A Tribute to Mahmoud Darwish
By Dr Shakil Akhtar Rai
Los Angeles, CA
Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian ‘poet of resistance’, whose blazing lyrics on the Palestinian experience of dispossession, occupation, alienation, and exile made him a leading cultural voice, and the most eminent Arabic poet of his time, breathed his last on August 9, in Houston, after undergoing heart surgery.
Pakistan’s leading Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mehmoud Darwish had many things common in the stories of their lives, political ideas, and the theme and diction of their poetry.
Darwish helped forge national consciousness of the Palestinian people and articulated their collective will to resist tyranny and injustice in all forms and places. Faiz attained poetic eminence after the creation of Pakistan and helped evolve a collective consciousness in delineating the ideals of the people in the new republic. Faiz exposed the hollowness of political leadership, and cruelty of the feudal system that continued to oppress those who had suffered most in the quest for a new homeland.
Like all great poets Darwish and Faiz transcended their personal experiences and group consciousness and transformed them into a universal message of eternal human struggle in the cosmic order. The trauma of eviction, the pain of exile, and deprivation of identity in Darwish’s life turned into searing lyrics of unremitting human sufferings, and struggle. Through his poetic genius he kept the torch of freedom alight in face of strong winds of opposition blowing in the dark nights.
Faiz and Darwish were heavy smokers, suffered heart problems that ultimately led to their deaths. Darwish lived without a homeland of his own, and yet his people gave him a ‘state funeral’ and showered great honorifics on him. Faiz lived in a free homeland and was buried relatively quietly without stately trappings.
Darwish was virtually a national poet and one of the most sought-after persons in literary circles. But, he always remained averse to public exposure and media spotlight. He was more comfortable with a small circle of friends. Faiz shared these personality traits with Darwish.
Darwish was born in 1941 in the village of Al Birwa. In 1948 when he was seven the family was forced to flee to Lebanon. A year later they sneaked back into their homeland and lived there illegally. Birwa along with 400 other Palestinian villages had been razed to make space for new settlements. Darwish and his family became internal refugees defined as “present-absent aliens.” This childhood experience made him realize why and how they were second-class citizen in their own land. As a schoolboy he wrote a poem for an anniversary of the foundation of Israel. In this poem, as Darwish recalled many years later, he addressed a Jewish classmate and said, ‘You can play in the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I can't. You have a house, and I have none. You have celebrations, but I have none. Why can't we play together?" He was summoned to see the military governor, who threatened him: "If you go on writing such poetry, I'll stop your father working in the quarry." Things have not changed for the people of Palestine in the last sixty years.
Darwish was imprisoned repeatedly for his writings and political activities. He was an active member of the Communist Party of Israel. He left the country second time in 1970 and lived in exile in Moscow, Cairo, Paris, Tunisia, and Beirut. The Soviet Union awarded him Lotus prize in 1969 and the Lenin peace prize in 1983. He won the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001. He was also awarded the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam in 2004. In his acceptance speech there he said, "A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life." Faiz also won the Lenin Peace Prize, and had communist leanings in his political orientations. The theme of being reborn from ones own self again and again is integral to Faiz’s poetry.
Darwish published his first collection of poetry Wingless Birds at the age of nineteen, followed by twenty-four publications; nineteen in poetry and five in prose. His works have been translated into more than 22 languages.
"Identity Card" (1964) was his first poem that brought him prominence. It said:
“Write down at the top of the first page:
I do not hate people.
I steal from no one.
However
If I am hungry
I will eat the flesh of my usurper.
Beware! Beware of my hunger
And of my anger.”
Darwish saw life through the Palestinian prism. In his poetry Palestine is not just a piece of land, it’s a metaphor, and a symbol for the loss of paradise, exile, dispossession, alienation, helplessness, sorrows, and resolve to keep going till the dawn breaks.
Refugee
They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.
