Mahmoud Darwich (in English)
JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. He was 67.
Mr. Darwish, a heavy smoker, was known to suffer from health problems. Still, his death was received among Palestinians with shock and despair.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of mourning on Sunday, saying that Mr. Darwish was “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project,” adding, “Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts.”
Yasir Abed Rabbo, secretary of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said, “No one could have imagined that Mahmoud’s voice could disappear.”
The Palestinian Authority will give Mr. Darwish a state funeral in the West Bank on Tuesday, the first since Yasir Arafat died in 2004.
Twice divorced with no children, Mr. Darwish had the straight hair, wire-rim glasses and blue blazer of a European intellectual and was, paradoxically for someone seen as the voice of his people, a loner with a narrow circle of friends. He was uncomfortable in public, where he was widely recognized, but he cared deeply about young Arab writers and published their work in the Ramallah-based journal that he edited, Al Karmel.
And while he wrote in classical Arabic rather than in the language of the street, his poetry was anything but florid or baroque, employing a directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern literary Arabic.
“He used high language to talk about daily life in a truly exceptional way,” said Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet and a close friend. “This is someone who remained at the top of Arabic poetry for 40 years. It was not simply about politics.”
Nonetheless, politics played a major role in Mr. Darwish’s life and work. Born to a middle-class Muslim farming family in a village near Haifa in what is today Israel, Mr. Darwish identified strongly with the secular Palestinian national movement long led by Mr. Arafat.
Mr. Zaqtan and Mr. Abed Rabbo said he was the author of Mr. Arafat’s famous words at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
He also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988 and served on the executive committee of the P.L.O. But he quit in the early 1990s over differences with the leadership and moved firmly out of the political sphere, lamenting the rise of the Islamist group Hamas and what he viewed as the bankruptcy of Palestinian public life.
Mr. Darwish first gained a following in the 1960s for his frank political poems, and to some extent they remain the source of his fame. Among his best known was “Identity Card” from 1964, in which he attacked Israel’s desire to overlook the presence of Arabs on its land:
“Write down!/I am an Arab/ and my identity card number is 50,000/I have eight children/And the ninth will come after a summer.”
It ends: “Therefore!/Write down on the top of the first page:/I do not hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper’s flesh will be my food/Beware .../Beware ... /Of my hunger/And my anger.”
There were other harsh political works in the following two decades, but those who knew Mr. Darwish said he had often expressed little pride in them, preferring his more personal and universal poems. He told The New York Times in a 2001 interview in Paris: “Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. 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.”
During the war that led to Israel’s independence, Mr. Darwish and his family, from the Palestinian village of Al Barweh, left for Lebanon. The village was razed but the family sneaked back across the border into Israel, where Mr. Darwish spent his youth.
Politically active fairly early, he was arrested several times and was a member of the Israeli Communist Party. He left in 1971 and lived in the Soviet Union, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and France.
After Mr. Arafat set up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza in the mid-1990s, Mr. Darwish came to live in Ramallah, where he rented a house. He said he never really felt at home there — he made clear that exile for him was increasingly an emotional rather than a purely political dilemma — and wrote more comfortably when in Europe.
He maintained a wide circle of literary acquaintances, including Israelis, and he said he fully supported a two-state solution.
His work earned him a number of international literary awards and was translated into more than 20 languages, more than any other contemporary Arab poet, according to Mahmoud al-Atshan, a professor of Arabic literature at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.
There was at first some question of where he would be buried, as some close to him sought to persuade Israel to let him be buried in the area of his home village. But the mayor of Ramallah said Mr. Darwish would be buried in Ramallah, the effective Palestinian capital of the West Bank.
(Reuven Kopichinsky / AP)
Darwish: his poems were anthems for millions of Arabs, but he did not like to called the poet of national resistance
The poet Mahmoud Darwish, hailed as the eloquent voice of the Palestinian people, was destined to lead the life of a peripatetic exile.
