Days before Ariel Sharon launched Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield with an army assault on the West Bank town of Ramallah on March 29, eight authors from the International Parliament of Writers visited the town. They included Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Jose Saramago, Breyten Breytenbach, Juan Goytisolo and Russell Banks. They were responding to a plea from the poet Mahmoud Darwish to bear witness to military occupation.
One evening Darwish, whom the US novelist Banks found “depressed, but uplifted by our visit,” took them to a hill with a view toward Jerusalem across Jewish settlements and checkpoints.
“I wanted to show them how the geography of Palestine is broken by settlements, as though they are the center and the Palestinian towns are marginal,” says Darwish. “No propaganda; we let them see the truth.” While Breytenbach recalled apartheid, Banks made comparisons with American Indian reservations in the late 19th century. He says, “I was horrified and angry at the physical scale of the occupation, with the settlements like suburban cities and military force in place to protect them.”
Four days after Darwish and his guests read to an audience of more than 1,000 in Ramallah’s Kassaba theater, the Israeli Army began its operation to root out Arabs. Palestinians see the invasion as collective punishment and a move to destroy the infrastructure of their embryonic state. Darwish, who had already left Ramallah to give a poetry recital in the Lebanese capital Beirut, was unable to return. He learned that the Sakakini Cultural Center, where he edits his quarterly literary review “Al-Karmel,” had been ransacked and his manuscripts trampled into the floor.
“They wanted to give us a message that nobody’s immune — including in cultural life,” says Darwish. “I took the message personally. I know they’re strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can’t break or occupy my words.”
Now aged 60, and known for almost 40 years as the Palestinian national poet, a “burden” he both relishes and chafes against. He is the Arab world’s best-selling poet; his recent recital in a Beirut stadium drew 25,000 people. To the Palestinian-American Professor Edward Said, of Columbia University in New York, he is the most brilliant Arabic poet, a commanding presence in Palestine — the country where he grew up but left for exile in 1971. For Said, Darwish’s poetry is “an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.” The writer Ahdaf Soueif sees him as one of the most powerful voices of the Palestine tragedy.
Though he writes in Arabic, Darwish reads English, French and Hebrew, and his influences include Rimbaud and Ginsberg. He has been translated into more than 20 languages, and is the best-selling poet in France. Yet few selections of his 20 volumes of poetry are in English translation. One of them, “Sand” (1986), is by his first wife, the writer Rana Kabbani. The American poet Adrienne Rich sees him as a poet of world stature for the “artistic risks (he has) taken.”
Darwish’s sonorous, incantatory delivery reveals the musicality of his poetry. In Philadelphia recently to receive the $350,000 award for cultural freedom given by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, Darwish confessed to being full of sadness and anger at the “struggle between the sword and the soul” in Palestine. His latest poem, “State of Siege” — which he read at the ceremony — was written during Israeli incursions last January.
“I saw tanks under my window,” he says. “Usually I’m lazy; I write in the morning at the same table; I have rituals. But I broke my rituals during the emergency. I freed myself by writing; I stopped seeing the tanks — whether that’s an illusion or the power of words.”
In the poem, a “martyr” says: “I love life/On earth, among the pines and the fig trees/But I can’t reach it, so I took aim/With the last thing that belonged to me.” He insists that suicide bombing doesn’t reflect a culture of death but a despair of occupation. “We have to understand — not justify — what gives rise to this tragedy. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope — a political solution — they’ll stop killing themselves.”
Darwish was born in 1942 into a land-owning Muslim family in Birweh, a village in Galilee, under the British mandate in Palestine. When he was six, the Israeli Army occupied Birweh and Darwish’s family joined the exodus of Palestinian refugees, estimated by the United Nations at between 726,000 and 900,000. The family spent a year in Lebanon on UN handouts. After Israel’s creation and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the family returned “illegally” in 1949, but found Birweh was one of at least 400 Palestinian villages razed and depopulated of Arabs, Israeli colonies built on its ruins. Darwish says, “We lived again as refugees, this time in our own country. It’s a collective experience. This wound I’ll never forget.”
The family lost everything, says Darwish, the second oldest of four brothers and three sisters. His father, Salim, was reduced to agricultural labor. “My grandfather chose to live on a hill overlooking his land. Until he died he would watch Jewish immigrants from Yemen living in his place, which he was unable even to visit.” Because they were absent during the first Israeli census of Arabs, being seen as illegal “infiltrators” and “present-absent aliens,” the family were denied Israeli nationality. They applied for identity cards but Mahmoud was refused a passport: “I was a resident not a citizen. I traveled with a laissez passer.” At Paris airport in 1968, he says, “they couldn’t understand: I’m an Arab, my nationality undetermined, carrying an Israeli document. I was sent back.”
His mother, Houreyyah, was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read. “I dreamt of being a poet.” By seven, Darwish was writing poetry. He worked in Haifa as a journalist. Palestinians in Israel were subject to emergency military rule until 1966, and needed permits to travel within the country. In 1961-69 Darwish was repeatedly imprisoned, ostensibly for leaving Haifa without a permit. His collections “Leaves of Olive” (1964) and “Lover From Palestine” (1966) made his reputation as a poet of resistance. When he was 22, the poem “Identity Card,” addressed to an Israeli policeman (“Write down, I am an Arab, Identity card number fifty thousand”), became a rallying cry of defiance and prompted his house arrest in 1967 when it was made into a protest song. “Mother,” a jailed son’s nostalgia for his mother’s bread and coffee, “was a poet writing a simple confession that he loves his mother, but it became a collective song. All my work is like that. I don’t decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.”
