Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in al-Birwa in the Western Galilee,[5] the second child of Salim and Houreyyah Darwish. His family were landowners. His mother was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read.[3] During the War of Independence by Israelis or the Nakba by Palestinians, his village was captured by Israeli forces and the family fled to Lebanon, first to Jezzine and then Damour.[6] Their home village was razed and destroyed by the IDF[7][8][9] to prevent its inhabitants from returning to their homes inside the new Jewish state.[10][11]
A year later, Darwish's family returned to the Acre area in Israel, and settled in Deir al-Asad.[12] Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif, two kilometers north of Jadeidi. He eventually moved to Haifa.
He published his first book of poetry, Asafir bila ajniha, or "Wingless Birds," at the age of 19. He initially published his poems in Al Jadid, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, eventually becoming its editor. Later, he was assistant editor of Al Fajr, a literary periodical published by the Israeli Workers Party (Mapam).[13]
Darwish left Israel in 1970 to study in the Soviet Union (USSR).[14] He attended the Lomonosov Moscow State University for one year,[3] before moving to Egypt and Lebanon.[15] When he joined the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in 1973, he was banned from reentering Palestine.[3]
In 1995, he returned to attend the funeral of his colleague, Emile Habibi, receiving a permit to remain in Haifa for four days.[16] That year Darwish was allowed to settle in Ramallah.[17]
Darwish was twice married and divorced. His first wife was the writer Rana Kabbani. After they divorced, in the mid-1980s, he married an Egyptian translator, Hayat Heeni. He had no children.[3] The "Rita" of Darwish's poems was a Jewish woman whom he loved when he was living in Haifa; he revealed in an interview with French journalist Laure Adler that her name is Tamar Ben-Ami.[18] The relationship was the subject of the film Write Down, I Am an Arab by filmmaker Ibtisam Mara'ana.
Darwish had a history of heart disease, suffering a heart attack in 1984. He had two heart operations, in 1984 and 1998.[3]
His final visit to Israel was on 15 July 2007, to attend a poetry recital at Mt. Carmel Auditorium in Haifa.[19] There, he criticized the factional violence between Fatah and Hamas as a "suicide attempt in the streets."[20]
Literary career
Over his lifetime of 67 years, Darwish published more than 30 volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. At one time or another, he was editor of the periodicals Al Jadid, Al Fajr, Shu'un Filastiniyya, and Al Karmel. He was also one of the contributors of Lotus, a literary magazine financed by Egypt and the Soviet Union.[21]
By the age of seventeen, Darwish was writing poetry about the suffering of the refugees in the Nakba and the inevitability of their return, and had begun reciting his poems at poetry festivals.[22] Seven years later, on 1 May 1965, when the young Darwish read his poem "Bitaqat huwiyya" ["Identity Card"] to a crowd in a Nazareth movie house, there was a tumultuous reaction. Within days the poem had spread throughout the country and the Arab world.[23] Published in his second volume "Leaves of Olives" (Haifa, 1964), the six stanzas of the poem repeat the cry "Write down: I am an Arab."[24] His 1966 "To My Mother" became an unofficial Palestinian anthem,[25] and his 1967 poem "A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies"[a] about a conversation with a young Shlomo Sand as an Israeli soldier stirred debate due to its portrayal of the Israeli soldier.[26][27][25]: 55–61 [28]: 19 Darwish's poems were translated into Danish and published in various publications, including Politisk Revy.[29]
In the 1970s, "Darwish, as a Palestinian poet of the Resistance committed himself to the ... objective of nurturing the vision of defeat and disaster (after the June War of 1967), so much so that it would 'gnaw at the hearts' of the forthcoming generations."[30] Darwish addressed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in Ward aqall [Fewer Roses] (1986) and "Sa-ya'ti barabira akharun" ("Other Barbarians Will Come").[31]
Darwish's work has won numerous awards and been published in 20 languages.[32] A central theme in Darwish's poetry is the concept of watan or homeland. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that Darwish "is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging..."[33] Among his awards was the "Cultural Freedom Prize" by the United States Lannan Foundation, for the stated purpose of recognizing "people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression."[34]
Writing style
Darwish's early writings are in the classical Arabic style. He wrote monorhymed poems adhering to the metrics of traditional Arabic poetry. In the 1970s he began to stray from these precepts and adopted a "free-verse" technique that did not abide strictly by classical poetic norms. The quasi-Romantic diction of his early works gave way to a more personal, flexible language, and the slogans and declarative language that characterized his early poetry were replaced by indirect and ostensibly apolitical statements, although politics was never far away.[35]
Literary influences
Darwish was impressed by the Iraqi poets Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.[6] He cited Arthur Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg as literary influences.[3] Darwish admired the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, but described his poetry as a "challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?"[3]
Political views towards Israel
Darwish is widely perceived as a Palestinian symbol[14] and a spokesman for Arab opposition to Israel. He rejected accusations of antisemitism: "The accusation is that I hate Jews. It's not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews."[36] Darwish wrote in Arabic, and also spoke English, French, and Hebrew.
According to the Israeli author Haim Gouri, who knew him personally, Darwish's Hebrew was excellent.[37] Four volumes of his poetry were translated into Hebrew by Muhammad Hamza Ghaneim: Bed of a Stranger (2000), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (2000), State of Siege (2003), and Mural (2006).[14] Salman Masalha, a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew writer, translated his book Memory for Forgetfulness into Hebrew.[14]
In March 2000, Yossi Sarid, the Israeli education minister, proposed that two of Darwish's poems be included in the Israeli high school curriculum. Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected the proposal on the grounds that the time "is not ripe" to teach Darwish in schools.[38] It has been suggested that the incident had more to do with internal Israeli politics in trying to damage Prime Minister Ehud Barak's government than with poetry.[39] With the death of Darwish, the debate about including his poetry in the Israeli school curriculum was re-opened in 2008.[40]
"Although it is now technically possible for Jewish students to study Darwish, his writing is still banned from Arab schools. The curriculum used in Arab education is one agreed in 1981 by a committee whose sole Jewish member vetoed any works he thought might 'create an ill spirit'."[41]
Darwish described Hebrew as a "language of love."[4] He considered himself to be part of the Jewish civilization that existed in Palestine and hoped for a reconciliation between the Palestinians and the Jews. When this happens, "the Jew will not be ashamed to find an Arab element in himself, and the Arab will not be ashamed to declare that he incorporates Jewish elements."[42]