He was born in 1942 in Birweh, near Acre, to a large, land-owning Sunni Muslim family. Taught to read by his grandfather, he started writing poetry at 7. When Israelis occupied the village in 1948, the family lost everything, joining the exodus of Palestinian refugees to Lebanon. On their return to Birweh the following year they found an Israeli settler colony built on the ruins of their home.
Working as a journalist in Haifa, in 1961 Darwish joined the Israeli Communist party, Rakah, where Arabs and Jews mixed peaceably, editing its newspaper. Between 1961 and 1969 he was repeatedly placed under house arrest, purportedly for leaving Haifa without the permit required of Palestinians under the emergency military rule maintained in Israel until 1966.
Denied a higher education in Israel, he left for Moscow in 1970 to study political economy. The following year he joined Al-Ahram, the daily newspaper in Cairo. In Egypt, despite befriending Yasser Arafat, he refused the chairman’s offer of the position of culture minister. To Arafat’s complaint that the Palestinians were an ungrateful lot, Darwish retorted: “Then find yourself another people.” His decision to join the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1973 denied him the option of returning to Haifa. He was banned from re-entering Israel. From Egypt he travelled to Lebanon, serving as an editor of the journal Palestinian Affairs in Beirut and was, for a while, director of the Palestinian Research Centre.
In 1988 he wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence but resigned from the PLO five years later in protest over the Oslo Accords, claiming that they would bring no benefit to the Palestinians. His itinerant life — moving from Syria, Cyprus, Cairo, Tunis and Paris — heightened a sense of belonging only to language, a “country of words”, and he likened the Palestinian experience abroad to an epic voyage of the damned. After 26 years abroad he settled in Ramallah.
The creation of the state of Israel gave Darwish plenty of material for his early poetry: dispossession, exile and resistance. In his first volume, Bird without Wings, published when he was 19, one poem, Identity Card, spoke directly to the Palestinian masses who found their freedom of movement curtailed by the Israelis, their identity reduced to a number. Darwish’s family had been denied passports — and thus Israeli nationality — because of their absence during the first Israeli census of Arabs. Further collections, Leaves of Olives (1964) and Lover from Palestine (1966), made his reputation as the national poet of resistance, a reputation he simultaneously welcomed and lamented.
“I don’t decide to represent anything except myself,” he said. Despite his desire to be judged merely as a poet, with his poems read purely for their literary attributes, Darwish could not escape the role assigned to him as the voice of the collective Palestinian conscience. He complained that his readers often attached too much significance to the imagery in his poems.
His later collections, published in the 1990s, showed a shift away from politics and the simple, direct style of his earlier inspirational and heroic epics towards an introspective lyricism that drew on various mythologies. Some criticised him for having betrayed his readers, leaving behind the homeland not only in deed but also in word. Yet he remained the Arab world’s bestselling poet; 25,000 gathered in Beirut to hear him speak; some poems, set to music, became anthems for generations of Arabs. Translated into more than 20 languages, he was little published in English, although the 2001 award of the Prize for Cultural Freedom established by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe introduced his work to a US audience. After the events of September 11, 2001, Darwish wrote that “nothing justifies terrorism”. He publicly opposed attacks on civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers, while seeking to clarify that such violent acts reflected the despair of occupation, rather than a morbid culture of death among the Palestinian youth. He described the infighting between Hamas and Fatah in 2007 as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets”.
His was a constant voice calling for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Fluent in Hebrew, Darwish numbered many Jews in his social and professional circle, his friendships informing the sympathetic view of the “Israeli Other” articulated in many poems. As editor of the quarterly literary journal al-Karmel, unusually he published Israeli writers alongside Arab authors, believing poetry to have the potential to create a dialogue of reconciliation. In 2000 it seemed that the Israeli Government shared this view when the education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested the inclusion of some of Darwish’s poems in the high-school curriculum. The suggestion was met with a chorus of dissent from right-wing politicians and was overruled by the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. Darwish, it would appear, was too potent a symbol of the Palestinian people, however much he might wish sometimes to be regarded primarily as a good poet.
Mahmoud Darwish was married twice and had no children.
