18 September 2008

Mohammed Omer

Inter Press Service

GAZA CITY: In the death of poet Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine has lost a voice.

It was a voice that carried into the hearts of Palestinians, and far across the world. His poems were translated into 22 languages, including Hebrew. Darwish, who died 40 days ago today, was born in the northern Palestinian village Birwah, six years before the state of Israel came into being. When that happened in 1948, Darwish and his family fled the massacres to Lebanon.

He returned the following year, too late to be included in Israel's census of Palestinians who had remained. There was no record of his existence, his village had been erased from the new map drawn up by the Israelis. This was the fate of at least three-quarters of a million Palestinians but Darwish gave it a voice as no one else did.

"Record!" he wrote in his 1964 poem "Identity Card," "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 ..."

Darwish wrote often of identity, exile, his past, and of a collective Palestinian memory. He wrote of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, but also of what Palestinian factions were doing to one another. 

"We have triumphed," he wrote after the Fatah-on-Hamas conflict that ended in Hamas taking over Gaza in 2007. "Gaza won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons that do not greet each other. We are victims dressed in executioners' clothing. We have triumphed, when we know that it is the occupier who really won."

Through the pain, Darwish often wrote with a bitter humor. From his sick bed he once wrote: "Relax. Perhaps you are exhausted today, / Dog-tired of warfare among the stars. / Who am I that you should pay me a visit? / Do you have the time to consider my poem? / Ah, no. / It's none of your affair. / You are charged only with the earthly body of man, / Not with his words and deeds.

"Oh Death, all the arts have defeated you, / All the Mesopotamian songs. / The Egyptian obelisk, the Pharaoh's tombs, / The engraved temple stones, / All defeated you, all were victorious."

Inevitably, Darwish was not just a poet but a political figure, and a long-time member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1988, he wrote the official Palestinian Declaration of Independence, read in Algeria by the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat at the National Council of the PLO. He later quit the PLO to protest the concessions of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

He kept working, writing "A State of Siege" during the second intifada. "During the siege, time becomes space / That has hardened in its eternity. / During the siege, space becomes time / That is late for its yesterday and tomorrow."

"Mahmoud Darwish was not only a poet, but a messenger carrying the message of a whole cultural project," former Palestinian Culture Minister Ibrahim Ibrash said. Darwish "created balance and protected the Palestinian identity."

Darwish wrote five books of prose and 20 books of poems - his first, "Leaves of Olives," in 1964, at the age of 22. He won numerous awards, including the Lotus Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the Stalin Peace Prize, the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, and France's highest honor, the Knight of Arts and Letters.

Darwish died in a US hospital, where he had been taken for open-heart surgery.

One of his closest friends, the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, told IPS that Darwish had to wait three months to obtain a US visa. Zaqtan says that while the US consulate in Occupied Jerusalem was supportive, they could not avoid the "complicated system" which Palestinians must wade through in order to obtain visas.

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.