Mahmoud Darwish:

Palestine's Poet of Exile

By Natiiaiie Handai
"Absent, I come to the home ofthe absent,"
the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other
poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory
the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris
or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government offi-
cials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students.
In bis latest coWemon, Judarieh (Mural), the poet
finds himself in between love and death, wondering
which of the two will conquer. "After the stranger's
night, who am I?" Darwish writes. So, when I speak
to him by phone on March 22, I ask him who he is.
He rapidly responds, "I still do not know."
On many occasions he has expressed the notion that
only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated
by war: "Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by
confirming its attachment to human fragility like a
blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march
by," he has written. I ask him if he still believes that.
"I thought poetry could change everything, could
change history and could humanize, and I think that
the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be
involved and to believe," he responds, "but now I
think that poetry changes only the poet."
Darwish has published twenty books of poetry,
Nathalie Handal is a poet and writer living in New
York and London. She is the author of a poetry book,
"The Neverfield" (Post Apollo Press, 1999), and is the
editor of an anthology called "The Poetry of Arab
Women" (Interlink 2001).
five books of prose, and his books have been translat-
ed into more than twenty-two languages. He has won
numerous awards, including the Lotus Prize (1969);
the Lenin Peace Prize (1983); France's highest medal,
the Knight of Arts and Letters (1993); and this April
he will be honored with the Lannan Foundation Prize
for Cultural Freedom.
"1 am still not a poet, and sometimes I regret I
chose this way," he tells me. Still, he is finishing his
forthcoming book of poetry. State of Siege.
His work speaks of his internal exile and uproot-
edness, his meditations on his historical, collective,
and personal past. Many of his poems mirror the loss
of homeland, the frtistrations of being under siege, of
being occupied. Here is a couplet from "The Earth Is
Closing on Us":
Where should we go after the last frontiers,
where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Other poems allude to myths, draw parallels
between the Native American and the Palestinian
experiences, speak of his mother, or address a Jewish
lover. In "Rita and the Rifle," he writes:
24 May 2002
Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle. . . .
Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes
from yours.
In "A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies," he writes
to his Jewish friends:
/ want a good heart
Not the weight of a gun's magazine.
I refuse to die
Turning my gun my love
On women and children.
He describes Palestine as a metaphorfor exile,
for the human condition, for the grief of dislocation
and dispossession. In "Eleven Planets in the Last
Andalusian Sky," he writes:
Tm the Adam of two Edens lost to me twice:
Expel me slowly. Kill me slowly
With Garcia Lorca
Under my olive tree.
D
arwish was born in 1941 in the village of Bir-
weh in the upper Galilee of Palestine. The cre-
ation of Israel in 1948 meant the wiping of
Palestine off the map and the destruction of 417 Pales-
tinian villages. Darwish's village was one of them. The
same year, he fled with some members of his family to
Lebanon. Months later, he returned "illegally," but too
late to be included in Israel's census of the Palestinian
Arabs who remained. There was no record of his exis-
tence. Thus started his absent-present status. When
Darwish eventually left in 1970, his absence made him
even more present in the consciousness of Palestinians,
and his poems became extremely popular, especially
"Identity Card," written in 1964, and excerpted here:
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. . .
Early on, he discovered he could write, and that
"The Palestinian people feel that
they are living the hours before dawn.
Their national will is stronger in
reaction to the challenge. They do
not have another option but to
continue to carry the hope that they
are going to have a normal life."
The Progressive 25
his words were weapons. Darwish tells me that his
childhood dream was to be a poet, adding that he
published his first poem when he was about twelve
years old. "It was not a love poem," he says. "1
described our journey from Palestine to Lebanon."
Darwish published his first collection when he was
about eighteen or nineteen years old. Some were love
poems, he says, and some were political poems. "I was
very strongly influenced by Al-Mutanabbi and the
Mahjar poets (emigrant poets such a Kahlil Gibran)
and modern Arab poets such as Qabbani, Al-Sayyab,"
he says. When I ask if any Western poets influenced
him, he says, "Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Yeats, and
today, Derek Walcott is probably my favorite poet. 1
also like the Polish poets, especially Symborska."