Mahmoud Darwish, poet, was born on March 13, 1942. He died after heart surgery on August 9, 2008, aged 66
Poet, author and politician who helped to forge a Palestinian consciousness after the six-day war in 1967
11/08/2008
A file photo dated February 2008 shows Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Photograph: Jamal Nasrallah/EPA
They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.
With poems from the 1960s such as this, Mahmoud Darwish, who has died in a Texas hospital aged 67 of complications following open-heart surgery, did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness, and especially after the six-day war of June 1967. His poems have been taught in schools throughout the Arab world and set to music; some of his lines have become part of the fabric of modern Arabic culture.
Darwish was born in the village of Birwa, east of Acre. His parents were from middle-ranking peasant families. Both were preoccupied with work on their land and Mahmoud was effectively brought up by his grandfather. When he was six, Israeli armed forces assaulted the village and Mahmoud fled with his family to Lebanon, living first in Jezzin and then in Damour.
When, the following year, the family returned to their occupied homeland, their village had been obliterated: two settlements had been erected on the land, and they settled in Deir al-Asad in Galilee. There were no books in Darwish's own home and his first exposure to poetry was through listening to an itinerant singer on the run from the Israeli army. He was encouraged to write poetry by an elder brother.
Israeli Arabs lived under military rule from 1948 to 1986. They were curbed in their movements and in any political activity. As a child, Darwish grew up aware that as far as those in control were concerned he, his family and his fellow Palestinians were second-class citizens. Yet they were still expected to join in Israeli state celebrations. While at school, he wrote a poem for an anniversary of the foundation of the state. The poem was an outcry from an Arab boy to a Jewish boy. "I don't remember the poem," he recalled many years later, "but I remember the idea of it; you can play in the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I can't. You have a house, and I have none. You have celebrations, but I have none. Why can't we play together?" He recalls being summoned to see the military governor, who threatened him: "If you go on writing such poetry, I'll stop your father working in the quarry."
But relations with individual Jewish Israelis varied. Some he liked, including at least one of his teachers, some he loathed. Relationships with Jewish girls were easier than with girls from the more conservative Arab families.
At his school, contemporaries remember him being very good in Hebrew. Israeli Palestinian culture was cut off from mainstream Arab developments. Arab poets who did impress him were the Iraqis Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Exciting innovations such as the Beirut group that clustered round the magazine al-Shi'r and the prosodic and thematic innovations of the Syrian poets Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar) and Nizar Kabbani did not reach the beleaguered Palestinians directly. Instead, much of Darwish's early reading of the poetry of the world outside Palestine was through the medium of Hebrew. Through Hebrew translations he got to know the work of Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. He also became influenced by Hebrew literature from the Torah to the modern poet Yehuda Amichai.
His first poetry symbolised the Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule. His first volumes, Leaves of the Olive Tree (1964), A Lover from Palestine (1966) and End of the Night (1967), were published in Israel. During this time Darwish was a member of the Israeli Communist party, Rakah, and edited the Arabic edition of the party's newspaper, Al-Ittihad. Israeli Palestinians were restricted in any expression of nationalist feeling. Darwish went to prison several times and was frequently under house arrest.
His earliest poetry followed classical forms, but, from the mid-1960s, it became populist and direct. He used imagery that he could relate intimately to Palestinian villagers. He wrote of olive groves and orchards, the rocks and plants, basil and thyme. These early poems have a staccato effect, like verbal hand-grenades. In spite of an apparent simplicity, his short poems have several levels of meaning. There is a sense of anger, outrage and injustice, notably in the celebrated Identity Card, in the voice of an Arab man giving his identity number:
Write down at the top of the first page:
I do not hate people.
I steal from no one.
However
If I am hungry
I will eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware beware of my hunger
And of my anger.
But his poetry also contained irony and a universal humanity. For Darwish the issue of Palestine became a prism for an internationalist feeling. The land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia, with influences from Canaanites, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and British. Throughout all this has survived a core identity of Palestine. He was able to see the Israeli soldier as a victim of circumstances like himself. He expresses the bureaucratic absurdities of an oppressive military occupation.
