A POLITICAL POET’S LIFE
Ten years after his death, Mahmoud Darwish is still considered to be one of the greatest Arab poets of the 20th century.
Born in a village near Galilee, Darwish lived in exile for most of his life and started writing poetry after high school. He was arrested several times by Israel for what were deemed to be inciteful poems.
Most of his work focused on the love and yearning for his homeland, and he was regarded the Palestinians’ poet of resistance. Over the course of his life, he published more than 30 poetry collections and books of prose, and won numerous awards, with his work translated into more than 20 languages.
Many of his poems were set to music by Arab composers, most significantly Marcel Khalife. The most notable are Rita and the Rifle, and I Yearn for my Mother’s Bread. These poems have become revolutionary anthems for generations of Arabs. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 after undergoing heart surgery in the United States. He was later buried in Ramallah where a shrine was erected in his honour. 150 Gazans killed and 16,000 injured by Israeli snipers in recent months during the Great March of Return; the nation state law passed last month by the legislature of Israel – not to mention Palestinian factional divisions and much more.
His letter to PalFest before he died is a sobering but inspiring and urgent message to fellow international writers. The importance, honesty and power of these words resonate today more strongly than ever.
“Your courageous visit of solidarity is more than just a passing greeting to a people deprived of freedom and of a normal life; it is an expression of what Palestine has come to mean to the living human conscience that you represent. It is an expression of the writer’s awareness of his role: a role directly engaged with issues of justice and freedom. The search for truth, which is one of a writer’s duties, takes on – in this land – the form of a confrontation with the lies and the usurpation that besiege Palestine’s contemporary history; with the attempts to erase our people from the memory