining "the experience of the homeless Palestinians wandering across the Arab World," writer Saifedean Ammous notes, "Darwish witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon -- one of the pivotal points of his life, his poetry and of Palestinian history -- and left with the Palestinian resistance on the boats headed to Tunisia. From then on, he lived the quintessential Palestinian nomadic life; the whole world was home for this stateless nomad. In 1995, he finally returned to Palestine with the Palestine Liberation Organization's signing of the Oslo Accords, and attempted to build his life there. He again witnessed another brutal Israeli siege of Palestinians, this time in Ramallah in 2002, which inspired his powerful poetry collection, 'Haalat 'Hisaar (A State of Siege). Since the 1980s Darwish had serious heart problems, and had a very close encounter with death in 1998 after heart surgery, an experience that inspired his monumental work, Jidaariyyah (Mural)."
Darwish enjoyed a rare level of political influence for a cultural figure. In 1988, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat symbolically declared Palestine's independence and read the Palestine Declaration of Independence penned in large part by Darwish. A member of the Palestinian National Council, Darwish resigned (along with the late Palestinian academic Edward Said) in protest of the secret Oslo Accords which he viewed negotiated away Palestinians' rights. It was under Oslo, however, that he accepted to return to Palestine and live in Ramallah. Darwish's voice was heard in Palestinian politics until his death. With the outbreak of conflict between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza, Darwish took a controversial stand. An editorial in The Daily Star (Lebanon) quotes Darwish at a recital in Haifa -- itself a questionable act since the vast majority of Palestinians are denied the right to travel there: "'We woke up from a coma to see a monocolored flag [of Hamas] do away with the four-color flag [of Palestine] ... We have triumphed. Gaza won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have [two] states, prisons who don't greet each other. ... We have triumphed knowing that it is the occupier who really won.'"
Though his role in the fractured Palestinian society and polity was a complicated one, he will be best remembered for his poetry that galvanized a national identity threatened with annihilation by the state that dispossessed their people, as well as that which celebrated the natural world and romantic love. The last word should be left to Darwish himself:
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!
Remembering Darwish:
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