Remembering Mahmud Darwish (1941––2008)

Abstract

AN AURA OF INFINITE SADNESS seemed to attach to Mahmud Darwish over the nearly four decades I knew him. In spite of his rapier wit, jovial affect, and sociable nature, he always carried himself with a reserve that seemed to bespeak an inner sorrow, as if he perceived wrenching tragedies deeper than the rest of us could fathom. His poetry, especially when he recited it, conveyed the same sense of seeing the entire course of the inexorable fate of his people, even as his words gave voice to the indomitable spirit of ordinary Palestinians. This deep wisdom was not derived from his close brushes with death at the time of his two previous heart operations, in 1984 and 1998; the same knowing, worldly awareness of human mortality and frailty was there much earlier, even in the defiant, engaged poems he recited to rapturous crowds when he first achieved fame and renown throughout the Arab world in the 1970s and early 1980s. But Darwish knew that death pursued him, and often wrote about it in his poetry. In the last poem he ever recited publicly, at Arles in July 2008, “A Prepared Scenario,” he described how he and his enemy were trapped in a hole, and matter-of-factly concluded, “It is up to another poet to follow this scenario to its end.”∗ Mahmud Darwish was one of the finest poets of his entire generation— in Palestine certainly, possibly in the Arab world, and perhaps even beyond. In part this was because he incarnated in his personal itinerary all the many dimensions of the Palestinian experience, to which he gave such eloquent voice. Born in Mandate Palestine, Darwish experienced expulsion, flight, and the loss of his home as a small child. He grew up in Galilee as an “internal refugee” living in a village next door to his destroyed natal village of al-Birwa, under the harsh military rule imposed for nearly two decades on the Palestinians inside Israel. His education included a spell in an Israeli prison—that training ground of Palestinian militants and intellectuals—where he wrote one of his most famous poems, “Sajjil ana ‘arabi” (“Record! I Am an Arab”; published in English under the title “Identity Card”). He then experienced exile, notably for over ten years in Beirut when the PLO was located there.