The man from Galilee

SPEAKING VOLUMES

How many homes did Mahmoud Darwish make for himself? Palestine’s greatest poet — some call him the greatest contemporary poet of the Arab world — was born in Birwe, a village in Galilee. He died on August 9 at the age of 67, of complications from open-heart surgery.

In 1948, his family fled to Lebanon; their village was destroyed by the Israeli army. They returned too late to be included in the census of Palestinian Arabs. By his twenties, Darwish was working as a journalist in Haifa and was placed under house arrest several times for leaving the town without the appropriate papers. (Until 1966, Haifa fell under Israel’s emergency laws; Darwish didn’t have the necessary documents.) He studied in Moscow; then he worked as a journalist at Al-Ahram in Cairo. Banned from returning to Israel, he lived in Beirut, Cyprus, Tunis; he found a stable home in Paris and only returned to Ramallah after 26 years of wandering — a near-Biblical length of time in the wilderness.

In ‘With The Mist So Dense From the Bridge’, Darwish set down some of what it means to be an exile:
My friend said to me,
“I do not want a place to be buried in.
I want a place to live in and curse, if I wish.”
Place passes like a gesture between us;
“What is place?” I asked.

For generations of Palestinians, Darwish became their voice. In July, he gave a reading in Ramallah — his last reading, though no one knew it then. It was attended by thousands. This was not unusual —when Darwish gave a recital in Beirut, many years ago, over 25,000 came to hear him. He was a throwback, in some ways, a reminder of an era when poetry was a part of the ordinary, day-to-day lives of most people, when poets spoke directly to readers who numbered in the thousands. In today’s world, especially in the West, poetry occupies the lowest, smallest shelf in the bookshop; Darwish came from a different place, a culture where poems were written to be sung in the streets, to be chanted by crowds, the daily quota of poetry just as important and ordinary as the daily loaf of bread.

Many Palestinians knew his poetry by heart. His works were often set to music, and most Palestinians grew up knowing the words to his most famous works. At his funeral, the well-known musician Marcel Khalife sang Darwish’s ‘My Mother’: “I long for my mother’s bread/ My mother’s coffee/ Her touch/ Childhood memories grow up in me/ Day after day/ I must be worthy of my life/ At the hour of my death/ Worth the tears of my mother.”

Darwish was often claimed as a symbol of the Palestinian cause, in part because of poems like ‘Identity Card’:
‘Put it on record.
I am an Arab.
I am a name without a title,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.’

He held a more nuanced view of his own position. Though Darwish had been a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, he had also resigned from it in dismay over the Oslo Accords, which he felt would be damaging for Palestinians. And when he spoke of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (who died in 2000, eight years before Darwish’s passing), it was with a recognition of the strange kinship between them.

They were both great poets, both survivors of bitter conflict, each other’s shadows, each a reminder of the other’s tortured history. Amichai wrote the moving ‘If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem’: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem,/ Let my blood be forgotten. /I shall touch your forehead, /Forget my own…” Darwish supplied the view from the other side, writing of Jerusalem: “My longing for you ... is a separation/And my meeting with you ... an exile!”

The words that did the rounds of the web most often in the week after Darwish died were taken from a different poem, one that spoke not of exile, but of life and death. Darwish’s life may have been shaped by Palestine and exile. But ‘Remainder of a Life’ was a reminder that he was also an ordinary man, a person who shaved once a day, who bought tangerines in the market, who preferred a quiet, almost reclusive life to the acclaim and adulation he was showered with at his infrequent public appearances.

“If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch…. I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.”

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