Headlines, Human Rights

MIDEAST: Palestinians Lose a Voice

Mohammed Omer

GAZA CITY, Aug 18 2008 (IPS) - 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 last Saturday Aug. 9, 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.

In 1964, he wrote a poem, 'Identity Card':

Record!
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.

After the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, he wrote: "We have triumphed. 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 humour. 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.

O 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 for long a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). In 1988 Darwish wrote the official Palestinian Declaration of Independence, read in Algeria by late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat at the National Council of the PLO. But he later quit the PLO in protest against the concessions of the Oslo Accords of 1993.

But he kept writing. Through the second Intifadah, he wrote 'A State of Siege'.

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 minister for culture Dr. Ibrahim Ibrash said. Darwish "created balance and protected the Palestinian identity."

Darwish wrote 20 books of poems, and five books of prose. At age 22, in 1964, he had already published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Olives. 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 honour, the Knight of Arts and Letters.

Many of Darwish's poems have been used as the lyrics of some of the Arab world's most famous songs, including those of the celebrated Marcel Khalife.

Darwish died in a U.S. hospital where he had been taken for open heart surgery. One of Darwish's closest friends, the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, told IPS that Dariwsh had to wait three months to obtain a U.S. visa. Zaqtan says that while the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem was supportive, they could not avoid the "complicated system" which Palestinians must wade through in order to obtain visas.