Darwish left Israel in 1971, to the disappointment of many Palestinians, and studied at Moscow University. After a brief period in Cairo he went to Beirut and held a number of jobs with the Palestine Research Centre. He remained in Beirut during the first part of the civil war and left with Yasser Arafat and the PLO in 1982. He moved on to Tunis and Paris, and became editor-in-chief of the influential literary review Al-Karmel. Although he became a member of the PLO executive committee in 1987 and helped to draft the Palestinian Declaration of Statehood, he tried to keep away from factionalism. "I am a poet with a particular perspective on reality," he said.
His literary work was changing. He wrote short stories and developed a style of writing poems that was a mixture of observation, humanity and irony. He argued that poetry was easier to write than prose. But the poetry continued inspired by incidents or relationships. There is often an optimism against all the odds in his works of the 1980s:
Streets encircle us
As we walk among the bombs.
Are you used to death?
I'm used to life and to endless desire.
Do you know the dead?
I know the ones in love.
During his Paris years Darwish wrote Memory for Forgetfulness, a memoir of Beirut under the saturation Israeli bombing of 1982 which has been translated into English. A poem in prose, it is a medley of wit and rage, with reflections on violence and exile.
His later work became more mystical and less particularly concerned with Palestine. Often it was preoccupied with human mortality. He was careless of his own health and suffered heart attacks in 1984 and in early 1998.
Darwish resigned from the PLO executive committee over the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the PLO, which he saw as a "risky accord". He was able to return to Israel to see his aged mother in 1995. The Israeli authorities also gave him permission for an unlimited stay in the self-ruling parts of the Palestinian West Bank, and he spent his last years in Ramallah and Amman, the capital of Jordan.
In 2000 the Israeli ministry of education proposed to introduce his works into the school curriculum, but met strong opposition from rightwing protesters. The then prime minister, Ehud Barak, said the country was not ready.
Darwish's work has been translated into Hebrew and, in July 2007, Darwish returned to Israel on a visit and gave a reading of his poetry to 2,000 people in Haifa. He deplored the Hamas victory in Gaza the previous month. "We have triumphed,' he observed with grim irony. "Gaza has won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons who don't greet each other. We are dressed in executioners' clothes."
Over the years Darwish received many honours. He was given the Soviet Union's Lotus prize in 1969, and the Lenin peace prize in 1983. He was president of the Union of Palestinian Writers. Married and divorced twice, he had no children; his first wife was the Syrian writer Rana Kabbani, who elegantly translated some of his poetry into English.
Margaret Obank writes: Mahmoud was a completely secular person, rather philosophical, an avid reader, elegant in his dress, and supremely modest in his opinion of himself. He liked to be alone, but would always be ready to speak on the telephone.
While I had been reading his poems since the early 1970s, I got to know him through my husband, the Iraqi author Samuel Shimon. Mahmoud supported Banipal, the literary magazine we founded in 1998, and took pride both in issues of the journal and the many dialogues we helpled to promote.
It presents work by Arab authors and poets in English for the first time. When we rang Mahmoud three months ago about doing a special issue on him, his reaction was: "Do you think I deserve that? If you think I do, then I like the idea." Now it will be a tribute to him.
We were with Mahmoud when he was awarded the Prince Claus Fund of principal prize in Amsterdam in 2004, the theme being asylum and migration. His acceptance speech was both powerful and thoughtful: "A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life."
Mahmoud Darwish, poet, born March 15 1941; died August 9 2008
21/08/2008
Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestine, died on August 9th, aged 67
POETRY exercises a special power for Arabs. To a people of desert origins, it takes the partial place of icons and cathedrals, stage drama and political oratory. Yet the Arab canon extends far wider, linking the tribal bards of pre-Islamic Arabia to Sufi mystics, bawdy medieval jesters and angst-ridden modernists. Poetry also carries a special meaning for exiles, who must sustain themselves with what they can carry, their lightest but most precious burdens being memory and language.
