Homage to Mahmoud Darwish

I returned to Cairo last night after a long vacation back home in the U.S. to learn the tragic news that the poet Mahmoud Darwish had died over the weekend. Fittingly, he will be accorded a state funeral by Palestinians in Ramallah Tuesday.

French edition of interviews with Palestine's poet laureate

Darwish's unexpected passing is a sad blow to Palestinians, for fewer people did more to articulate the Palestinian identity or instill pride and hope in the Palestinian cause. Golda Meir once famously said that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. Through his piercing works like The Earth is Closing on Us, Birds Die in Galilee, A Voice from the Olive Grove, Leaving the Mediterranean Coast, Letter from Exile and Homeland, no single Palestinian did more to demonstrate otherwise. It was probably Yasser Arafat's guerrilla movement that made Israelis eventually reverse Meir's estimation of Palestinians. But the Palestinian cause would have fared better and the world would be a safer place if we had paid more heed to Darwish and the cultural power he represented. It is said that Darwish penned the memorable words Arafat spoke at the United Nations in 1974, "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

Darwish, who died at age 67 apparently after heart surgery in Texas, was born in El-Barweh, a village near the port city of Haifa, shortly before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. (El-Barweh, as with many Arab villages, was later razed by the Israel authorities.) He remained in Israel and became an Israeli citizen along with thousands of other Arabs who did not become permanent refugees and exiles in Israel's 1948 War of Independence. The son of a farmer, fluent in Hebrew, Darwish began writing poems for leftist newspapers and eventually departed Israel in the early 1970s to study in the Soviet Union before settling in Lebanon and later France. He moved to the West Bank in 1996 although he had resigned from the PLO to protest Arafat's Oslo Accords peace agreement with Israel. Darwish, who had grudgingly agreed to sit on Arafat's Executive Committee, accepted the principle of a two-state solution but doubted--so far, correctly--that the Oslo deal, which he felt was a sell-out to Israel, would lead to a genuine Palestinian state. More likely, he said, to further conflict.

Darwish's poems remain with us as a moving chronicle of the bitter yet rich and hopeful Palestinian experience. His words are sometimes angry, often compassionate, always human. His first collection in the '60s included perhaps his best known poem, which presaged much of the terrible violence between Palestinians and Israelis that followed in future decades. Identity Card is arranged in the manner of a simple Palestinian addressing some unspecified Israeli authority. Edward Said said the poem "did not represent as much as embody the Palestinian, whose political identity in the world had pretty much been reduced to a name on an identity card." Here's the ending:

Therefore!
Record on the top of the first page:
I do not hate man
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper's flesh will be my food
Beware--beware--of my hunger
And my anger!

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo