Literature is often used as a means to express grievances notably of national character. In Palestine, this has been carried out fully by Mahmoud Darwish. Indeed, as many people throughout history have been subjugated to a stronger group, the Palestinians have been so to the Israelis. The Palestinians believe that they have been forced to become second-class citizens in their native lands. The famous poet Mahmud Darwish (1942-2008), being one of them, has been exploring themes related to this situation in his poetry. He is Palestine’s foremost national poet.
Mahmud Darwish is considered as one of the leading Palestinian poets of the twentieth century to transmit his personal experience, to which many Palestinians can identify themselves. His personal experiences had greatly affected him and were the catalysts for his poetic imagination and voice. Darwish, through his personal experiences, felt cut off from the entirety of the Arab world and as if he was a second-class citizen in a Jewish state. He felt as if he had to fight to maintain his Palestinian identity. His personal experience that overlapped with the experiences of so many Palestinians owed him the qualification of a “national poet”.
Darwish is a Palestinian poet who was born in 1942, Birwa, Palestine (now Israel). He was the son of a farmer His family fled Israel’s war of independence in 1948 and spent a year as refugees in Lebanon, before returning to Israel. Their original village had been destroyed and replaced by a Jewish settlement, so the family settled in a new village nearby, in Galilee. Darwish’s formerly wealthy father was forced to work in a quarry to support the large family. Darwish married twice. His first was to Rana Kabbani.
Darwish had led the typical life of many Palestinians of the 1940’s- exile. He had been moving from country to country. His life had been spent between Egypt, Lebanon, USSR, and France. He was the editor of the newspaper Al-Ittihad, but then he moved to USSR, in 1971, for one year of study. He worked after that in Egypt for another newspaper called Al-Ahram, and in Beirut, Lebanon as an editor of the Journal “Palestinian Issues” (qtd. in Darwish, par.1). He had also been living intermittently in Paris until 1996 (qtd. in Tristam, 6), when he was allowed to go back to his homeland (qtd. in Hadid, par.11).
Besides his journalistic activities, Darwish had political affiliations which reflected the socio-political strife in his native land, Palestine. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization PLO (qtd. in Darwish, par. 1). The organization is, until now, the major liberation movement in Palestine.
Political commitment was also the backbone of Darwish’s literary activity. On a highly symbolic note, in July 2007, just one year before his death, Darwish had read some of his ideologically laden poetry in Haifa, Israel (Hadid, p.1). The context was the breakout of hostilities among the two major factions that de facto form resistance movements against Israel were fighting each other, claiming dozens of casualties (Hadid, p1, para.2-3).
Therefore, exile and political commitment had been two important elements in the life of Darwish. These two elements had, in turn, thematically fed his poetry. Indeed, Darwish is deemed as a “national poet” of the Palestinian people (qtd in Hadid, par. 2). His essays and poems have made him the spokesperson of two generations of Palestinians (Tristam, par.1), oppressed by the strife of life under the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Edward Said, another emblematic figure, has described him as “poetry for Darwish provides not simply access of unusual insight or a distant realm of fashioned order, but a harassing amalgam of poetry and collective memory, each pressing on the other. And the paradox deepens almost unbearably as the privacy of a dream is encroached on and even reproduced by a sinister, threatening reality” (qtd. in Anis, par. 15).
Darwish had produced a huge corpus of poetry that graphically describes the Palestinian experience of land loss. It would take more than a five pages paper to talk about them, but perhaps outlining, in what follows, the major literary phases that Darwish went through. Roughly speaking, critics group Darwish’s poetry into three phases, all of which seek to transmit the Palestinian experience of land loss.
In this first phase, since he was fourteen years old and up to 1972, the poetry he had produced was highly political. He had produced it before he was banned from going back to Israel and has been written under the influence of such world writers like Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Karl Marx (qtd. in Tristam, para. 4).
“Identity Card”, one of the most famous poems of Darwish is the product of this period. It was written in 1964 and it highly reflects the plight of Palestinians with regards to movement from and to Israel, in their native homes. They are usually bound with the notion of “passes”, a document that only Israel can issue and they determine who has the right to circulate in Israel and who does not. The poem reflects the issue of freedom and identity. Identity is somewhere between collective memory about native lands and the reality of having to go through Israeli security.
Right from the first verses, the vehemence of the emotions is conveyed:
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? (Darwish, 1964).
