October 1, 2003:
Mohammed's younger brother
Issam was seriously injured
and was taken to the hospital
about a week ago. His leg
was amputated and he is
undergoing medical treatment.

October 18, 2003:
Mohammad's younger brother,
Hussam [17 yrs old], was killed
by the Israeli army today.

Hussam was sitting at home
when he was shot in the face,
chest, back, legs. He had
nothing to do with any violent
or even political movement.

Hussam's crime is that he was
a Palestinian.

— The Webmaster

Opening a Space for Jasmine:
Mahmoud Darwish, Poet of Palestine—and the World

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2005/0507072.html

Washington Report, July 2005, pages 72-73

IN 2002, halfway through the brutality and bloodshed of the current intifada, poet Mahmoud Darwish told interviewer Nathalie Handal, herself a poet, that he found being the iconic “voice of Palestine” to be “a burden.” Nonetheless, while it is a burden initially thrust upon him by the facts of history, it also is one he has carried willingly—and eloquently—all his life. Having never made a sharp distinction between political activism and poetry, Darwish not only has published some 20 collections of poetry (more, actually, if one counts translated anthologies), but also has worked as a journalist and essayist, and, until 1993, was active in the PLO. Still, it is as a poet that he is revered—and not just as the premiere poet of Palestine but, by many throughout the world, as the most important living Arabic poet.

While in much of the West poetry is a specialized study, the province of a few intellectuals and graduate students, throughout the Arabic world poetry belongs to everyone—to the taxi driver and farmer every bit as much as to the professor of literature. While even the smallest schoolchildren study poetry, the Arabic-speaking world is still a place where the oral tradition flourishes. To this day, there are elderly Palestinian poets in the refugee camps of Lebanon who never learned to read or write, but are poets nonetheless, memorizing their own works, reciting them to friends and family, some of whom in turn, memorize and recite them to new audiences.

Like the man himself, much of Darwish's work is paradoxical, and transcends specifics to achieve a universal appeal. His sense of place and descriptive powers are extraordinary, whether sketching out an impersonal hotel room, a chance meeting in Manhattan, or his beloved and ravaged homeland. Although he has been a lifelong exile and nomad, Darwish’s work is firmly rooted in the very soil of Palestine. While his language is deceptively simple, the levels of meaning and symbolism packed into a few words are miracles of compression. He can reduce an exile’s sorrow and bewilderment to a single phrase, and does so again and again, yet he also has written modern epics of generous length.

Darwish’s view of the most brutal events is unflinching; he never shrinks from bloodshed and horror, yet at the same time recognizes the tenderness veiled in the desperate struggle for justice, the unending hope in the most dismal circumstances. As he put it in his 1999 poem “We Were without a Present”: “We gnawed on stones to open a space for jasmine.” The image is gruesome, a bloody, tooth-breaking life of starvation, poverty and occupation, but is in pursuit of “opening a space” for not just any flower, but jasmine, at once the most ordinary and yet the sweetest-scented of free-growing vines. Fifty years of hope and history in a single line.

Darwish frequently takes his inspiration from the simplest objects and happenings—flowers, lovers, a cup of coffee—yet tackles with modern sophistication the most daunting philosophical concepts—death, divinity, existential anguish, questions of identity. While he wears his erudition lightly, his work reveals a thorough familiarity with the complete sweep of religious and, philosophical writings, from ancient Sumerian sources all the way through the Old and New Testaments, the Holy Qu’ran, the Sufi poets, to modern Western poets like Yeats, Pablo Neruda and Garcia Lorca.

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 to a land-owning Sunni Muslim family in the village of Al Birwah, near Akka. In 1948, during the Nakba (literally translated as “the catastrophe”), his village, like hundreds of other Arab villages in Palestine, was attacked by Zionists, and the entire population fled and scattered. Darwish’s father was killed and, during the confusion, Mahmoud became separated from his family. A year later, the eight-year-old boy made his way back to Palestine to find what had been his village in ruins and in its place an Israeli settlement.

Even as a child in elementary school, Darwish was writing poetry, and published his first collection when he was only 19. Although now a stateless person, he lived in what is now Israel until he was 20—often in trouble and under house arrest for refusing to carry the Israeli-mandated identity papers and insisting on reciting his poetry.

In 1970, Darwish fled Israel for Moscow, where he studied for a year, then moved to Beirut in 1971. There he became a journalist as well as a poet, and edited several highly influential Palestinian journals and magazines. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon in 1982, Darwish became a modern nomad, living in Cyprus, Tunisia, Jordan and France. He was active in the PLO until 1993, when he resigned in protest of the Oslo accords. The agreement, he believed, embraced a peace without justice for Palestine and was doomed to failure. Sadly, subsequent events proved he was prescient.

