Mahmoud Darwish (March 13, 1941-August 9, 2008)

Mahmoud Darwish, often referred to as the Palestinian national poet, once told his readers: “Do not trust the poem —/ The daughter of absence/ It is neither intuition nor is it/ Thought/ But rather, the sense of the abyss...” These lines of verse wave a flag to warn the reader of besieged territory ahead — the sort of territory where poetry, politics — life itself — has to be conducted in a state of dispossession. The poem is called, appropriately, ‘In a State of Siege’.

What does living such a life entail? A few details of Darwish’s life provide us with fairly clear-cut indications.

Darwish was born in 1941 in al Birweh, a village in Galilee, under the British mandate in Palestine. When he was six, his world was turned upside down, and it never set itself right again. And it wasn’t just young Mahmoud’s life, but the lives of his family, his village, other villages, and their homeland. All their lives were turned upside down, and so was their sense of who they were, and who they now had to be. As the Israeli army occupied Birweh, Darwish and his family were forced to join the great exodus of refugees. They spent a year in Lebanon living on United Nations handouts. By the time they returned to their village in 1949, Israel had been created; but their village was one of the hundreds of Palestinian villages that had been razed to the ground.

They were refugees again, infiltrators in their own land. Their return was “illegal”; they were given the status of “present-absent aliens”. Present-absent alien — an invention worthy of a bizarre fictional dystopia — would be the identity that would shadow Darwish from that point onwards.

Years later, Darwish recalled how his grandfather chose to live on a hill that overlooked his land. “Until he died he would watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place, which he was unable even to visit.” The message of such an experience was: “You were not here. This was not Palestine.”

This is what Golda Meir said when she announced, “There are no Palestinians.”

Displacement, landlessness, exile, fragmentation, discontinuity — such experiences are bound to confuse and erode identity. Edward Said took statements like Meir’s and transformed them into questions that explore the shifting, elusive nature of contemporary Palestinian identity: “Do we exist? What proof do we have? The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence...”

Darwish described this identity in terms of a continuous “struggle between two memories”. If his memories were real, his poetry had to challenge the Zionist tenet of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The result was, often, a strange contest within the poet. For instance, Darwish admired the work of the Hebrew poet, Yehuda Amichai; but he also recognized that Amichai’s poems were a challenge to him. Darwish said of Amichai, “He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?”

Darwish never found his homeland again in a literal sense, but he found it in his language. The language of his poetry managed to describe everyday events. And according to the literary critics who consider Darwish “the saviour of the Arabic language”, he did this with such understanding of the people living in his poetry, that they are finally able to express “what they fear most but are unable to utter”.

Darwish has written of a state of siege in which anger simmers; but he has also written, “Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time/ Close to the gardens of broken shadows,/ We do what prisoners do,/ And what the jobless do:/ We cultivate hope.”

Perhaps this is the most important legacy Darwish has left all of us, not just his fellow Palestinians. The “sense of abyss” he describes so movingly in his work does not exist on its own. It has been transformed through political acts, and acts of imagination, into something more life affirming. In other words, there’s siege, but there’s also hope. There’s loss, but there’s also belonging.

The homeland that was not within reach had to grow into something bigger. The history of Palestine had turned the insider — the Palestinian Arab — into the outsider. As a result, the Palestine in Darwish’s work turned into a universal metaphor for the loss of Eden, for birth and resurrection, for the anguish of dispossession and exile. In fact, Said described Darwish’s poetry as “an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.”

Darwish was often called “the poet of the resistance”; but in the course of his life’s work, he somehow managed to resist any neat or simplistic label. He wrote the Palestinian declaration of independence in 1988, and many poems of resistance that are an integral part of every Arab’s consciousness. But he also allowed himself to grow into a poet who did not close his mind to other ways of seeing.

He said: “Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down... I always humanize the other. I even humanised the Israeli soldier…” Humanizing a “side” in a polarized situation is not easy for anyone, least of all a poet. Just after the 1967 war, Darwish wrote a subtle and tender poem about an Israeli friend who decided to leave the country on his return from the front. The poem, “A Soldier Who Dreams of White Lilies” drew criticism from the secretary general of the Israeli Communist Party, who wanted to know whether Darwish wanted them to leave the country; while many Arab readers were offended because Darwish had humanized the Israeli soldier. But Darwish wrote that he had “multiple images of the Israeli other” — the Israelis in his poetry were not only jailors, but also friends and lovers — and that he would “continue to humanize even the enemy...”

It’s not surprising then that his conception of “Arab” was an open and inclusive identity. His work conducted a dialogue with a range of peoples and cultures — including Canaanite, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Arab, French, English, Ottoman and Native American. Not only did these dialogues create multiple levels of meaning in the poems, but they also made the theme of defining and asserting identity a richer, more complex exercise that made allowances for all kinds of overlapping. Darwish also wrote many poems about love and death; some could be easily understood; others yielded their meanings more reluctantly. And in all this body of work, Darwish tried to maintain an open and honest relationship with his readers. In an interview to The New York Times, he said, “When I move closer to pure poetry, Palestinians say go back to what you were. But I have learned from experience that I can take my reader with me if he trusts me...”