The poem reads also as a declaration cultural of freedom. The Arab identity is called out loud. Indeed, the poet is stressing his “Arabness. This is to say that he does not want to forget his roots and that his people should be proud and strive to preserve what differentiates them from others. When the poet states he has eight children, which in real life he does not, he is not being biographical in his art as much as he lends his voice to his people. It is common in fact among average Palestinians to have numerous children.
With such a particular poem, one understands, why Darwish was granted Lannan Prize in 2001 for cultural freedom (Lannan Cultural Freedom). The significance of such an “Identity Card”, is that undermines globalization and stresses the peculiarity of the Palestinian people, as Arabs, culturally pro-multiple children, and so on.
The second phase spans 1972-1982 when Darwish was exiled in Beirut, Lebanon. Now that he was forced to exile, the theme of land loss was displaced by that of nostalgia (qtd. in Tristan, para. 5). This phase and thematic change are illustrated in his memoir Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (qtd. in Tristan, para.). The memoir explores the theme of exile, taking elements both from personal experience and collective memory. Moreover, the historical background of the memoir is as its title denotes, the siege of Beirut in 1982.
The third phase is that spreads out from 1982 until his death. It is said that this phase marks a movement towards universalism and rejection (qtd. in Tristan, para. 8). This phase has been influenced by the historical-political changes, notably the Palestinians’ gaining governance over the city of Ramallah. According to the critics, this phase reflects a double rejection: the rejection of the Palestinian as brandished by the PLO and the rejection of political poetry (qtd. in Tristan, para. 8).
However, Darwish could hardly escape politics. One work, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words”, caused him trouble with the Israeli authorities who read it as an anti-Israel poem. One excerpt illustrates the locus of controversy:
It is time for you to be gone
Live wherever you like, but do not live among us
It is time for you to be gone
Die wherever you like, but do not die among us
For we have work to do in our land (Darwish 1987: Sachs, 2000)
The poem reads out as a patriotic piece and the words had indeed been interpreted as a rejection to the Israeli State. The poem is quite provocative. “It is time for you to be gone, Live wherever you like, but do not live among us”, these are words that explicitly call the Israelis to leave. They show a rejectionist political stand. Darwish redeems himself by explaining that he only meant the withdrawal to 1967 borders. In a New York Times article, Darwish defended his work and relativized its implications; he explained that he was calling for a going back to 1967 borders (qtd. in Sachs, par. 23).
Apart from this poem, the political charge that characterizes Darwish’s poetry has caused him controversy up to the final years of his life. Darwish was documenting the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such a landmark, for instance, as the signature of the Oslo Accord was believed to have been criticized allegorically in his poem “A Non-Linguistic Dispute With Imru’ al-Qays” (qtd. Antoon, p.66, par.3). Just recently, in the year 2000, putting at the table the question of whether to teach some of Darwish’s works in Israeli school has brought controversy to Ehud Barak’s government that concluded in deciding that Israel was not ready yet for it (qtd. in Antoon, p.66, par.3). This is to say that until his final days, Darwish’s powerful poetry has been nurturing debate, if not controversy.
Conclusion
Indeed, Darwish by the militant and committed poetry he engaged into had always been a source for debate. Nevertheless, whether the message he conveyed was well-received or ill-received, no one would deny that Mahmud Darwish is indeed one of the major Arab and Palestinian poets. His poetry, by about literature, would always bear various interpretations.
What should be retained is that Mahmoud Darwish is deemed as a “national poet” for the Palestinian people. He had tried to convey the condition and the plight of the Palestinian man. He shared many of the grievances that his people have been suffering from, notably exile, land loss, and nostalgia. He also stressed the cultural peculiarity of the Palestinian people, notably through his poem “identity card”. In other words, Darwish is a good embodiment of committed literature and his works show the close link between literary art and reality.
Bibliography
Darwish, Mahmoud. “Biography”, Mahmoud Darwish Official website. Web.
Tristam, Pierre. “Profile: Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet of Loss and Exile, 1942-2008”. Web.
Darwish, Mahmud. “Identity Card”, Media Monitors, 1964. Web.
Lannan, Official Website. “Lannan Cultural Freedom”, Lannan Official Website. Web.
Antoon, Sinan. “Mahmud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, (2002): 66-77.
Anis, Mona. “In memoriam: Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish”, Al Ahram Weekly, 2008.
Hadid, Diaa. “Palestinian poet blasts infighting”, AP News, 2007.
Sachs, Susan. “Ramallah Journal: Poetry of Arab Pain: Are Israeli Students Ready?”, The New York Times, 2000.
Darwīsh, Mahmūd, Muhawi, Ibrahim. “Introduction” In Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, University of California Press, 1995.