Commutiny Media Features

by Anil Varghese

They Would Love to See Me Dead / When the Martyrs Go to Sleep / The Night There / We Went to Eden / Another Damascus in Damascus / The Flute Cried / In This Hymn (I See What I Want to See, 1993)

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s first poem, written while in school, ruffled the military rulers to the extend that his father lost his job – well, almost. The poem was in the form of a conversation between an Arab boy and his Jewish friend. The Arab boy tells the friend he has a home, toys and games and celebrations, but he has none of these, so why can they not play together? This poem irked the military governor who warned Darwish that his father would lose his job in the quarry if he continued to write poems in that vein. That was beginning of a journey of writing and reacting to his immediate surroundings.

Darwish passed away on August 9, 2008. He was a poet whose poetry were different, turned a legend in his life time and whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren.

He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. His father was a Muslim landowner. His mother was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read. It can be a coincidence that the birth of Israel as well as the first poetry of Darwish began in the same year. The Israeli Arabs were under military rule from 1948 to 1986; whereas it is interesting to note that most of the countries under colonial rule, including India, had attained Independence by then. The Israeli Arabs were treated as second class citizens and were not free to move about or engage in political activity.

Where is my where now? Where is the city of the dead, / and where am I? Here in this no-here, in this no-time, / there's no being, nor nothingness. As if I had died once before, / I know this epiphany, and know I'm on my way towards what I don't know. / Perhaps I'm still alive somewhere else, and know what I want. / One day I shall become what I want. One day I shall become a thought, / taken to the wasteland neither by the sword or the book / as if it were rain falling on a mountain split by a burgeoning blade of grass, / where neither might will triumph, nor justice the fugitive.
(Judariya'['Mural'], 2000)

Darwish carved out powerful versus which depicted the pathetic situation of the people thrown away from their land, and their identity. His poems were recited at various occasions at various places right from refugee camps to universities, further to poets’ platforms moving on to world stages. His poetry followed a pattern of slogans which was more direct with popular idiom capable of moving with everyday lives. This can also be due to the days of revolutionary vision in the '60s too. The images in his poetry came from his immediate surroundings.

Irony, anger and outrage at injustice – hallmarks of poetry of resistance – reverberate in the poems of Darwish as well as Dalit poets like Namdeo Dasal and Mahashweta Devi in India.

"Record! I am an Arab / And my identity card is number fifty thousand / I have eight children, And the ninth is coming after a summer / Will you be angry? Record! I am an Arab, I have a name without a title / Patient in a country Where people are enraged . . . 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!"
(Identity Card, 1964)

His poetry was aimed to explore the diversity in the Arab identity as well as respected the essence of each identity among the Arabs. It was not a closed identity but a plurality ever open to others. There was hope and optimism in his early poems that one day paradise would come to Palestine. Post 90's in the context of the changed world scenario Darwish also witnessed the fall of many prominent slogans which they dreamt of an ideal heaven. Palestine transforms to be a metaphor of the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile. In his words "I became addicted to exile. My language is exile. The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality".

His was also a very committed political activist. Darwish was a member of Rakah, the Israeli communist party, before joining the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut. In 1970 he left for Moscow. Later, he moved to Cairo in 1971 where he worked for Al-Ahram daily newspaper. In Beirut, in 1973, he edited the monthly Shu'un Filistiniyya (Palestinian Affairs) and worked as a director in the Palestinian Research Center of the PLO and joined the organisation. In the wake of the Lebanon War, Darwish wrote the political poems Qasidat Bayrut (1982) and Madih al-zill al'ali (1983). Darwish was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 1987. In 1988 he wrote a manifesto intended as the Palestinian people's declaration of independence. In 1993, after the Oslo accords, Darwish resigned from the PLO Executive Committee as he could not accept the agreement which he thought was a 'risky accord'.

"Where should we go after the last frontiers / Where should the birds fly after the last sky."
(The Earth Is Closing on Us 1984)

Though he was a political poet he did not shy away from looking at the mystery of life and death, as demonstrated by many of his later poems that confront the reality of "eternity". His later work became more mystical and less particularly concerned with Palestine. Many of his poems were dedicated to his mother too of which 'I yearn for my mother's bread' is quite well known. Many of Darwish's poems were set to music and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs, by Arab composers. He spent his last years in Ramallah and Amman, the capital of Jordan.

"But I am the exile Seal me with your eyes. / Take me wherever you are Take me wherever you are. / Restore to me the colour 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. Shield me with your eyes. / Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow. Take me as a verse from my tragedy; / Take me as a toy, a brick from the house/So that our children will remember to return."
(Mahmoud Darwish, quoted in Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Vintage, 1986))

Darwish depicts his sense of homelessness in the form of a list of unfinished and incomplete things. The pathos of exile depicted in these versus shows the loss of contacts where homecoming is out of question.

Considered Palestine's most eminent poet, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was 22. Since then, Darwish has published approximately thirty poetry and prose collections which have been translated into more than twenty-two languages. Some of his more recent poetry titles include The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger (1999), Psalms (1995), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1994), and The Music of Human Flesh (1980).

By the time he passed away Darwish had won many hounours:The Lotus Prize (1969; from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers), Lenin Peace Prize (1983; from the USSR), The Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1993; from France), The Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom (2001), Prince Claus Awards (2004), Bosnian stećak (2007), Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings (2007)

The poet said in his acceptance speech while receiving the Principal Prize of the Prince Claus Fund in Austria that "A person can only be born in one place; however, he may die several times elsewhere; in exile and in prisons, in a homeland transformed into a nightmare by occupation and oppression. 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."

The legacy of the man Darwish is an inspiration where one rises above all odds and tries to open the eyes of human to act, react and be relevant in history in the times of high turmoils and paves way for some ray of hope….