Mahmoud Darwish was born in Palestine when it was a British mandate. At the age of six, he experienced the dispersal of his people upon the birth of the state of Israel (1948). The Palestinians had to flee or accept subjugation. Darwish’s family left their village, al-Birwa (near Acre), for Lebanon to avoid the violence, in the expectation that they would be able to return when the conflict was over. When they did return a year later, they found their village destroyed by the new Zionist state, and they had become internal refugees in their own country, denied the status of citizens.
Darwish studied in schools in Galilee and was harassed and imprisoned several times for asserting Arab identity and Palestinian rights, but he remembers gratefully teachers who encouraged him—both Arabs and Israeli Jews. He started writing poetry at an early age. His first collection of poetry, ’Asafir bila ajniha (Birds Without Wings), was published in 1960. His second collection, Awraq al-Zaytun (Olive Leaves), published in 1964, made him widely known as a resistance poet. His confrontational poem in this collection, “Identity Card,” asserted Palestinian Arab identity despite Israeli efforts to suppress it.
In 1961 Darwish joined Rakah, the Communist Party of Israel—arguably the only political organization that recognized Palestinians as equals. Darwish published articles and poems in Arabic newspapers and magazines in Israel and became a coeditor of al-Fajr.
Mahmoud Darwish
In 1970 he left his occupied country and lived in different cities: Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, and Paris. In Beirut in the 1970s, he worked as editor of the monthly Shu’un Falastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs) and as director of the Research Center of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). He founded the acclaimed literary and cultural journal Al-Karmal in 1980 and continued to be its editor in chief. At present, he lives between Amman, Jordan, and Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank of Palestine.
In summer 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut, where Darwish resided. Darwish wrote poems that depicted the situation and circulated widely in the decade that followed. He also wrote the prose work Dhakira lil-Nisyan (Memory for Forgetfulness) about besieged Beirut and the Palestinian catastrophe known as nakba. Following that, Darwish had to leave Beirut, thus adding another exile. He lived in various cities in Europe and the Middle East.
In 1987 he was selected as a member of the PLO Executive Committee, but he resigned later in protest against the Oslo Accords of 1993, which did not restore their legitimate rights to the Palestinians.
A prolific author with about 20 collections of poetry and more than half a dozen prose works, Darwish is both a poets’ poet and a national bard. Popular as he is among general readers, he is also a sophisticated and multilayered poet whose works attract intellectuals and critics. He is also known as a significant voice in Third World literature and is one of the few Arab poets who has a global readership.
When Darwish recites his poetry at literary festivals, thousands of people attend what is considered a momentous cultural event. He communicates intimacy and profundity even when reading to crowds in huge halls. His poetry has been discussed in the Israeli Knesset—including “Passing Among Passing Words,” which commemorates the Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada. In 2000 Yossi Sarid, the Israeli minister of education, proposed including Darwish’s poems in the secondary school curriculum, but there was strong opposition against allowing a Palestinian voice to surface.
Darwish’s poetry combines lyricism with symbolism while staying close to historical events and everyday concerns. His poems have since developed from the earlier confrontational statements and explicitly political works to a more reflective and philosophical poetics. Darwish is an educated poet, well-read in different fields and familiar with various poetic traditions and trends. He admires great poetry whether of the ancients or the moderns (see, for instance, his “Lesson from the Kama Sutra”). But his favorite poet is Federico García Lorca, who, like Darwish, defended the cause of an oppressed people.
In Darwish’s Jidariyya (Mural), published in 2000 following a serious heart operation, his poetry reached the heights of the epical with its echoing of human history and existential questions. In its focus on the self, Jidariyya inevitably reminds one of those renowned, long autobiographical poems—Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, for example. Whitman presents an imperial self with its all-encompassing optimistic drive, looking brightly at the future. Ashbery presents a convoluted self delving ironically and torturously into the nexus between the past and the present. Jidariyya, however, presents a vulnerable self. The confessional element in Darwish’s long poem stems from admitting human weakness, physical deterioration, and reluctance to bid farewell to the world.
There is a humanistic strain in Darwish’s poetry where resistance is divorced from chauvinism, and where peace is the other face of justice. His longings for his country are often akin to the lyrical outpouring of an unrequited lover. His poetry can be read as a patriotic song for Palestine (see Diary of a Palestinian Wound) or a love poem for an unnamed beloved. Darwish, unlike other modernist poets, has not broken ties with the long tradition of Arabic poetry. He continues to savor prosodic musicality, and his lexicon is rich and compelling. Yet his concerns are thoroughly modern and contemporary.
