Sherry Chandler

Mahmoud Darwish (March 13, 1941-August 9, 2008)

From the Jerusalem Post:

Renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died at 67, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday evening.

Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an Abbas spokesman, said Darwish died at a hospital in Houston, Texas, following complications from an open heart surgery.

Darwish was the world’s most recognized Palestinian poet, and became a Palestinian cultural icon who eloquently described his people’s struggle for independence. He was a vocal critic of both the Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

His poetry is considered to have given voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won many international prizes.

…

Darwish’s influence was keenly felt among Palestinians. Last year he recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets.”

From NPR.

From his biography at Poets. org:

About Darwish’s work, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said, “Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging….”

His awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of intellectual merit handed to him by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize.

From Nathalie Handal in The Progressive in 2002:

In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. “After the stranger’s night, who am I?” Darwish writes. So, when I speak to him by phone on March 22, I ask him who he is. He rapidly responds, “I still do not know.”

On many occasions he has expressed the notion that only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated by war: “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by,” he has written. I ask him if he still believes that.

“I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe,” he responds, “but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”

Perhaps that is enough. I don’t know.

At about 2 a.m., I had just finished reading Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men (Random House, 2007). Feeling restless and chilled at the heart, I heard the “got mail” chime from my computer. Checking, I found an e-mail from Marilyn Hacker on the Wom-Po list that Mahmoud Darwish had died. Life is a sad proposition folks, but poets like Darwish made me think there is good alive in the world. I am grieved:

The Prison Cell

It is possible . . .
It is possible at least sometimes. . .
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away. . .

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

—What did you do with the walls?
—I gave them back to the rocks.
—And what did you do with the ceiling?
—I turned it into a saddle.
—And your chain?
—I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me
In the morning:
He shouted at me:

—Where did all this water come from?
—I brought it from the Nile.
—And the trees?
—From the orchards of Damascus.
—And the music?
—From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

—Where did this moon come from?
—From the nights of Baghdad.
—And the wine?
—From the vineyards of Algiers.
—And this freedom?
—From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad. . .
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

—Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Ben Benanni, from Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers, ed. Peggy Rosenthal, Pax Christi USA, 2005.

See also here and here.