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Life is possible on this earth: the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, April-May

2011 On a bright winter morning we made a pilgrimage to the hill of Al Rabweh, on the outskirts of Ramallah, where the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. An ambitious m emorial garden is planned, but at the moment its a construction site littered wit h diggers and cement mixers. The oversize tombstone is crated up in plywood. We were welcomed by cheerful building workers and joined by Palestinian families pa ying their respects and taking snaps. Sitting amid the pines overlooking the tom b (and a nearby waste ground populated by stray dogs), we spent an hour reading Darwishs State of Siege, a sequence of poems he wrote in response to Israels 2002 assault on the city. Here he called on poetry to lay siege to your siege but obser ved bitterly that: This land might just be cinched too tight for a population of humans and gods Darwish was six in 1948 when his family fled their village in western Galilee. W hen they returned a year later they found the village destroyed and their land o ccupied. Since they had missed the census they were denied Israeli citizenship a nd declared present-absentees, an ambiguous status which Darwish was to transform into a metaphor for Palestine and much more. He was 22 when he read his poem Identity Card, with its defiant refrain Record: I a m an Arab, to a cheering crowd in a Nazareth movie house. Repudiating Golda Meirs assertion there are no Palestinians, his poems played a key role in the Palestinia n movement that emerged after 1967, fashioning a modern Palestinian identity usi ng traditional poetic forms in a renewed, accessible Arabic. Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, Darwish left Israel in 1970 and remained in exile for more than a quarter of a century. His political journey led from the I sraeli Communist Party to the PLO, which he joined in 1973 (pennng Arafats famous Dont let the olive branch fall from my hand speech to the UN). He settled in Beiru t, from which he was expelled along with the PLO following the Israeli invasion of 1982, the subject of his inventive and harrowing prose memoir, Memory for For getfulness. In the years that followed, Darwish wandered Tunis, Cyprus, Damascus, Athens, Pa ris broadening his poetic scope and deepening his insight. He was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 1987 but resigned in 1993 in protest at the Oslo acc ords. There was no clear link between the interim period and the final status, an d no clear commitment to withdraw from the occupied territories, he explained. Its said that when Arafat complained to Darwish that the Palestinian people were ung rateful, the poet (remembering Brecht) snapped back, Then find yourself another pe ople. 240px-MahmoudDarwish Oslo did allow Darwish to return to Palestine and in 1996 he settled in Ramallah , only to find himself under siege again six years later. In his last years he w rote more prolifically then ever, responding to the tragedies of Iraq, Lebanon a nd the violent conflict between Palestinian factions: Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on our handst o realize that we are no angelsas we thought? Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin? How much we lied when we said: we are the exception! When Darwish died in 2008, thousands joined the cortege and there were candle-li t vigils in towns across the West Bank and Gaza. The PA declared three days or m

ourning and issued a series of postage stamps in his honour. Being the Palestinian national poet was a heavy burden, one which Darwish bore f rom an early age, and though he chafed under it he never shirked the load. Inste ad, he succeeded in transforming the Palestinian experience into a universal one . The themes of loss, exile, the search for justice, the dream of a homeland, th e conundrum of identity: all became, as his work evolved, human and existential explorations, without ceasing for a moment to be rooted deeply in the vicissitud es of Palestinian life. For decades he mourned Palestines losses, denounced its t ormentors, celebrated its perseverance, and imagined its future. And we have a land without borders, like our idea of the unknown, narrow and wide we shout in its labyrinth: and we still love you, our love is a hereditary illness. Though preserving Palestinian memory and identity was his lifes work, Darwish con ceived of this as a creative act of self-renewal. Identity is what we bequeath an d not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember. Among his last ve rses was this admonition: We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the foot ball pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba Darwish was a national poet who challenged as well as consoled and inspired his na tional audience. As he moved away from his earlier declamatory, public style tow ards a more personal idiom, elliptical and oblique, and at times (unpardonable s in for a national poet) obscure, he met resistance. The biggest achievement of my l ife is winning the audiences trust, he reflected in 2002, We fought before: wheneve r I changed my style, they were shocked and wanted to hear the old poems. Now th ey expect me to change; they demand that I give not answers but more questions.

Even in translation, where we miss so much, Darwishs voice rings clear. In his ma ture style theres a seductive fluidity: he moves lightly from realm to realm, pro noun to pronoun (I to we, I to you, us to them), from the intimate to the epic, re, abstract to concrete. Metaphors topple over each other, abundant and inter-l aced. This is poetry that fuses the political and the personal at the deepest le vel. At the tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, Ramallah At the tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, Ramallah Throughout, his evocation of loss and exile, of coming from a country with no pas sport stamps, is poignant, elegiac but open-ended, conjuring resolution from desp air: We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing, There is yet another r oad in the road, another chance for migration, Where should we go after the last b order? Where should birds fly after the last sky?, In my language there is seasick ness. / In my language a mysterious departure from Tyre..: Guests on the sea. Our visit is short. And the earth is smaller than our visit where are we to go when we leave? Where are we to go back to when we return? What is left us that we may set off once again? Yet, convinced that Out of the earthly/ the hidden heavenly commences, Darwish aff irmed the richness and beauty of life, especially life in its ordinariness:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: Aprils hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a womans point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flutes sigh and the invaders fear o f memories. In one of his late poems, Darwish pays tribute to his friend Edward Said, puttin g this advice in Saids mouth: Do not describe what the camera sees of your wounds Shout so that you hear yourself, shout so that you know that you are still alive , and you know life is possible on this earth.

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