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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.newframe.com/mahmoud-darwish-from-galilee-to-the-world/">https://www.newframe.com/mahmoud-darwish-from-galilee-to-the-world/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Mahmoud Darwish: From Galilee to the world</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr"><div class="gmail-profile-name"><div class="gmail-credits">By: <a class="gmail-text" href="https://www.newframe.com/writer/richard-pithouse/">Richard Pithouse</a><span class="gmail-text"> -</span><span class="gmail-the-date">13 Mar 2021</span>
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<p>Mahmoud Darwish is one of the great poets of the 20th century. Like
Pablo Neruda, he could read in a stadium: once drawing 25 000 in Beirut,
a city that is, he wrote, “the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and
lemons”.</p>
<p>Born in the village of Al-Birweh in Galilee in 1941, his family fled
to Lebanon in 1948 when their village was razed by the Israeli military
during the Nakba. In his mid-60s Darwish would recall that “in one
disastrous hour, history like a bold thief came through a door, and the
present left by a window”. </p>
<p>A year after the destruction of Al-Birweh the family returned to
Israel, too late to be considered Arab Israelis. His once prosperous
father had to become a farm labourer. Darwish recited his first poem – a
political poem – at the age of eight, and at 17 had achieved a public
voice as a poet, a very political poet writing in classical Arabic style
and primarily concerned with the Nakba. </p>
<p>In his 20s, inspired by a new generation of poets writing in Arabic,
as well as poets like Arthur Rimbaud – the teenage poet of the Paris
Commune for whom the poet must commit to “a long, systematic derangement
of all the senses” – Darwish began to break from classical forms. For
almost 40 years he would offer an extraordinarily abundant and
brilliantly kaleidoscopic poetry of pomegranates, doves, gazelles,
olives, salt, blood, love, lust, Jerusalem, Damascus, Andalusia, trees,
butterflies, rivers, coffee, memories, dreams, home, rifles, tanks and
mourning.</p>
<h2><strong>Young life and work</strong></h2>
<p>At 22 he fell into a heady love affair with Tamar Ben Ami, a Jewish communist:<em> </em></p>
<p><em>Rita’s name was a feast in my mouth</em><em><br></em><em>Rita’s body was a wedding in my blood</em> </p>
<p>But, of course, this love was intolerable to a racist state: </p>
<p><em>Between Rita and my eyes <br>There is a rifle</em><br><em>…</em><br><em>And I remember Rita </em><br><em>The way a sparrow remembers its stream</em></p>
<p>In 1965, at the age of 24, he recited a poem titled <em>ID Card </em>in
a cinema in Nazareth. It became a sensation across the Arab world.
Darwish would later be placed under house arrest when it was set to
music and became a popular protest song. The poem is addressed to an
Israeli police officer:</p>
<p><em>Put it on record.</em><br><em>I am an Arab</em><br><em>Working with comrades of toil in a quarry.</em><br><em>I have eight children</em><br><em>For them I wrest the loaf of bread,</em><br><em>The clothes and exercise books</em><br><em>From the rocks</em></p>
<p>In the same year Darwish joined Rakah, the Israeli communist party. His work was first published in its literary journal, <em>Al Jadid</em>.