Exile was certainly personal to Mahmoud Darwish. His first forced flight came in 1948, when he was seven. Fearing the advance of Israeli forces, his family abandoned their ancestral wheatfields in Western Galilee and walked, destitute, to the apple orchards of Lebanon. Sneaking back across the border later, they found their village razed to make way for Jewish settlement. His father became a labourer; his family, having missed a census, were classed as “present-absent aliens”.
But exile was also an experience that Mr Darwish shared with his entire people, the Palestinians. Sixty years after the creation of Israel, more than half of them remain in physical exile from their homeland, while the rest, partitioned into enclaves under various forms of Israeli control, remain exiled from each other and from the wider Arab world. Mr Darwish was their voice and their consciousness.
It was a role that often bothered him. Rightly, he felt it belittled his devotion to the poetic craft and made him over-solemn. He sometimes berated his huge audiences when they clamoured for nationalist odes rather than the subtler, metaphysical verse of his later years. He fretted that some would recall only lines such as “Go! You will not be buried among us,” and forget those praising a Jewish lover or commiserating with an enemy soldier.
Yet it was inescapable that he should be lauded as Palestine’s poet laureate, and not merely because his words were made into popular songs and splashed as headlines to sell newspapers. His own life was entwined with the tragic Palestinian national narrative. When he was barely in his teens, the village schoolmaster tasked him with writing a speech to mark Israel’s independence day. He wrote it as a letter to a Jewish boy, explaining that he could not be happy on this day until he was given the same things that the Jewish boy enjoyed. This earned him a summons before the Israeli military governor, who warned him that such behaviour could get his father’s pass revoked, making him unable to work.
A few years later Mr Darwish took the bus to a poetry festival in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. He read one long poem, and was asked to recite more. All he had was a crumpled paper on which he had jotted some rough verse inspired by a visit to the Israeli police, to renew his travel pass. The poem included these lines:
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks…
The result was electric. The crowd demanded three encores, and Mr Darwish’s fame was born. By the mid-1980s, his 20 volumes of verse had sold well over a million copies.
For all that time he had no country of his own. Though a citizen of Israel, he was too often jailed there for his activism, and eventually had his citizenship revoked. He tried living in Moscow, then Cairo, then Beirut, where Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation had been allowed to build a proto-state in exile. When Israel invaded in 1982, Mr Darwish sailed for Tunis and later lived in Paris. Not until 1996, after the Oslo peace agreement made it possible, did he return to Palestine.
But Palestine was a shambles. Arafat’s dictatorial style repulsed him; the drift towards the second intifada of 2000, and the vicious schisms that followed, reduced him to despair. Much of his later verse avoided overtly political themes. After a heart attack in 1998, he wrote:
One day I shall become a thought,
Which no sword will carry
To the wasteland, nor no book;
as if it were rain falling on a mountain
split by a burgeoning blade of grass, where neither has power won
nor fugitive justice.
One day I shall become a bird,
And wrest my being from my non-being.
The longer my wings will burn,
The closer I am to the truth,
Risen from the ashes.
Yet he could never fully escape the duty to help his people sustain their sense of destiny. In his last poem, Mr Darwish described Palestinians and Israelis as two men trapped in a hole:
I said: For what would you bargain
In this grave?
He said: Over my share and your share of this common grave
I said: Of what use is that?
Time has passed us by,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a killer and the killed, asleep in one hole
And it remains for another poet to write the end of the script.
The poet Mahmoud Darwish was the voice of the Palestinian odyssey, whose stark writing reflected the desperation and alienation of the Palestinian people. He published more than 20 collections of poetry, which have been translated into many languages (although few of them into English), and was the Arab world's best-selling poet. His poems are engraved in the hearts of millions of Palestinians and his words have been shouted by anti-occupation demonstrators in the streets of Ramallah, Damascus and Cairo. Many have been set to music, including "I yearn for my mother's bread."
Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in al Birweh, an Arab village in the Acre region which became part of the new state of Israel in 1948. His family fled to Lebanon, although they returned the following year. Darwish published his first poetry collection, Asafir bila ajniha ("Wingless Birds", 1960) while still a teenager and soon made a reputation as a "poet of the resistance". One of his best known poems was "Identity Card", with its defiant opening lines "Record! I am an Arab/And my identity card is number fifty thousand".