According to Said, Darwish’s early poems defined Palestinian existence, reasserting an identity after the dispersal of 1948. He was foremost among a wave of poets who were writing within Israel in the teeth of Golda Meir’s assertion that “There are no Palestinians.” Darwish’s lyric poetry coincided with the birth of the Palestinian movement after the Arab defeat in the six-day war of 1967. Yet he was always averse to being praised out of solidarity.
Darwish has called the conflict a “struggle between two memories.” His poems challenged the Zionist tenet, embodied in such poetry as Haim Bialik’s, of “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
He was denied higher education in Israel so he studied political economy in Moscow in 1970, but left, disillusioned, after a year. In 1971 he joined the daily newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo and decided not to return to Haifa. That decision was sealed in 1973, when he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization and was banned from reentering Israel, a ban that lasted 26 years.
In 1973-82 he lived in Beirut, editing the journal Palestinian Affairs and becoming director of the PLO research center before founding “Al-Karmel” in 1981. By 1977 his poetry books in Arabic had sold more than one million copies. But the Lebanese civil war of 1975-91 was raging. He fled Beirut in 1982 after the Israeli Army under Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon and besieged the capital for two months, expelling the PLO. Israel’s allies massacred refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps.
Darwish became a “wandering exile,” moving from Syria, Cyprus, Cairo and Tunis, to Paris. In 90 days in Paris in 1985, he wrote his prose masterpiece “Memory For Forgetfulness” (1986), an autobiographical odyssey in the form of a Beirut diary, set during a single day of heavy Israeli shelling on Aug. 6 1982.
In Paris, Darwish revised or rejected many of the direct political poems of his Beirut period, modeled on the Chilean Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon, a poet of the French resistance. He also wrote some of his masterpieces: “Eleven Planets” (1992) is a “lyric epic” sequence on 1492, the date of Columbus’ voyage which destroyed the Native American world, and of the expulsion of Arabs from Andalucia, both parallels with the Palestinian nakba — catastrophe — the way Palestinians describe the creation of Israel in 1948. “Why Have You Left the Horse Alone?” (1995) is his “poetic autobiography.”
He was elected to the PLO executive committee in 1987, but saw his role as symbolic (“I’ve never been a man of politics”). According to Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of culture in Ramallah, “he’s not an isolated artist; he follows political life, and argues against extreme positions.”
Darwish resigned from the executive the day after the 1993 Oslo accords — the first stage in setting up a governing Palestinian Authority — saying the Palestinians “woke up to find they had no past.” He saw the accords as flawed and unworkable, likely to escalate the conflict rather than produce a viable Palestinian state or a lasting peace. Abed Rabbo says: “He was skeptical of Oslo. I’m sorry to say his judgment turned out to be true.”
Oslo did allow Darwish to move to the newly “autonomous” Palestinian Authority. “I was shocked by Gaza — there was nothing there, not even tarmac on the roads.” He has a home in the Jordanian capital Amman — his gateway to the outside world — but settled in Ramallah in 1996, yet says he is still in exile. “Exile is not a geographic state. I carry it everywhere, as I carry my homeland.”
His home has become language, a “country of words.” Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and Ramallah neighbor, met Darwish in Paris. “He seemed like a lover of fine things — high living and good food,” he says. “It’s to his credit he came here.” Darwish, who lives by journalism and editing as well as poetry sales, says: “I’ll stay till Palestine is free. The day after Palestinians have an independent state, I have the right to leave, but not before.”
The ban on Darwish visiting Israel was relaxed in December 1999, allowing him to visit his mother and relatives, who still live in villages near Haifa. But his entry has been barred since the Al-Aqsa uprising, or second intifada, erupted in September 2000. When his mother was in hospital with stomach cancer, he tried to visit her “but they called the hospital and realized she wasn’t going to die, so they refused me permission.” She recovered, but he has not seen her for two years.
Darwish had a heart attack and a life-saving operation in 1984, and a second heart operation in 1998. During his first surgery, he says, “my heart stopped for two minutes. They gave me an electric shock, but before that I saw myself swimming on white clouds. I remembered all my childhood. I gave myself to death and felt pain only when I came back to life.” But the second time, there was a fight. “I saw myself in prison, and the doctors were policemen torturing me. I have no fear of death now. I discovered something more difficult than death: The idea of eternity. To be eternal is the real torture. I don’t have personal demands of life because I’m living on borrowed time. I have no big dreams. I’m dedicated to writing what I have to write before I go to my end.”
“Israel has a good opportunity to live in peace,” says Darwish. “In spite of the darkness, I see some light.” But Sharon, he believes, wants to take the conflict “to square one, as if there was no peace process. It’s war for the sake of war. It’s not a struggle between two existences, as the Israeli government would like to portray it.”
Darwish’s collection “A Bed for the Stranger” (1998) was, he said, his first book entirely devoted to love. Yet even the ability to love is a “form of resistance: we Palestinians are supposed to be dedicated to one subject — liberating Palestine. This is a prison. We’re human, we love, we fear death, we enjoy the first flowers of spring. So to express this is resistance against having our subject dictated to us. If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write love poems.”
Readers were shocked by what some saw as his abandonment of the cause. One friend discerned a “gloomily defiant message: ‘To hell with Palestine; now I’m on my own.’” Yet Darwish’s poetry and presence in besieged Ramallah tell a different story. “I am waiting for the moment when I shall be able to say, ‘to hell with Palestine,’” he says. “But this will not come before Palestine is free. I can’t achieve my private freedom before the freedom of my country. When it’s free, I can curse it.” (The Guardian)
