 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) |
|
Poet and journalist, the interpreter and voice of the exile and hopes of the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Darwish's major theme in his poems was the fate of his homeland. He used simple vocabulary and plain, recurrent images: an open wound ('wound that fights'), blood ('we will write our names in crimson vapor'), mirrors ('shape of the soul in a mirror'), stones ('my words were stones'), and weddings. Darwish often addresses the reader directly, he pleads and defends the cause of his people. "Sister, there are tears in my throat Mahmoud Darwish was born into a landowning Sunni Muslim family in
the village of Birwe, in the district of Akka (Acre), in upper Galilee,
Palestine. At that time Palestine was a British
mandate. After the war of 1948, the Israeli Army
occupied and subsequently destroyed Birwe, along with over four hundred
other Palestinian villages, and Darwish with his family became refugees
in
their own country. They fled to Lebanon. A year later, they returned
"illegally" and settled
to another Arab village, Deir al-Asad, where Darwish grew up. His early
uprootedness
and the loss of his homeland marked deeply his whole life. After graduating from a secondary school, Darwish moved to Haifa. He worked in journalism and in 1961 he joined the Israeli Communist Party, Rakah, which recognized Palestinians as equals, and edited for some time Rakah's newspaper, Al-Ittihad. He had a passionate relationship with an Israeli-Jewish girl, Tamar Ben Ami, a dance student; she wes the "Rita" to whom Darwish later dedicated love poems and prose passage. "Between Rita and my eyes is a gun / and whoever knows Rita kneels / and prays / to some divinity in those hazel eyes." (quoted in Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine's Poet and the Other as the Beloved by Dalya Cohen-Mor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. ix) Becoming a target of harassment, he experienced imprisonment, house arrest, and ultimately exile. To this period Darwish returned in Yawmiyyat al-huzn al-'adi (Journal of an Ordinary Grief), published in 1973 in Beirut. Darwish started to write poems while still at school. His first collection came out in 1960 when he was only nineteen. With the second collection, Awraq al-zaytun (1964, Olive Leaves), he gained a reputation as one of the leading poets of the resistance. It includes the poem 'Identity Card,' which was first recited in 1957 in a Nazreth movie house ("Write it down! / I am an Arab"). Olive Leaves dealt with two general topic: love and politics. Gradually the love for a woman transformed in subsequent works into a unbreakable union between the poet himself and his homeland – Palestine. "Restore to me the color of face / And the warmth of body, / The light of heart and eye, / The salt of bread and rhythm, / The taste of earth . . . the Motherland." (from 'A Lover from Palestine,' Splinters of Bone: Poems, selected and translated by B. M. Bennani; introd. by Joseph Langland, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1974, p. 23) Darwish left Israel in 1970 to study at the Social Sciences
Institute in Moscow, USSR. "For a young communist, Moscow was the
Vatican but I discovered it was not heaven," he later said. ('Darwish's vision and longing' by Joseph A. Kechichian, Gulf News, August 14, 2008) After a
year, Darwish went to Cairo to work at
the newspaper Al-Ahram and then settled in Beirut, Lebanon, where joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
and edited the monthly Shu'un Filistiniyya,
Palestinian Affairs. Subsequently, he was banned from reentering
Israel. Darwish was very close to Yasser Arafat, first as an adviser, and then in the inner circle of PLO.
In 1981 he founded and edited the Palestinian literary and cultural
periodical, Al-Karmel. The epic poems Qasidat Bayrut (1982) and Madih al-Zill al-Ali (1983) took their subject from the Palestinian resistance to the
Israeli siege of Beirut during the summer of 1982. Beirut, where Darwish resided, was bombed
almost constantly from 13 June to 12 August to drive the PLO guerrillas
out of the city. Darwish recoded his partly melancholic, prtly sarcastic account of the invasion in Memory for Forgetfulness. "The sea is
walking in the streets. The sea is dangling from windows and the
branches of shriveled trees. The sea drops from the sky and comes into
the room. Blue, white, foam, waves. I don't like the sea. I don't want
the sea, because I don't see a shore, or a dove. I see in the sea
nothing excerpt the sea." (from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, translated with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 182) Originally the work appeared in Al-Karmel.