In 1960, Darwish graduated from high school and
moved to Haifa, where he became editor and transla-
tor for al-Ittihad da'dy and al-fadidweekly, published
by the Rakah (Communist) Party. In 1970, tbe poet
left for Moscow to study political economy, and from
then on his life was one migration after another. In
1971, he arrived in Cairo to work ^or Al-Ahram daily.
It was the first time he went to an Arab country, the
first time he saw everything written in Arabic.
In 1973, he went to Beirut, where he edited Pales-
tinian Affairs, published by the Center for Palestinian
Studies. He joined the P.L.O. soon after and played a
significant role in it. And he became the unofficial
poet of Palestine, a description he rejects. "1 do not
like the label; it is a burden," he says to me.
In 1981, he fotmded and became editor ofthe pio-
neering literary journal Al Karmel. But the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon led the poet on yet anoth-
er migration, this time to Tunis and Cairo, and he
eventually settled in Paris. In 1993, he resigned from
the P.L.O. Executive Committee and protested the
Oslo accord, saying that he wanted peace but a fair
one. Darwisb says that real peace means being equal
with the Israeli society, and that the Palestinian peo-
ple should have the right to return, that the question
of the refugees, of Jerusalem, of the settlements
should be resolved, and of course, Palestinians must
have the right to self-determination.
After thirteen years in Paris, Darwish immigrated to
Jordan in 1995, and in 1996 started living berween
Amman and Ramaliah, where he continues to edit Al
Karmel. During a brief visit in 1995 to Galilee and
Jerusalem (Israel granted him permission to return for
the fianeral of his friend the writer Emile Habibi, and an
unlimited stay in Palestinian self-rule areas ofthe West
Bank), he said that he "felt like a child." Thousands
waited for him, welcomed him, told him he was loved,
and asked him to stay. He was deeply moved, cried, and
said he would never leave. But he was not given permis-
sion to stay in his hometown for more than a few days.
He still longs to go bome, "although I might realize that
the harshest exile is in my homeland," he says. Thus,
Darwish remains a stranger passing through.
When he lived in Israel, the government harassed
him and several times put him in prison or placed
him under house arrest for reading his poetry.
In 1988, one of his poems, "Passing Between the
Passing Words," was even discussed in the Knesset.
He wrote:
So leave our land
Our shore, our sea
Our wheat, our salt, our wound.
Israelis claimed he was demanding that the Jews
leave Israel. Darwish disputed that, saying he meant
they should leave the West Bank and Gaza.
Yossl Sarid, who was Israel's education minister,
suggested in March 2000 that some of Darwish's
poems should be included in the Israeli high school
curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak
declared, "Israel is not ready."
D
arwish insists that terror is not a means to
justice. "Nothing, nothing justifies terror-
ism," he wrote, condemning the September
11 attack on the United States in the Palestinian daily
Al Ayyam. Concerning the current situation, he tells
me: "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."
I ask him how he sees the future. The Israelis can-
not "give us back our house but live in our garden, in
our living room," he says, his voice rising. I ask
whether a Palestinian state will exist. In a firm voice
he tells me, "A Palestinian state already exists." He
adds, "The Palestinian people feel that they are living
the hours before dawn. Their national will is stronger
in reaction to the challenge. They do not have anoth-
er option but to continue to carry the hope that they
are going to have a normal life."
He says there is a simple solution that only seems
complicated and that the two sides can resolve the ques-
tions ofthe borders and all the other issues under nego-
tiation. He repeats a number of times, "There is hope."
After a lifetime of longing, perhaps Darwish is too
optimistic, too wishful. A few days after our conver-
sation, Israel sends tanks into Ramaliah. 1 call Dar-
wish back, finding him this time in Amman, Jordan.
His voice, far and fading, tells me that it is all "so bar-
baric, so cynical."
But I get the impression that he still feels there is a
place to go "after the last frontiers. . . after the last sky."*
26 May 2002