A few weeks before his death on August 9, 2008, Mahmoud Darwish took to the stage at the Ramallah Cultural Palace to give what would become his final poetry reading. In it, the poet put himself on trial against fate.
The Dice Player is widely regarded to be Darwish’s last major poetic statement. It is an existential self-examination, a lyrical reckoning with both his personal life and stature as a public figure.
The poem doesn’t quite have the assertion of Identity Card (1964) where Darwish commands: “Write down! I am an Arab.” Nor does it bear the outward verve of Earth Presses Against Us (1986), where he reflects on heroism and struggle with sentences like: “We write our names with crimson mist” and “Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees.”
Instead, with failing health and addressing a crowd of hundreds in the courtyard of the centre, Darwish began his last poem with a question: “Who am I to say to you what I say to you?”
The opening line was disarming. Here was a poet who was globally considered to be Palestine’s national voice – with steadfast verses that resisted occupation, exile and erasure – suddenly expressing self-doubt.
“I am a dice player. I win some and lose some,” he recited to the audience with a note of irony. His voice was sombre but controlled, audible across the courtyard and giving no hint of his ailing heart. “I am like you or slightly less.”
The poet seemed to question his own authority, as well as the role that he had found himself in. The lines dismantled his narrative voice, the poetic ‘I’ that had become an amplifier of Palestinian consciousness. It articulated a vulnerability that must have been strange for audiences to first hear.
In scrutinising his own voice, Darwish did more than express doubt. He questioned the role of the poet as a national symbol. The Dice Player became a reflection of the burdens of representation. It asked what it meant to speak not just as an individual but on behalf of a people.
The dice is a powerful metaphorical device in this context. Darwish invoked it to challenge the poet’s traditional authority, reframing his life as a product of arbitrary chance rather than heroic will.
But from this vulnerability, Darwish would go on to deliver what is arguably his most tenacious work. The Dice Player charges forth from the precipice of uncertainty to measure the poet’s entire life, tracing the twists and turns of his fate as a Palestinian, and the many chances that spared his life.
Several lines boom with poignant universal timbre, such as: “I could have been like my sister, who screamed then died not realising that she had been born for one hour and did not know her mother.”
But perhaps even more rousing are the verses that allude to the harrowing experiences that are familiar to many Palestinians. “I survived by chance: I was smaller than a military target and bigger than a bee wandering among the flowers of the fence” or a few lines after: “Fear kept up with me and I continued with it, barefooted, forgetting my little memories of what I wanted from tomorrow. There is no time for tomorrow.”
But the most memorable and haunting words are the ones that follow.
“I walk, haste, run, go up, go down, I scream, bark, howl, call, wail, I go faster, slower, fall down, slow down, dry, I walk, fly, see, do not see, stumble, I become yellow, green, blue, I split, break into tears, I get thirsty, tired, hungry, I fall down, get up, run, forget, I see, do not see, remember, hear, comprehend, I rave, hallucinate, mumble, scream, I can not, I groan, become insane, go astray, I become less, more, fall down, go up, and drop, I bleed, and I lose consciousness.”
The lines, written with transcendental rhythm, expound the tragedies Palestinians have been facing for decades. From here, the poem ramps up its cry against fate, gesturing towards Palestine as a whole.
“By chance this land became holy. Not because its lakes, hills and trees are replicas of paradise, but because a prophet walked here, prayed on a rock, it wept and the hill fell in fear of God then passed out, and by chance, the slope of a field in a country became a museum of dust.”
It is a lamenting survey of history, a mournful bird’s eye view that becomes all the more evocative as Darwish expresses his love for his native country: “I love you green. O green land. An apple ripples in light and water, green, your night is green, your dawn is green.” And then, with prescience, he adds: “Plant me gently.”
The poem, in its middle section, reprises the narrative resolve that Darwish had become renowned for, but he then returns to the introspection with which he began the work, acknowledging the luck that saved him from certain death, again and again, and gave him the chance to be a poet.
“Who am I to say to you what I say to you? I could have not been who I am. I could have not been here. The plane could have crashed that morning with me on board. I am lucky that I overslept and was late for the plane. I could have not seen Damascus or Cairo or the Louvre and the magical cities. Had I been a slow walker, the rifle could have cut off my shadow from the watchful cedar. Had I been a fast walker, I could have been hit by shrapnel and become a fleeting thought.”
As the poem concludes with Darwish expressing his fading luck against death, The Dice Player invites another reading, particularly with its refrain.
In saying “who am I to say to you what I say to you?”, Darwish is not so much diminishing his own voice as a poet as much as he is elevating the audience. The question becomes not so much an anthem of self-effacement but one that repositions authority. It acknowledges every listener and reader, passes back the baton of the poetic “I” that Darwish feels was never his to keep. It is a call to recognise one's own life, and how it was shaped by the dice of absurdity and adversity.
For Darwish, it may have been a conscious and elegant coda, the last words of a parent on their deathbed. Seventeen years after Darwish’s death, The Dice Player eerily echoes with the present carnage, especially in Gaza, where the boundaries of life and death are drawn by arbitrary violence.
The poem is haunting for its meditation on chance, but it is also an excellent example of the poetry of resistance and survival against oppression.
Late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was among those who attended Darwish’s funeral in Ramallah. In an article for The Guardian, he wrote about the “wave of people of all ages and affiliations, all trying hard to get as close as possible to the grave to say goodbye to their poet”. His account is a vivid documentation to the event. It also touches upon the legacy of Darwish as well as the role poetry plays in the Palestinian cause.
“Occupation and dictatorship do everything possible to suppress their victims' desire for any kind of self-expression,” he wrote. “But the victims do express themselves: they do it politically, through acts of resistance, and culturally, through songs, folk dances, handicrafts, memoirs and poems.
“By self-expression they achieve self-assertion, and this makes them stronger and guards them against self-pity and sentimentality. This explains the precious unwritten contract between Palestinian and Arab writers, as masters of expression, and their audience.
“Darwish gave them this without sacrificing his self-imposed aesthetic ambitions and rules. I think it is safe to say that this is what distinguished him among Arab poets. But Darwish did not come out of nowhere, and his absence will not be the end of excellent Palestinian poetry. This land needs its poets and will always have them.”