Darwish was arrested three times by Israel for reciting "inciting poems" and left for Cairo in the Seventies. He joined the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (the PLO) and became close to its leader Yasser Arafat. In 1987 he was elected to the PLO's executive committee and it was Darwish who wrote the declaration of independence of 1988 read out by Arafat when he proclaimed the state of Palestine.
He returned to live in Ramallah after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between Israel and the PLO, but he had expressed his opposition to Oslo and left the PLO's executive committee in protest. Many Palestinians criticised him for having left his homeland, and he defended himself by saying that he had served the Palestinian cause abroad better than when he was inside.
"There was a halo around him in my mind until I met in him in 1996," said the literary editor Iyad Rajoub. "He was no longer the poet of resistance, he was soft, he was living a luxurious life. I was shocked. I could not imagine that he was the one who had written 'Record! I am an Arab'."
Mahmoud Atshan, Professor of Modern Literature in Birzeit University, saw this change in Darwish as a positive transformation. "Darwish was moving away from the narrow Palestinian circle to universality," he said. "He had crossed the borders of Palestine and entered the world."
Darwish had twice undergone surgery for heart problems and in his later poems expressed his sadness at the approach of death, but also at the divisions among his fellow Palestinians. In a recent article, he had criticised secular Arabs and Palestinians for backing Hamas.
Last July, he gave a poetry reading in Ramallah: "He was giving roses to people who came to listen to his poetry," said Mahmoud Atshan. "When he shook hands with me, and gave me a rose, I felt he was saying farewell." His last collection was published earlier this year.
Said Ghazali
Mahmoud Darwish, poet and writer: born al Birweh, Palestine 13 March 1941; married first Rana Kabbani (marriage dissolved), second Hayat Heeni (marriage dissolved); died Houston, Texas 9 August 2008.
Darwish won many international prizes for his work
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Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died after surgery at the age of 67, hospital and Palestinian officials say.
He suffered complications after undergoing open-heart surgery in Houston, Texas, said a spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Darwish was the most recognised Palestinian poet in the world, using his words to try to draw attention to the Palestinian cause.
He also delivered harsh criticism of the infighting by Palestinian factions.
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 Even though he became iconic he never lost his sense of humanity - we have
lost part of our essence 
Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi
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During a reading in 2007, Mr Darwish denounced the violence in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, describing it as "a public attempt at suicide in the streets".
He said that the two warring factions had made the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state far more unlikely.
Poet of conscience
Mr Darwish is famous throughout the Middle East and is regarded as the Palestinian national poet.
He is said to have given voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their 1988 declaration of independence and helped to forge a Palestinian national identity.
"He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience," said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, quoted by AP news agency.
"He embodied the best in Palestinians... even though he became iconic he never lost his sense of humanity. We have lost part of our essence, the essence of the Palestinian being."
His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has won many international prizes for his work.
Poet's Palestine as a Metaphor
December 22, 2001
By ADAM SHATZ
PARIS - In the Arab imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land any more than Israel is a plot of land in the Jewish imagination. As the
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has observed, Palestine is also a metaphor - for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile, for the declining power of the Arab world in its
dealings with the West.
Mr. Darwish, 59, who is widely considered the Palestinian national poet has developed this metaphor to richly lyrical effect. Born in a village destroyed by Israeli soldier s in the 1948 Arab- Israeli war, he has evoked the loss of his homeland in more than two dozen books of poetry and prose, which have sold millions of copies and made him the most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world. "Many people in the Ara b world feel their language is in crisis", the Syrian poetry critic Subhi Hadidi said. "And it is no exaggeration to say that Mahmoud is considered a savior of the Arab language."
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A Darwish reading in Cairo or Damascus draws thousands of people, from college professors to taxi drivers. Despite his scathing
criticisms of Arab governments - "prison cells," he calls them - he has met privately with virtually every leader in the Arab world. He cannot go to a cafe in an Arab city without being
noticed, which is why he studiously avoids public places. |