RAMALLAH, WEST BANK // In the end, death came for Mahmoud Darwish far from the land that had defined him and his work. Darwish, the pre-eminent Palestinian poet, writer and voice of a people, died yesterday night in Houston, Texas, after complications from heart surgery on Wednesday. He was 67. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of national mourning. "It is painful to my heart and soul to announce to the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people, as well as freedom lovers everywhere, that Mahmoud Darwish, the knight of Palestine, has died," Mr Abbas said.
Tributes poured in throughout yesterday. Khaled Mishaal, the Hamas leader in exile, calling Darwish a "pillar of Palestinian literature" in a statement issued from Damascus. In a culture where poetry remains the ultimate literary expression, Darwish towered above his peers. Many of his poems were popularised in song, notably Rita, Birds of Galilee and I Yearn for My Mother's Bread, and many of his phrases entered the popular vernacular.
He described the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a "struggle between two memories", and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as "the king of waiting". The political context and defiance of his poetry struck a powerful chord for Palestinians, who could identify with his message that "words are stones" and his account of his people as isolated from their Arab neighbours, notably in the poem I Am Yusef, based on the biblical story of Yusef/Joseph, who was rejected by his brothers.
"Oh my father, I am Yusef / Oh father, my brothers neither love me nor want me in their midst." The poem was controversial, not least because it included a verse from the Quran, and Marcel Khalife, the Lebanese singer and musician who set the poem to music in 1999, landed in court on blasphemy charges. Darwish published his first collection of poetry in 1960, but was recognised as a major voice with his second collection, Awraq al-Zeitun (Leaves of Olives), which included the defining poem Identity Card, an angry and defiant poetic encounter with an Israeli soldier.
"Record!" Darwish told his fictional interlocutor, "I am an Arab. I have a name without a title / Patient in a country / Where people are enraged". Darwish was born in 1942 in the Galilean village of al Birwa, which was destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948. He was politically active at a young age and joined the Israeli Communist Party in 1961 but was also active in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, for which he was arrested several times. In 1970 he left for Moscow, then Cairo before joining up with the PLO in Lebanon in 1973.
He stayed throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and described the Israeli bombing of Beirut and Palestinian resistance in another major collection, Memory for Forgetfulness (1995). He was elected to the PLO executive committee in 1987, but resigned in 1993 after the Oslo Accords. In 1996, he returned for the first time in 26 years to the Palestinian territories to visit his mother and settled in Ramallah. By then, his work had become more introspective.
"Since the 1980s, there was an inward turn," said Nathalie Khankan, whose doctorate at Stanford University is on contemporary Palestinian poetry and literature. "His poetry tended towards the more personal away from the national, even though this is only commonly recognised as having taking place later, especially and most conspicuously with Al Jidariyya [The Mural] in 2000. But in work from the 1990s and on, [Darwish] was seeking new poetic expression, experimenting with form and voice."
The inward turn was not without controversy among his readers, who had come to expect him to express their anger and frustrations for them. It was a controversy Darwish himself acknowledged and struggled with. "I am the one designated 'the Poet of Palestine', and I am required to fix my place within the language, to protect my reality from the myth and be the master of each, so as to be both part of history and witness to what it has put me through," he wrote in a preface to a 2000 anthology of his work.
"But how to realise the journey from the poet's interiority to his exteriority, then from his exteriority to his interiority? "How not to drown in one's 'ego' nor lose it by changing into a spokesman and representative of one's people?" These questions were briefly put aside in 2007, when, angry at the fighting between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, Darwish recited a poem damning the fighting as "a public attempt at suicide in the streets".
"No one was able to provide the kind of subtle commentary that he could," Ms Khankan said. "His was a very big and pervasive presence." Darwish published more than 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose. He was translated into more than 22 languages and won several literary prizes including the Lotus Prize in 1969, the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983 and the Lannan Foundation Prize in 2001. Darwish often reappraised his role as a writer and a poet and did not always come up with comforting answers.
"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanise," he said in a 2002 interview with The Progressive magazine. "And I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe. But now I think that poetry changes only the poet." Nevertheless, his poetry has inspired generations of new Palestinian artists and poets, both directly and indirectly.
Basil Zayed, a 29-year-old Palestinian musician based in Ramallah who set part of one Darwish poem from the collection Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? to music on his first album Hada Leil (This Night), said Darwish had served as a prime example of how to live as an artist. "I think what I learnt from him was to be an artist of your time. That is the most important lesson." Darwish is due to be buried in Ramallah Tuesday.
@Email:okarmi@thenational.ae