While Israel barred him returning to Palestine until the 1990s, Darwish was achieving worldwide recognition for his poetry. In 1996, after more than two decades of exile, Darwish settled in the West Bank city of Ramallah. In 2000, a proposal to teach some of his work in Israeli high schools wracked Israel with controversy. Ultimately, his poetry was banned, with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak remarking that his country “wasn’t ready” to deal with a world-acclaimed Palestinian poet. As Darwish remarked in a different context, “The first step of real peace is to know the other side, its culture and creativity.” Indeed, the events of later that year, with the outbreak of the current intifada, demonstrated the depth of Israel’s “unreadiness.”

While a central image in Darwish’s early poetry is the resistance hero, who never falters in the fight for freedom and independence for the Palestinian people, Darwish’s concerns have become deeper and broader as he has matured. With the disappointment he and all Palestinians suffered as a result of the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut in 1982, his orientation shifted, and he became more aware of the reality of powerlessness that even the most resilient hero can experience. Even as early as his 1967 “The End of Night,” Darwish’s soldier-narrator laments, “I need a bright day, not a mad fascist moment of triumph/I need a child to cherish a day of laughter, not a weapon of war.”

In 2002, during the current intifada, Darwish published his collection of poems, “State of Siege.” His poetry is never forced or academic; despite the sophistication of its structure he seems to work directly from what he sees in every refugee camp and alleyway of Palestine. The theme of the poems in “State of Siege” was separation and barriers—the literal Israeli checkpoints and “settler only” roads, the separation of a mother from her beloved son in an Israeli jail, the separation of a father from his children, the separation of all Palestinians from safety and normalcy. Juxtaposed with images of war and brutality is eternal nature—the almond trees, doves, even the blades of grass—kindness in stark contrast to humiliation. As Darwish explained to Nathalie Handal, he abhorred terrorism, and condemned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America. Yet he prayed his readers would understand the Palestinian suicide bombers acted from pure despair, not revenge. As he wrote in “State of Siege”:

In a land where the dawn sears
We have become more doltish
And we stare at the moments of victory.
There is no starry night in our nights of
explosions.
Our enemies stay up late, they switch on
their
Light in the intense darkness of this tunnel.

Although reflecting the growing Palestinian despair, like the image of the phoenix he often uses in his poetry, Darwish has just published Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (available soon from the AET Book Club), a new collection of poetry that expresses renewed hope, however cautiously. One reviewer described the work as “marvelously unapologetic,” saying it expresses a determination to live by and live up to choices made, and an admission that apologies and regrets are now irrelevant. “La Ta’tadir Amma Fa’alt” translates literally from the Arabic as “Don’’t Apologize for What You Did”—surely a title with political implications. Critics in Palestine and abroad, however, also are hailing it as a “return to poetry.” Indeed, regardless of his subject matter, Darwish never has abandoned his devotion to the rhythms of the Arabic language, its simplicity, power, and precision. Still, all his latest writings are imbued with a sense of the urgency of the present moment in Palestinian, Arab, and world history.

While Darwish has won numerous literary prizes and had his poetry translated into more than 20 foreign languages, he has always inspired a certain trepidation among literary scholars and critics. As the Palestinian critic Professor Adel Al Asta of Al Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus explained, “Darwish reclaimed the place of Arabic poetry in world consciousness. Thanks to him, the power of Arabic poetry has been recognized again. But he has also made the Palestinian issue a global Arab issue. He also has a poetic gift, a universality, rarely seen.”

Professor Al Asta described Darwish as a “poet’s poet,” even while remaining accessible to the general reader. “His language seems simple on the face of it,” Al Asta explained, “yet when one looks deeply, it repays close analysis. The scholar, the poet, and the schoolchild or shopkeeper can all be rewarded by his work. Darwish has an amazing, astonishing imagination. His critics are almost frightened by the depth of his work. Darwish never abandoned his deep love of meter, of language, so he is not just the most eleoquent spokesman for the Palestinian people, but really, a world class poet. I simply don’t know if my words are enough to describe such a poet,” the profressor concluded.

According to Naela Kalil, a Ramalah journalist who writes for Al Ayyam newspaper, “If Darwish were not Palestinian, he would probably get the Nobel Prize. Since he's a Palestinian, he probably won't.”

Perhaps she meant that Darwish was “too political,” or “too controversial.” Yet Western readers encountering Darwish for the first time may be reminded of the ancient Roman saying: “I am human, so nothing human is foreign to me.” As he wrote in his poem “A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips”: “Homeland, he said, for him/Is to drink my mother’s coffee, to return safely at nightfall”—something anyone who ever had a mother can understand.

“Mahmoud Darwish is Mahmoud Darwish,” Kalil summed up simply. Truly, he is himself, and uniquely Palestinian—but he also expresses the longings of every man and woman.

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