MAHMOUD DARWISH

Mahmoud Darwish(13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008)

 

 

Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee. He was the second child of Salim and Houreyyah Darwish. His family were landowners. His mother was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read. After Israeli forces assaulted his village of al-Birwa in June 1948 the family fled to Lebanon, first to Jezzin and then Damour. The village was then razed and destroyed by the Israeli army to prevent its inhabitants from returning to their homes inside the new Jewish state.A year later, Darwish's family returned to the Acre area, which was now part of Israel, and settled in Deir al-Asad. Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif, two kilometers north of Jadeidi. He eventually moved to Haifa.

He published his first book of poetry, Asafir bila ajniha or Wingless Birds, at the age of nineteen. He initially published his poems in Al Jadid, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, eventually becoming its editor. Later, he was Assistant Editor of Al Fajr, a literary periodical published by the Israeli Workers Party (Mapam). Darwish was impressed by the Arab poets Abed al-Wahab al Bayati and Bader Shaker al-Sayab. 

As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his political activism and for publicly reading his poetry. He joined the official Communist Party of Israel, the Rakah, in the 1960s. In 1970, he left for Russia, where he attended the University of Moscow for one year, and then moved to Cairo. He lived in exile for twenty-six years, between Beirut and Paris, until his return to Israel in 1996, after which he settled in Ramallah in the West Bank. 

Considered Palestine’s most eminent poet, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was 22. Since then, Darwish has published approximately thirty poetry and prose collections which have been translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Some of his more recent poetry titles include The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger(1999), Psalms (1995), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?(1994), and The Music of Human Flesh (1980).

Darwish was an editor for a Palestine Liberation Organization monthly journal and the director of the group’s research center. In 1987 he was appointed to the PLO executive committee, and resigned in 1993 in opposition to the Oslo Agreement. He served as the editor-in-chief and founder of the literary review Al-Karmel, published out of the Sakakini Centre since 1997

About Darwish’s work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, “Mahmoud Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging, exquisitely tuned singer of images that invoke, link, and shine a brilliant light into the world’s whole heart. What he speaks has been embraced by readers around the world—his in an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered.”

His awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of intellectual merit handed to him by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize.

Darwish died on August 9, 2008, in Houston, TX, after complications from heart surgery.

The Earth is Closing on Us

The Earth is closing on us 
pushing us through the last passage 
and we tear off our limbs to pass through. 
The Earth is squeezing us. 
I wish we were its wheat 
so we could die and live again. 
I wish the Earth was our mother 
so she'd be kind to us.

I wish we were pictures on the rocks 
for our dreams to carry as mirrors. 
We saw the faces of those who will throw 
our children out of the window of this last space. 
Our star will hang up mirrors. 
Where should we go after the last frontiers ? 
Where should the birds fly after the last sky ? 
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air ? 
We will write our names with scarlet steam. 
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh. 
We will die here, here in the last passage. 
Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Earth Is Closing on Us", trans. Abdullah al-Udhari, in Victims of a Map (London: al-Saqi Books, 1984), p. 13.