He soon became its editor. Darwish spoke excellent Hebrew, and read
poets like Neruda and Federico García Lorca in that language. In
response to criticism of <em>A Soldier Who Dreams of White Lilies</em>, written after the Six-Day War in 1967, he insisted: “I will continue to humanise even the enemy.”</p>
<img src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/13Mar_Mahmoud-Darwish_wires002-scaled.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="471" height="314">Circa
2005: Prominent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish during an event in
Turin, Italy. (Photograph by Leonardo Cendamo/ Getty Images)
<p>In 1970, after repeated spells in prison, Darwish made the decision to move to Cairo where he worked for <em>Al-Ahram</em>,
a daily newspaper. He joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO) in 1973, and was banned from entering Israel for the next 23
years. This life in exile – “a long night that stares at the water” –
was lived in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Tunis and Paris. “I yearn”, he
wrote, “for my mother’s bread and my mother’s coffee.” </p>
<p>The longing to “see again from our own sun, our own sunrise from our
own east”, and the weight of memory “like a pomegranate … of the ruby in
metaphor” was carried with a simultaneous enchantment of the present
and a profusion of poetic richness. He held fast to the convictions that
“an idea is a coal burning”, that “words are a country” and that, even
in the most difficult circumstances, “singing in a cage is possible and
so is happiness”.</p>
<h2><strong>Living and resisting</strong></h2>
<p>Darwish liked to write in the mornings, formally dressed, preferably
in a room with a window looking onto a tree, and always sustaining a
militant commitment to the value of life, once writing: “We have on this
earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of
bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of
Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a
flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories.”</p>
<p>By 1977 he had sold more than a million books in Arabic. But for
three years after the invasion of Lebanon and the siege and shelling of
Beirut in 1982, Darwish was not able to write. That silence was broken
with the long prose poem <em>Memory for Forgetfulness</em>, written in
Paris over 90 days. The poem is set on 6 August 1982, a day of heavy
Israeli shelling: “The street. Seven o’clock. The horizon is a huge egg
made of steel.” </p>
<p>In the midst of this day – Hiroshima Day he called it – the poet turns to ordinary rituals of daily life: </p>
<p><em>I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a
five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other
than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my
aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my
thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.</em></p>
<p>The poem carried a new pessimism: </p>
<p><em>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 except a sea. I don’t see a
shore. I don’t see a dove.</em></p>
<h2>Related article:</h2>
<p>In 1988, Darwish was asked to write the Palestinian Declaration of
Independence. He sat on the executive committee of the PLO until 1993,
when, unable to accept the Oslo Accords, he offered his resignation.</p>
<p>In exile Darwish became a global figure, reading in English and
French as well as Arabic, and receiving a trove of prizes, although not
the Nobel Prize, which many felt he had earned several times over.</p>
<p>Darwish was able to return to Ramallah, to what remained of
Palestine, in the late 1990s where he made his life until his death in
2008. This was not a return to any kind of freedom. In March 2002,
during the Second Intifada, he read to a large audience with other
writers – including Wole Soyinka, Jose Saramago and Breyten Breytenbach –
that he had invited to witness the occupation. Four days later Israeli
tanks entered Ramallah and a cultural centre where he edited a literary
review was ransacked by the Israeli military, his work left scattered
and trampled on the floor. </p>
<img src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/13Mar_Mahmoud-Darwish_wires004.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="471" height="314">2
November 1997: Mahmoud Darwish recites some of his poems in Damascus.
It was the first time in 14 years that he had visited Syria. (Photograph
by Louai Beshara/ AFP)
<h2><strong>Besieging the siege</strong></h2>
<p><em>A state of Siege</em>, published in 2002, deals with this period in which:</p>
<p><em>Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them</em><em><br></em><em>they alter it with a bulldozer</em></p>
<p>And:</p>
<p><em>The soldiers measure the distance between being</em><br><em>And nonbeing</em><br><em>With a tank’s scope</em></p>
<p>This is a poetry resolved to <em>besiege the siege</em>, a poetry in which soldiers urinate <em>under a tank’s guard/ and the autumn day completes its golden stroll</em>. There are still <em>green trees with blue shadows</em> and life to be lived <em>on earth, among the pines</em>. The names of the dead may yet be written in letters of lapis. </p>
<p>In July 2007, Darwish lamented the Hamas takeover of Gaza, writing
that “one people now have two states, two prisons who don’t greet each
other. We are victims dressed in executioners’ clothing”.</p>
<p>Darwish died in a hospital in Houston at the age of 67 after
undergoing open-heart surgery. He left more than 30 volumes of poetry,
eight books of prose and, many would argue, a reputation as the greatest
poet of the second half of the twentieth century.</p>
<img src="https://www.newframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/13Mar_Mahmoud-Darwish_wires003-scaled.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="471" height="314">13
August 2008: Palestinians gather as the coffin of their national poet
Mahmoud Darwish is driven past in what amounted to a state funeral in
the West Bank city of Ramallah. (Photograph by Reuters/ Ammar Awad)
<p>His body was returned to Palestine. He had wanted to be buried in
Galilee but even that last desire was refused. Instead, on a sunny
winter morning, tens of thousands followed the funeral procession to a
grave dug in the pines on Al Rabweh, a hilltop looking over Ramallah.
Many recalled a few lines from the last poem that Darwish had read
before his death, <em>The Dice Player</em>:</p>
<p><em>When the sky appears ashen</em><br><em>and I see a rose that has suddenly burst</em><br><em>out of a crack in a wall I don’t say:</em><br><em>The sky is ashen!</em><br><em>I extend my study of the rose</em><br><em>and say to it: What a day! </em></p>
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