The text, written in the form of prose poems, is shattered into pieces
like a broken mirror. "To whom shall I offer my innocent
silence?" asks the poet on the war-raveged streets, walking slowly,
"that a jet fighter may not miss me." (Ibid., p. 41) Darwish's images are nightmarish, the poet
no longer waits for the end of the steely howling from the sea. In the
middle of the infernal dawn, the writer says that "sleep is peace.
Sleep is a dream, born out of a dream." (Ibid., p. 181) When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the PLO abandoned its headquarters there and Darwish moved to Cyprus. He was elected to the PLO executive in 1987. Darwish wrote in 1988 the official Palestinian declaration of independence but five years later he resigned from his post in opposition to the Oslo Agreement, which earned in 1994 the Nobel Peace Price to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East. Darwish, who was kept abreat of the talks in Oslo, demand a tougher stand with Israel. For decades, anthologies of Darwish's poetry were hard to find in Israeli bookshops. Salman Masalha translated in 1989 Memory for Forgetfulness into Hebrew, and the correspondence between Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, translated by Hannah Amit-Kochavi, was published in 1991. From the beginning of 2000, Mohammad Hamzah translated several anthologies of Darwish's poems. In
March 2000 Ehud Barak's
government faced a political crisis following an announcement by
Israel's Education Minister Yossi Sarid that poems by
Darwish would be included in the secondary school curriculum, not only
because he is Palestian, but because of the quality of his poetry.
Sarid's
initiative provoked a heated public discussion. A vote of no confidence
was raised in the Knesset and members of the Committee for Literature
were annoyed: they felt that the proposal was an insult to their
expertise. The Palestinian-American writer
and critic Edward Said remarked, that "what the Darwish debate revealed
was a profound instability, if not vacancy at the heart of Israeli
identity, an emptiness where there should have been a sense of
plentitude and confidence after 52 years of military and social
affirmation." (quoted in Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives by Adia Mendelson-Maoz, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2014, p. 45) During his career, Darwish received several awards, including the 1969
Lotus Prize by the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, the Lenin Peace Prize
in 1983, France's Knighthood of Arts and Belles Lettres in 1997, the
Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001, and Golden Wreath of Struga
Poetry Evenings in 2007. A ducumentary film entitled Mahmud Darwich was produced by French television in 1997. Many of Darwish's heroic poems have become popular as songs. In 1999 the well-known Lebanese musician Marcel Khalifeh was brought before the Beirut Court on charges of blasphemy. The charges related to his song entitled 'I am Yusuf, my father' (Anā Yūsuf Yā Abī), which was based on Darwish's poem and cited a verse from the Qur'an. In this poem, originally published in Ward Aqall (1985, Fewer Roses) Darwish shared the pain of Yusuf (Joseph), who was rejected by his brothers. "Oh my father, I am Yusuf / Oh father, my brothers neither love me nor want me in their midst". (translated by Amal Amireh, in 'Comparing translations: Mahmoud Darwish’s "Ana Yusuf ya Abi"' by Elisa Gambro, MSc Translation Studies – University of Aberdeen, 2019) Darwish has also used the lamentations Isaiah and Jeremiah from the Old Testament, to condemn injustice. For his song 'Rita w'al-Bunduqiya' (Rita and the Rifle) Khalifeh took the lyrics from Darwish's iconic love poem. The rifle refers to the Israeli army; the real life Rita joined the Navy forces after the 6-day war in 1967 and refused to continue with Darwish. Following the breakup, Darwish had an affair with another Jewish-Israeli woman, "she was my last love in the country." (Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine's Poet and the Other as the Beloved, p. 58) According to Darwish, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis was "a struggle between two memories." Ibrahim Muhawi, his translator, summarized that "his is a poetry of witnessing." ('Darwish Was An Eloquent Witness of Exile' by Molouk Y. Ba-Isa, Arab News, 2008-08-12) In 1988 Darwish's hard, uncompromising poem 'Abirun fi Kalam Abir' (Those Who Pass Fleeting Words) upset his Israeli readers, who considered it a call for the destruction of Jews. Darwish wrote the work after the beginning of the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in December 1987. The Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir read it in Knesset to prove that Palestinians did not want to live in peace with Israel. "The time has come for you to go away / And dwell where you wish but do not dwell among us / The time has come for you to go away / And die where you wish but do not die among us". ('The Poet And The People' by Martin Peretz, The New Republic, August 12, 2008) Darwish himself admitted that the poem was too slogan-like. Darwish led a somewhat nomadic existence. He lived in Lebanon,
