The Poet Is Dead: Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008)
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2008 November |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2008, pages 16, 18
In Memoriam
The Poet Is Dead: Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008)
By Nathalie Khankan
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O Death, Wait,
Give me time to prepare a funeral
in the tender spring
in the place where I was born, where I will forbid all the speakers
to repeat what they say about the unhappy homeland
about the persistence of our figs and olives in the face of time and its army
O Death, wait! Let me pack my bag:
my toothbrush, my soap and razor,
aftershave, some clothes
Is the weather mild there?
Do situations change in white eternity
or do they remain just as they are in fall and winter?
Is one book enough to keep me entertained with no-time
or do I need a whole library?
What language do they speak there?
A colloquial for everyone
or classical Arabic?
—Mahmoud Darwish, from al-Jidariyya (Mural), 1999. In Mahmoud Darwish: Collected New Works (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2004): 481p. Author’s translation
ONE HEARS condolences in the office and library, in the taxi and barbershop. A poet has died. Elsewhere, such a collective grief that feels so personal over the death of a poet would hardly be conceivable.
Saturday, Aug. 9, 2008 became a Kennedy moment for Palestinians. Quickly the headlines deteriorated from bad to worse: “Mahmoud Darwish is fighting for his life after open-heart surgery in Houston, Texas” to “Mahmoud Darwish dies in Houston after post-surgery complications.” There was no time to get used to the difficult idea that Palestine—as cause, geography and people—had lost its prominent poet. Suddenly, far from Texas, time stood still. Then he was gone.
“He is our language, our linguistic tongue,” Kifah Fanni, a younger poet, once told me when I asked him about the role of Darwish. Mahmoud Darwish was a poet, and much more. He was—and remains—an icon, an aesthetic.
Born in 1942 in al-Birweh in the northern part of historic Palestine, Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon when Israel was created in 1948. The family would return a year later to find their village destroyed by Zionist forces.
In the 1960s, Mahmoud Darwish was active in the Israeli Communist Party, working as a translator and editor, and later also in the PLO. Arrested several times for his political poetry, Darwish left Israel in 1970 and began a long journey in exile: Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, Paris. When he went to live in Beirut, he was already famous as a poet. By the end of the 1970s, he had sold more than a million copies of his work. Darwish remained in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of the city—unforgettably rendered in the prose work Memory for Forgetfulness (1987). When the PLO, evicted from Beirut, relocated to Tunis, Darwish did the same.
For a long time Darwish had close ties to Yasser Arafat. He not only composed the famous U.N. olive branch speech delivered by Arafat in 1974, but also helped write the symbolic Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988. In 1993, after the signing of the Declaration of Principles, Darwish officially broke with the PLO leadership, protesting the piecemeal resolution to the Palestinian predicament that the peace process and Oslo accords offered.
Since the mid-1990s Darwish lived in Ramallah, working as an editor for the literary journal al-Karmil, which he founded in the early 1980s, and publishing some of the most important contemporary Arabic poetry and prose, e.g., Why Did You Leave the House Alone? (1995); A Bed of the Stranger (1998); The Mural (1999); State of Siege (2002); and Like Almond Blossoms or Beyond (2005); and In the Presence of Absence (2005).
It is hard to explain just how big a loss Darwish’s passing is. It is in the same class as the death in 2003 of Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said. It is the same knot in my stomach, that same stillness in the ear. Who is going to say “Viva Palestina” the way Edward and Mahmoud were able to?
Darwish, poet and human being, managed to put words to the wordless, to the fateful years and wounds of modern Palestinian history—1948, 1967, 1982, the intifadas—and to all the blind spots in between. He became a national symbol with early poems like “Identity Card” and “A Lover from Palestine.” He never wished to be stuck there, however, as a frozen collective symbol. Time and again he sought to transcend his public image as the Voice of Palestine and to be simply his own poet’s poet. Every diwan, or collection of poetry, may be read as a kind of rupture with what he wrote before it. It may also be read as a steady movement away from a simple but dominant conflation between the political and poetic. He wrote himself away from “Identity Card,” but without turning his back to the political urgency felt by colonized populations or to the enterprise of hope.
There is no cultural persona quite like him in Palestine. His more than 30 works, mainly collections of poetry, have been translated into 20 languages. Since 1964 Palestinians and Arabic literature aficionados have curiously anticipated the next Darwishian expression: a new moving poem, a riveting commentary, or provocative notes published in tomorrow’s newspaper. He was a generous writer, who better than anyone else was able to articulate Palestine as a universal human condition.
“A person can only be born in one place,” he said in his acceptance speech to the 2004 Prince Claus Fund Award. “However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. 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.”
Darwish’s popularity is also linked to his gifts as an orator who could fill entire football stadiums. Despite the fact that in recent decades he was increasingly perceived by readers as difficult and sometimes obscure, he would captivate an audience with his spoken word. He was a poet of the people, but also of the elites. Uncannily, his words struck both wide and deep.
Less than six weeks before his death Darwish stood before a full house in the Ramallah Culture Palace reciting his poems. Accompanied by the Jubran Brothers on oud, the event was transmitted live on Aljazeera World. Darwish was Darwish. I was not there, but I can listen to the recordings of this—the now last—live Darwish performance. I was there, in the same place, in April 2005. I saw with my own eyes then that he was as great a poet on stage as he is on paper. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was also present—or rather he arrived late, with his entourage of press and security personnel interrupting the event. Darwish had to stop his recital several times and wait patiently for the clamor to die down. “The authorities (al-sulta) are to be found everywhere. Even in the middle of a poem,” he said with a mischevious smile. One did not need to know much about the Palestinian Authority’s reputation as a police state to smile along.
The loss of Darwish goes beyond the occupied Palestinian territories. He spoke for a Palestine that has no national or geographical borders. Locally, in Ramallah, there is already talk of the end of an era. The era of the big poets is over, they say. The era of our big poet is over, they say. In the middle of mourning, Palestinians—Hamas and Fatah, Gaza and the West Bank—seem, for the first time in a long time, to have found a little common ground. It is the poem.
O Death, wait a minute.
Sit down. Pour yourself a glass of wine.
Let’s not negotiate…
Lean back now. Maybe you are tired today having fought the stars.
Who am I for you to visit me now?
Do you have time to analyze my poem?
No? That is not something you do.
You are responsible for the earthly in the human
not for what we do or what we say.
Nathalie Khankan is a Ph.D.-candidate in Arabic literature at the Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley. She currently writes from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
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