An account of Darwish’s life is in fact dramatized in a number of his works, both poetry and prose, among which are نﺎﯾﺳﻧﻠﻟ ةرﻛاذ Memory for Forgetfulness in 1982 and ﻲﻓ بﺎﯾﻐﻟا ةرﺿﺣAbsent Presence published for the first time in 2006. No one is better to tell his story than himself. Darwish was born on 13 March 1941 (Darwish 1995, p. xii and Darwish 2009b, p. vii) in al-Birwa, a village east of Acre in Palestine to a farming family.
He grew up there in a large family of eight children (five sons, and three daughters) and his grandfather taught him to read and write as his father, a peasant, was killed by Israeli troops in 1948 and his mother was illiterate.
With the declaration of the newly formed state of Israel in the same year, al-Birwa was subsequently “along with 416 other Palestinian villages” (Akash 2003, p. xvi) razed to the ground, wiped off the map, and cleansed of its indigenous Arab population.
Darwish’s family like many other Palestinian families had to flee to Lebanon and the boy had to leave home and childhood behind. Two years later, he sneaked into his
‘country’ ‘illegally’ to live in another Palestinian town called Deir al-Asad in Galilee (Darwish 2010, p. vii).
Darwish subsequently lost the innate sense of childhood and had to coexist with a hostile world. He forgot how to play with rug balls in the neighbourhood, look for birds in nests, or chase homeless cats. He later expressed his wish to be a child again after he grew old in his poemﻲﻣأﻰﻟإTo My Mother:
I became old, تﻣرھ
So return the stars of childhood ﺔﻟوﻔطﻟا موﺟﻧ يّدرﻓ
That I along with swallows كرﺎﺷأ ﻰﺗﺣ
Can chart the path رﯾﻓﺎﺻﻌﻟا رﺎﻐﺻ
Back to your waiting nest. كرﺎظﺗﻧا شﻌﻟ عوﺟرﻟا برد
(Adab, 2005)
Unwillingly, he became familiar with the concepts of silence, rage, and contemplation, which heightened his poetic outlook and political awareness and probably led him to express his personal feelings and experiences against exile and oppression through poetry and to a lesser extent through prose. He denied the language “that set children apart from grown-ups. Both his mind and soul were introduced to adult words:
‘boundaries’, ‘refugees’, ‘occupation’, ‘Red Cross’, relief agency’, ‘return’, and so on”
(Bennani 1994, p. 7).
It was too late for his family to be included in the new state’s census of the Palestinian Arabs who lived in Israel. He was then unable to travel inside his country without permission from the new settlers. He became particularly haunted by and possessed by the words ‘refugees’, ‘exile’, and ‘return’, especially because his family had a change of identity that could not be reversed from Arab Palestinian to ‘internal refugees’, illegal ‘infiltrators’, or ‘aliens’. That is why we see it is an essential element of his poetry to confirm his Arab and more precisely Palestinian identity.
During the 1950s, Darwish lived and studied in difficult circumstances in Deir al-Asad and graduated from high school in 1960. Immediately he moved to Haifa to make a living and worked as an editor for al-Ittiḥād “The Union” daily newspaper and al-Jadīd
“The New” weekly magazine, published by the Rakah communist party. He became politically active and a year later joined the party (Akash and Moore 2000, p. 12).
He started writing poetry at an early stage, and his first collection ﺔﺣﻧﺟأ ﻼﺑ رﯾﻓﺎﺻﻋ Wingless Birds was published in 1960 when he was less than 19 years old. During the sixties, as mentioned above, he was imprisoned several times. Nevertheless, he was able to publish his second collection نوﺗﯾزﻟا قاروأ Olive Leaves in 1964, which distinguished him as a national Palestinian poet (Shaheen 2010, p. vii) and put him centre stage of the Palestinian resistance movement against Israeli occupation.
In 1970, Darwish left Israel for Moscow to pursue his education in political economy. A year later, he decided to go back to the Middle East. However, he did not choose to return to the occupied land but in search of liberty and intellectual freedom he chose Cairo, Egypt, where he worked for the widely-known Al-Ahram daily newspaper. In fact, his decision to reside in Cairo was regarded by some Palestinians as a betrayal of
his responsibility as a freedom fighter, “comparable to that of a soldier deserting his post and caused a cry of outrage in the Arab press” (Mansson 2003, p. 15).
He left Cairo for Beirut, Lebanon, in 1973 (Akash and Moore 2000, p. 12). In the period 1977-1981, he worked as the editor-in-chief of the Palestinian magazine ﺔﯾﻧﯾطﺳﻠﻓ نوؤﺷ (Palestinian Affairs) published by the Centre for Palestinian Studies (Shaheen 2010, p.
viii). In 1977, his books of poetry in Arabic sold over a million copies (Akash and Moore 2000, p. 12).
In 1981, he founded the pioneering literary journal al-Karmel, named after a village in Galilee. He was its editor in chief and it was published quarterly in Beirut. It was “the most influential literary journal in the modern Arab World” (Darwish 2003: 39). In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon and consequently Darwish and all other Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) members were expelled from Lebanon.
He lived for a short period in Tunis and again in Cairo and finally moved to Paris,
“which gave him the opportunity to explore the various cultures from around the world that co-exist there”. He continued to edit the journal al-Karmel. In 1984, he was elected president of the Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, and re-elected in 1987 (Shaheen 2009b, p. ix). He became a member of the PLO executive committee in 1987, and in 1988 he wrote the Algiers Declaration known also as ‘the Palestinian Declaration of independence’ (Mansson 2003, p. 16).
In 1993, he resigned following the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles between the PLO and Israel because “he did not want to be held responsible for this risky accord” (Muhawi 1995, p. xiv). Return to the West Bank, however, did not lead to Darwish’s ‘Paradise Lost’, and he was still defined by Israel as a ‘refugee’. He rather discovered that the West Bank was the largest waiting room worldwide and Gaza Strip the largest prison.
During the late 1990s, he lived in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and partly in Ramallah in the West Bank to run The Carmel Cultural Organization. But there, he was once more “caught in a war-zone”. His office was raided and his manuscripts destroyed by Israel (Mansson 2003, p. 16).
In the year 2000, he published his twentieth book of poetry, ﺔﯾرادﺟ Mural in Arabic and French. He was “the best-selling poet in France and in the Arab World” (Darwish 2000:
13). Over one million copies were sold in the Arab world. This represents a precedent in a part of the world not typically known for widespread reading.
On March 7, 2000, the New York Times wrote: “The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish becomes a weapon in the hands of the right-wing Israeli politicians who would like to bring down the [Israeli] Government”. The storm began when the education minister then Yossi Sarid announced that Darwish’s poetry would be taught to Israeli high school students. However, the opposition there gained the upper hand, and consequently his poetry was not taught in schools.
His poetry is widely admired and his achievements “won him recognition throughout the world”. In total, he published about thirty volumes of poetry and nine books of prose (Ibid: 14-16). He was awarded a number of international literary awards, prizes and highest medals across the globe. Those include, among others, The Lotus Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, and Prince Claus Awards (Shaheen 2010, p. viii).
His close friends included Edward Said, Bialek (Israel’s national poet), Samih Al-Qasem, Adonis, Abd el-Bary Atwan (editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper), Mohammad Shaheen (a distinguished Jordanian translator), and many Arab and Palestinian poets. He left all of them and died in 2008 in the United States after complications following open-heart surgery and was buried in Ramallah. He was honoured with three days of national mourning and a state funeral in Palestine. His tomb lies on a hill and is surrounded by transparent glass so that it can be seen by all visitors at any time.