Cyprus, Tunisia, Jordan, and France. In 1995, he was permitted to
attend the funeral of the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi in Haifa. After 26 years of exile,
visited his native village again. Since the mid-1990s, his home was in
Ramallah, a central West Bank Palestinian town, where Yasser Arafat had
his headquarters, and which became again a battlefield in 2002, when it
was was reoccupied by Israeli army. Following a serious heart operation in 2000, existential
themes emerged in Darwish's poetry. An example of his cosmic
philosophical approach to the question of being is Jidariyya
(2000, Mural), a long poem about his near-death experience. "I was
created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless /
void," Darwish concludes. "In exile you train yourself to contemplate
and admire what is not yours. Exile edifies the body," he said in In the Presence of Absence (2006). Mahmoud Darwish died on August 9, 2008, in
the Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas, after undergoing
open-heart surgery. Thousands of Palestinians attended his funeral, and
some 20 Israelis. His grave is on the hill of Al Rabweb; it means in
Arabic: "the hill with green grass on it." Darwish was married twice, first to the feminist writer and cultural historian Rana Kabbani, the niece of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani.
His second wife was the Egyptian translator Hayat Heeni; they were
divorced in about a year. Darwish had no children. Eight months before
his death he published Athar al-Farâsha
(2007, A River Dies of Thirst), a combination of diary entries, poems,
and meditations, in which he asked: "Where did we leave our life
behind?" In March 2014, Darwish's works were removed from The Riyadh international book fair in Saudi Arabia. The event's organiser the Ministry of Culture and Information claimed that the books "violated the kingdom's laws". Opposing the ban Darwish's translator Fady Joudah said that "Darwish's vision and treatment of religious texts, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, are of a celebratory character that dissolves all three into one, and links them to other myths. No one has done this before anywhere in the world, regarding these three religions at once." ('Saudi Book Fair Bans 'Blasphemous' Mahmoud Darwish Works After Protest' by Alison Flood, The Guardian, 14 March, 2014) For further reading: Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World by Nouri Gana (2023); Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine's Poet and the Other as the Beloved by Dalya Cohen-Mor (2019); Palestinian Culture and the Nakba: Bearing Witness by Hania A.M. Nashef (2019); Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity by Muna Abu Eid (2016); In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists After Darwish by Najat Rahman (2015); Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation by Khaled Mattawa (2014); Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives by Adia Mendelson-Maoz (2014); 'Mahmoud Darwish's Poetics of Desire: Visions and Revisions' by Mounir Ben Zid, in Asian Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, Vol. 3(3) (August 2014); 'Darwish, Mahmud' by Ferial J. Ghazoul, in The Facts on File Companion to World Poetry, 1900 to the Present, ed. by R. Victoria Arana (2007); Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet: Critical Essays by Hala Kh Nassar and Najat Rahman (2006); Passage to a New Wor(L)D: Exile & Restoration in Mahmoud Darwish's Writings 1960-1995 by Anette Mansson (2003); Then Palestine by Larry Towell et al. (1999); 'On Mahmoud Darwish' by Edward W. Said, in Grand Steet, No. 48, Oblivion (Winter, 1994); Modern Arabic Poetry, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1987); Mahamoud Darwish: The Poet of the Occupied Land by Raja Al-naqash (1969) Selected bibliography:
|