His writing articulates eloquently the frustrations and dreams of his silenced people, and by extension it expresses those states of mind of the oppressed and displaced everywhere. His poems have expressed the tragedy and aspirations of other people as well as his own. He has written about the struggle of colonized Africans as well as of North American Indians. A famous poem that incarnates the persona of an American Indian, Chief Seattle, addressing the white man, “Speech of the ‘Red Indian,’” contrasts different philosophies of being, one that believes in harmony with nature and another that attempts conquering nature.
His poem about the hoopoe, with its rich intertextual references, partakes of the vision of Farid al-Din Attar, the 12th-century Persian poet and author of the allegorical narrative poem Mantiq al-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds). Darwish has also been able to go under the skin of Israeli soldiers, not to denounce and condemn as in A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips, but to represent the pacific streak that is repressed in them by military logic.
Darwish’s humanist drive makes him a poet who listens to the wretched of the Earth and articulates their agony. His universal appeal stems from his universal concerns. Rather than turning the political into the ideological, he weaves it into a tragic lyricism. Yet hope and passion never desert his writing. Having lost his physical homeland, he turned his native language—Arabic—into a homeland of sorts.
Many of Darwish’s poems have been set to music and sung by the well-known Lebanese singer associated with the resistance, Marcel Khalife. The Palestinian-American critic and theorist Edward W. Said analyzed the poetry of Darwish and compared it to that of William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Aimé Césaire.
A documentary film entitled Mahmud Darwich was produced by French television and directed by Simone Bitton in 1997. In 2004 Darwish invited a delegation of internationally renowned writers (including two Nobel laureates) to occupied Palestine to see for themselves what Israeli rule meant for indigenous people. The writers included Russell Banks (United States), Bei Dao (China), José Saramago (Portugal), and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria). The visit was recorded in a documentary film directed by Samir Abdallah and José Reynes and entitled Writers on the Borders.
Mahmud Darwish has received many awards in the Arab world as well as international honors, including the Lotus Prize (1969, Union of Afro-American Writers), the Lenin Prize for Peace (1983, USSR), the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1993, France), the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom (2002, United States), and the Prince Claus Fund Principal Award (2004, Netherlands), the Al-Quds Prize for Culture and the Arts (1990, Palestinian Ministry of Culture), the Ibn Sina Prize (1982, USSR), the Cavafy Prize for Poetry (2000, Egypt), the Al Owais Award for Poetry (2004–2005, UAE), the Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings (2007, Macedonia), and honorary doctorates from the University of Paris VIII (France) and Birzeit University (Palestine)..
Bibliography
Abou-Bakr, Randa. The Conflict of Voices in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus and Mahmud Darwish. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag, 2004.
Darwish, Mahmud. Selected Poems. Translated by Ian Wedde and Fawwaz Tuqan. Cheadle Hulme, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1973.
———. Splinters of Bone. Translated by B. M. Bennani. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1974.
———. The Music of Human Flesh: Poems of the Palestinian Struggle. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. London: Heinemann, 1980.
———. Sand and Other Poems. Translated by Rana Kabbani. New York: KPI (distributed by Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1986.
———. [Darwich, Mahmoud]. Palestine mon pays: L’affaire du poème. Paris: L’Édition de Minuit, 1988.
———. Psalms: Poems. Translated by Ben Bennani. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Three Continents Press, 1994.
———. Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut 1982. Translated by Ibrahim Muhari. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
———. The Adam of Two Edens: Poems. Edited by Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
———. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Hafez, Sabry. Mahmud Darwish (in Arabic). Cairo: Dar al-Fata al-‘Arabi, 1994.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. “Introduction: Palestinian Literature in Modern Times.” Edited by Salma K. Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 1–80.
Said, Edward. “On Mahmud Darwish.” Grand Street 12 (Winter 1994): 12–15.
Saith, Ashwani. “Mahmud Darwish: Hope as Home in the Eye of the Storm.” ISIM Review 15 (Spring 2005): 28–29.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Palestinian Literature, War Literature
Analysis of Mahmoud Darwish’s Diary of a Palestinian Wound
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