Mahmoud Darwish’s poems are ever relevant to the conditions of Palestinians, particularly now in Gaza.
The beauty of Gaza is that our voices do not reach it.
Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist from the enemy’s face.
Gaza is devoted to rejection…
Hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection…”
Extracts from Silence for Gaza, Mahmoud Darwish (1973)
These are the words of celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, penned 50 years ago and perhaps more poignant now than ever as Gaza is devastated by more than five months of an Israeli onslaught that has killed more than 31,000 people and destroyed vast swaths of its infrastructure.
Born on March 13, in 1941, Darwish is feted as Palestine’s national poet for his words expressing the longing of Palestinians deprived of their homeland, which was taken by Zionist militias to make way for present-day Israel.
His poetry gave voice to the pain of Palestinians living as refugees and those under Israeli occupation for nearly a century.
Today, media remembers Darwish, whose words are relevant today as the hopes of a free Palestine struggle against increasing Israeli control of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Darwish died in 2008 after open-heart surgery leaving behind more than 30 collections of lyrical Arabic poetry.
Translated into 39 languages, Darwish’s laments of loss, longing and exile spoke to people struggling against occupation around the world.
“In the absence of a fair response to Palestinian political outcries, poetry has helped to give shape and voice to what they have lost,” he tells media.
Darwish did just that, becoming the voice of the Palestinian people.
On this Earth, there is what makes life worthwhile:
On this earth is the Lady of Earth, the mother of all beginnings, the mother of all endings.
Her name was Palestine.
Her name became Palestine.
My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.
On this Earth (year unknown)
The second of eight children, Darwish was born to a modest farming family in the village of Barweh, Akka (Acre) – an Arab city destroyed by Zionist militias in 1948, its remains absorbed into Israel.
The power of poetry
At the age of six, Darwish saw his village razed to the ground along with hundreds of others during the Nakba of 1948 during the founding of Israel.
His family joined 750,000 other Palestinians forced into exile, fleeing violent attacks by Zionist militias and the newly formed Israeli military, in search of a safe home elsewhere.
They moved to Deir al-Asad, a Palestinian village about 15km (nine miles) away, where they tried to rebuild their lives as internally displaced people (IDPs), unable to return to their home.
Thousands of Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 were dubbed “present-absent aliens” — physically present, but returning to their properties because they were absent when Israel took those over, since they had fled fearing violence.
Among the exiled was also renowned Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, also from Akka, who was 12 in 1948.
They would join the wave of revolutionary Palestinian writers like Samih al-Qasim (How I Became an Article), Fadwa Tuqan (The Night and the Horsemen) and Tawfiq Zayyad (Here We Will Stay) who would go on to unpack themes of exile, identity and resistance. Darwish would later say, “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”
A 14-year-old Darwish read out a poem he had written in class, at his school in Kafr Yasif (11km or seven miles from Akka). The poem described a Palestinian boy complaining to a Jewish boy:
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?
Israel’s military officials decided to answer the question the poem posed — by threatening Darwish that if he continued with such poetry, his father could lose his job at the local quarry.
Undeterred, Darwish kept writing his poems, with his early works — soon after he completed high school — appearing in left-wing newspapers.
His poetry spread, going on to be “sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren”, write Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche in the introduction to the English translation of his works: Unfortunately, it was Paradise.
His writings were read by Palestinian children. His poems were sampled in songs, painted on the walls of buildings in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and beyond – camps that were built to be temporary.
In March 2000, Yossi Sarid, Israel’s education minister, suggested including Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum but Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him.
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