The HyperTexts

Mahmoud Darwish



Mahmoud Darwish is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging . . . his is an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered.—Naomi Shihab Nye

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was perhaps the preeminent Arab poet of his day. He was born in the Galilean village of Barweh, which was razed to the ground by Israelis during the Nakba (Arabic for "Catastrophe") of 1948. Like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, Darwish became an exile, along with his family, because his ancestral village had been destroyed. The title of his first book, Wingless Sparrows, speaks volumes. It was published when he was nineteen. And yet Darwish rejected anti-semitism, saying:

The accusation is that I hate Jews. It's not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.

As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment because of his political activism. He left Palestine in 1971 to study briefly at the University of Moscow, after which he worked for a newspaper in Cairo, then in Beirut as an editor of Palestinian Issues. When he joined the PLO in 1973, he was banned from reentering Palestine. Still, he recognized the humanity of the Jews; some were his oppressors, other his lovers:

I will continue to humanise even the enemy  . . .  The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings.

Several of his poems were written for Jewish lovers.

These poems take the side of love, not war.

Darwish lived in exile for more than twenty years, primarily in Beirut and Paris, until he was allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1996. But even then he spoke as if his exile continued, since he did not consider the West Bank his personal "homeland." A central theme in Darwish's poetry is watan or homeland:

Why are we always told that we cannot solve our problem without solving the existential anxiety of the Israelis and their supporters who have ignored our very existence for decades in our own homeland?

His poetry earned international acclamation and has been translated into 35 languages. He also founded the  prestigious literary review Al Karmel. In 1998 he published Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems. In 2000 he published Jidariyya (Mural) a book-length poem about his near death experience of 1997. By speaking eloquently for himself and his fellow Palestinians, Darwish made it impossible for history to ignore them:

We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.

Darwish's influences include the Arab poets Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Rimbaud and Ginsberg. He also admired the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, but described his poetry as a "challenge to me, because we write about the same place. 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 became a voice of compassion and reason, speaking for young men driven to martyrdom by despair:

We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair . . . We have to understand—not justify—what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope—a political solution—they'll stop killing themselves.

In March 2000, Israeli education minister Yossi Sarid proposed that two of Darwish's poems be taught in Israeli high schools. Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected the proposal on the grounds that Israel was "not ready." This sounds suspiciously like white supremacists saying their children are "not ready" for the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Langston Hughes. No doubt the incident had more to do with Israeli politics and racism than poetry. With the death of Darwish the debate about including his poetry in the Israeli school curriculum has been re-opened.



Excerpts from "Under Siege"

translated by Marjolijn De Jager

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.

A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent
For we closely watch the hour of victory:
No night in our night lit up by the shelling
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us
In the darkness of cellars.

Here there is no "I".
Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay.

You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank—
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass . . .

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment
Were it not for the visits of the rainbows.

We have brothers behind this expanse.
Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep.
Then, in secret, they tell each other:
"Ah! if this siege had been declared . . . " They do not finish their sentence:
"Don’t abandon us, don’t leave us."

Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees . . .
Added to this the structural flaw that
Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.

Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

In the state of siege, time becomes space
Transfixed in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.

The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word
You have given me back to the dictionaries
And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz.

The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse
I did not look
For the virgins of immortality for I love life
On earth, amid fig trees and pines,
But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it
With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure.

The siege will last in order to convince us we must choose an enslavement that does no harm, in fullest liberty!

Resisting means assuring oneself of the heart’s health,
The health of the testicles and of your tenacious disease:
The disease of hope.

Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to
The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the
Blackness of this tunnel!

Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me
In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces:
Greetings to my apparition.

My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me,
A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees
A marble epitaph of time
And always I anticipate them at the funeral:
Who then has died . . . who?



Ahmad Al-Za’tar:

translated by Tania Nasir

For two hands, of stone and of thyme
I dedicate this song. For Ahmad, forgotten between two butterflies
The clouds are gone and have left me homeless, and
The mountains have flung their mantles and concealed me
From the oozing old wound to the contours of the land I descend, and
The year marked the separation of the sea from the cities of ash, and
I was alone
Again alone
O alone? And Ahmad
Between two bullets was the exile of the sea
A camp grows and gives birth to fighters and to thyme
And an arm becomes strong in forgetfulness
Memory comes from trains that have left and
Platforms that are empty of welcome and of jasmine
In cars, in the landscape of the sea, in the intimate nights of prison cells
In quick liaisons and in the search for truth was
The discovery of self
In every thing, Ahmad found his opposite
For twenty years he was asking
For twenty years he was wandering
For twenty years, and for moments only, his mother gave him birth
In a vessel of banana leaves
And departed
He seeks an identity and is struck by the volcano
The clouds are gone and have left me homeless, and
The mountains have flung their mantles and concealed me
I am Ahmad the Arab, he said
I am the bullets, the oranges and the memory

The HyperTexts